From "Sonnets to Orpheus," Rainer Maria Rilke

You who let yourselves feel: enter the breathing
that is more than your own.
Let it brush your cheeks
as it divdes and rejoins behind you.

Blessed ones, whole ones,
you where the heart begins:
You are the bow that shoots the arrows
and you are the target.

Fear not the pain. Let its weight fall back
into the earth;
for heavy are the mountains, heavy the seas.

The trees you planted in childhood have grown
too heavy. You cannot bring them along.
Give yourselves to the air, to what you cannot hold.

From In Praise of Mortality, which includes selections from the sonnets to Orpheus and the Duino Elegies, translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy.

This is the second translation of the sonnets in less than a year, following Willis Barnstone's version from last summer. Recently, Rake's Progress ran an essay by Ulrich Baer, the translator of The Poet's Guide to Life: The Wisdom of Rilke, which offers all-new translations from the poet's vast correspondence. Both Rake and Prof. Baer were kind enough to allow me to reprint that essay about the book's origins here.

A Higher Responsibility
by Ulrich Baer

I edited and translated The Poet's Guide to Life because in the fall of 2001, I was looking for such a book and could not find it. My father passed away in November 2001, a little more than two months after the events of September 11 which I had witnessed directly in Lower Manhattan on that horrible, strangely cerulean day. I wanted to read a poem at his funeral but could not find anything suitable: poetry seemed just a bit too precious, too worked-over, too complete. And this did not match my experience at the time at all: my sense of loss was everything but complete, or ready to be cast into appropriate words. Surely due to the layering of loss that fall, my father's passing rather seemed to open up additional tasks that I could not quite yet define. When I came across the following passage in one of Rilke's letters of condolence to a friend, it expressed this sense of open-endedness and put into words the sense of a heightened responsibility created by my father's absence.

"It has seemed to me for a long time that the influence of a loved one's death on those he has left behind ought to be nothing else but a higher responsibility. Does the one who is passing away not leave a hundredfold of everything he had begun to be continued by those who survive him – if they had shared any kind of inner bond at all? Over the past few years I have been forced to gain intimate knowledge of so many close experiences of death. But with each one who has been taken from me, I have found the tasks to have increased around me."

When I returned to New York from the funeral in Germany, I translated this passage for my wife and mother-in-law to read it. I then simply kept on translating: first other parts of the same letter, then sections from other letters, and then plainly anything from Rilke's correspondence that helped me through the day. The task of translation changed from a diversion into one of the major reasons for getting up each morning: there were so many letters, and it seemed to me that Rilke had addressed many of these short bits of advice directly to me. I read through volume after volume of Rilke's correspondence in German and French, relying on editions that occasionally give a lie to the notion that German scholars and editors are particularly meticulous or even consistent.

Rilke wrote over 11,000 letters during his lifetime (1875-1926), and about 7,000 are available in print or in archives in Germany, Switzerland, and the United States. From these letters, I chose passages that can stand alone, without any need for information about the recipients (which include his editors and benefactors, lovers, fellow writers, numerous young fans, his wife and daughter but also cleaning ladies). Rilke sometimes wrote over twenty letters in one day. He considered his correspondence part of his oeuvre and stipulated that all of this letters could be published after his death as part of his collected work. His recipients instantly grasped the significance of these missives and carefully preserved them (individual letters were auctioned off already beginning in 1916, when Rilke was a famous but still very much a living poet). In these letters, Rilke presents his view on life, which is something that he was fundamentally convinced ought to be lived rather than reflected upon, analyzed, or understood. This conviction makes the letters immensely accessible. Treating them like open rehearsal or a workshop on which the curtain was lifted to the public, Rilke in these letters worked out the thoughts that he would cast into poetic verse in the Duino Elegies, the Sonnets to Orpheus, and his other poetry. They cover virtually every dimension of a human life, and thus far exceed the scope (and, incidentally, the stylistic range and insights) of the Letters to a Young Poet written when Rilke was 26.

My process of translation involves a lot of reading out loud, mumbling, and general behavior unfit for a public space. I read the German or French sentence a few times, try to allow its meaning, speed, and rhythm resonate within me, and then try it out in English. All the while I am more or less speaking to myself, listening for an approximation of the particular movement of Rilke's thought and phrasing in English. This virtually always means placing period stops where the German relies on commas and syntactical inversions to mark a break or transition in meaning. It also requires listening for parallels in metaphors or idiomatic expressions, and trying to recreate such echoes (usually in different places) in the English sentence. Above all, it means grasping and preserving the immediacy and startling beauty (it’s not elegance but a more natural effect) of Rilke's German. 

During the process of selecting and translating the excerpts from Rilke's letters, I grouped them into themes. The Poet's Guide to Life offers Rilke's reflections on a series of themes ranging from "Life to Being with Others" over "Illness, Loss and Death" to "Language," "Art," and finally "Love." This sequence reflects Rilke’s fundamental belief that "there is no greater force in the world but love": his conviction that as human beings we can transcend our own conditions, if only momentarily, through the transports of love. I put together The Poet's Guide to Life to chart a way for myself from loss back to life, and from a sense of helplessness back to having a strong sense of purpose. After committing myself to working on this book for several years, I view this purpose more clearly than before as the task of finding an adequate expression for ourselves, as if we are always in need of careful, patient, and impassioned translation.