Rilke

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Rainer Maria Rilke (1875 - 1926)

 

 

 

"Works of art are indeed always products of having been in danger, of

having gone to the very end in an experience, to where man can go no

further." (from Letters)

 

Rainer Maria Rilke was born in Prague as the son of Josef Rilke, a

railway official and the former Sophie Entz. A crucial fact in

Rilke's life was that his mother called him Sophia. She forced him to

wear girl's clothes until he was aged five - compensating for the

earlier loss of a baby daughter. Rilke's parents separared when he

was nine and his militarily inclined father sent him at ten to the

military academies of St. Pölten and Mahrisch-Weisskirchenn. He

suffered at the military academy, and was sent to a business school

in Linz. He also worked in his uncle's law firm. Rilke continued his

studies at the universities of Prague, Munich, and Berlin.

As a poet Rilke made his debut at the age of nineteen with LEBEN UND

LIEDER (1894), written in the conventional style of Heinrich Heine.

He met in Munich the Russian intellectual Lou Andreas-Salome, an

older woman, who influenced him deeply. He travelled with her and her

husband in Russia in 1899, visiting among others Leo Tolstoy. Rilke

was deeply impressed by what he learned of Russian mysticism. During

this period he started to write The Book of Hours: The Book of

Monastic Life, which appeared in 1905. He spent some time in Italy,

Sweden and Denmark, and joined an artists' colony at Worpswede in

1903.

In 1901 Rilke married the young sculptress, Klara Westhoff, one of

Auguste Rodin's pupils. They had a daughter, Ruth, but marriage

lasted only one year. During this period composed the second part of

The Book of Hours. After he separated from Klara, he settled in Paris

to write a book about Rodin and to work for his secretary (1905-06).

Overworked poet left Rodin abruptly in the Spring of 1906. He revised

DAS BUCH DER BILDER and published it in an enlarged edition. He also

wrote The Tale of the Love and Death of Cornet Christopher Rilke,

which became a great popular success.

During his Paris years Rilke developed a new style of lyrical poetry.

After NEUE GEDIGHTE in (1907-08, New Poems) he wrote a notebook named

DIE AUFZECHNUNGEN DES MALTE LAURIDS BRIGGE (1910), his most important

prose work. It took the form of a series of semiautobiographical

spiritual confessions but written by a Danish expatriate in Paris.

Rilke's "thing-poems" (Dinggedichte) were not about dead objects, but

in his writing they came alive - in 'Archaic Torso of Apollo' (from

New Poems, 1908) the ancient statue discovered at Miletus is "stuffed

with brilliance from inside" and "gleams in all its power".

Rilke kept silence as a poet for twelve years before writing Duino

Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus, which are concerned with 'the

identity of terror and bliss' and 'the oneness of life and death'.

Duino Elegies was born in two bursts of inspiration separated by ten

years. In 1910-1912 Rilke was for some time the guest of Princess

Marie von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe at Duino, her castle near

Trieste. According to a story, Rilke heard in the wind the first

lines of his elegies when he was walking on the rocks above the sea -

"Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels' / hierarchies?"

In 1913 Rilke returned to Paris but he was forced to return to Germany

because of the First World War. Duino Castle was bombarded to ruins

and Rilke's personal property was confiscated in France. He served in

the Austrian army and found another patron, Werner Reinhart, who owned

the Castle Muzot at Valais. After 1919 he lived in Switzerland, where

he died on December 29, in 1926. He had suffered from leukemia, and

died of an infection he contracted when he pricked himself on a rose

thorn.

Important part of Rilke's writings are his letters (to Marina

Tsvetaeva, Auguste Rodin, André Gide, H.v.Hofmannstahl, B.Pasternak,

Stefan Zweig etc.), which have been published posthumously in

different collections. Rilke's sense of alienation was summed up in

his words that it is our 'fate to be opposite and nothing else, and

always opposite'. In his early works he imported mystical elements in

his poetry, but later Rilke dealt more with the role of an artist, who

must "speak and bear witness.Praise this world to the angel, not

the unsayable one; you can't impress him with glorious emotion; in

the universe where he feels more powerful, you are a novice. Show him

something simple which, formed over generations, / lives as our own,

near our hand and within our gaze." (from 'The Ninth Elegy')

~Biography by: Petri Liukkonen

 

((( This poem by Rilke, below, is the first poem I ever read of his -

 

Black Cat

by Rainer Maria Rilke

A ghost, though invisible, still is like a place

your sight can knock on, echoing; but here

within this thick black pelt, your strongest gaze

will be absorbed and utterly disappear:

 

just as a raving madman, when nothing else

can ease him, charges into his dark night

howling, pounds on the padded wall, and feels

the rage being taken in and pacified.

 

She seems to hide all looks that have ever fallen

into her, so that, like an audience,

she can look them over, menacing and sullen,

and curl to sleep with them. But all at once

 

as if awakened, she turns her face to yours;

and with a shock, you see yourself, tiny,

inside the golden amber of her eyeballs

suspended, like a prehistoric fly.~translated by Stephen Mitchell(((

Here are three more -Rainer Maria RilkeTranslated from the German by

Annie Boutelle NEIGHBOR GOD Neighbor God, I disturb you in the long

night with my fierce knocking because I can hardly hear you breathe,

and I know you're alone in the huge room and when you're thirsty

there's no one there to offer you a drink. I'm listening all the

time. Give a small sign. I'm very close. Only a thin wall rests

between us--if a cry should rise from your mouth or mine, the wall

would crumble without a sound. The wall is made of your images. Your

images stand in front of you like titles. And when the light flares up

in me, the light through which my deepest self knows you, it pours

itself out in gold on your frames. And then my weakening senses are

cut off from you, and left without a home. WHAT WILL YOU DO? What

will you do, God, when I die? I am your pitcher: I will shatter. I am

your drink: I will spoil. I am your raiment and your trade: without

me you will lose all meaning. After my death, you will have no house

where kind words wrap you. The velvet slippers will fall from your

tired feet. Your long cloak will release you. Your glance, used to

the cushion of my warm cheek, will go out looking for me and, when

the sun goes down, will lie in the lap of strange rocks. What will

you do, God? I'm anxious. BEFORE HE MAKES EACH ONE Before he

makes each one of us, God speaks. Then, without speaking, he takes

each one out of the darkness. And these are the cloudy words God

speaks before each of us begins: "You have been sent out by your

senses. Go to the farthest edge of desire, and give me clothing: burn

like a great fire so that the stretched-out shadows of the things of

the world cover me completely. Let everything happen to you: beauty

and terror. You must just go-- no feeling is the farthest you can go.

Don't let yourself be separated from me. The country called life is

close. By its seriousness, you will know it. Give me your

hand."LoveAlways,Mazie Want to check if your PC is virus-infected?

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