Who, if I were to scream, would hear me
amidst the din of those up above?
If one of them were to take me under their wing,
I would vanish in their stark design.

That ideal is nothing other than the onset of a horror
that we are drawn to, and wonder at,
and all the while it threatens to destroy us.
For these angels bring terror.

But if we are to swallow grief, where should we find solace?
Not in those up above, nor in others.
And even the dogs in the street can sniff out
our existential anxiety.

Perhaps there is some hilltop tree, seen on our daily commute,
or the other fixtures and fittings of our lives.
Then there is the night, when a huge nothing confronts us.
Darkness lies there in wait for all of us, softly enticing,
with desire and nocturnal disappointments.
But do couples simply hide behind each other to forget their fate?
Throw off that empty gesture of longing.
Let it waft into the sky and make more space for those birds that are full of flying.

Springtime sought you out.
Stars hoped to be spotted by you.
Waters move at your orders.
Violins pour out of open windows.
This was your calling, if you had the stomach for it.
Anticipation was too much.
As if for the arrival of a lover.
As if you had time for one, amidst your lucubrations.

So sing of the lovers of the past. Their stories can never be proclaimed enough.
Especially the abandoned lovers whom we almost envy.
Begin over again forlornly to sing their praise.
Think how heroes outlive themselves, how their fame is made anew each day.
But lovers by their nature burn up in their passion once and for all.

Have you heard of Gaspara Stampa,
whom all abandoned lovers should aspire to be like?
Should we not have learned from these endless sufferings
that it is time that we released ourselves, as an arrow flies from the string,
to become more than ourselves? The holding on is inertia.

Soundings. Soundings. Hear, my heart, as only prophets have heard,
so that they’ve been raised up from their knees, rapt in their hearing.

Not that we could endure, by any means, the voices of eternity.
But listen to those signals, the news that stays news,
formed out of silence, that streams to you today from those who died young.
Does their fate not speak to you through the architecture of old Italian churches? Or that inscription in Santa Maria Formosa?
And my task is to lessen that sense of grievance that clings to them and can hinder the pure progress of their souls.

Strange, to no longer inhabit the earth,
to no longer follow frail routines,
for roses and other pretty things
to no longer have human significance.
To be no longer what one was in infinitely
patient hands. To shed even one’s name,
to lay it aside like a broken toy.
To no longer will. Strange,
also, to see what once cohered
now flutter loosely amongst the celestial bodies.

To be in this state is laborious,
full of the little stirrings needed
before one can retrieve something of eternity.
We draw these borders too readily.
They say the dead don’t know if they move
amongst those who live or those who’ve passed away.
Both are immersed in an eternal current that envelops all ages,
and finally drowns them out.

And eventually they no longer need us;
they wean themselves off this earth.
But we, who crave the great mysteries,
who find in sorrow inspiration,
could we survive without the dead?

And what does the lament for Linus leave us with?
In the unexpected space where the godlike youth had been:
the pioneering notes of a pained harmony that can delight and comfort and help.

Commentary :

When I started this I knew hardly a word of German. I did have in mind what Ezra Pound did in his versions of Old English and Latin, though I did not go as far as Pound’s extremes in his 20^th century equivalent of Propertius. I do subscribe to Pound’s notion of translation as creative criticism. This version took over a year. The commentary that follows is an attempt to present an edited version of some of the thought processes.

The first word? Should we begin with Who – the most common translation? How this word has echoed down through the 20^th century in thousands of readings, passing through many languages. The first stirrings of consciousness, of self-consciousness. Who am I? Who is out there? Who might affirm my own presence? Or a more phonetic rendering of the original through Where? Instead, the original is echoed later in this first line. And to scream instead of the usual cry, to echo the German schriee.

The angel problem arises early on. It emerges out of the original and into the light of the new poem, newly born, unsure, and falls flat on its face. The decision was to go for those up above instead of angel. Some readers might be offended, but the connotations of angel make it an untouchable here, and indeed elsewhere. The modern English poem can’t stomach it. At least there is still the implied sense of hierarchies.

The translator’s problem is that, when recreating this poem, the term angel must take on its own meaning throughout the sequence. It must come into being as something other than what most people think of when they hear the word, but this is impossible when the translation is re-making the poem and the subtleties of the later descriptions have yet to come into being. No, the angels of this poem are terrifying for the translator and their very mention is enough to destroy the work. They will only exist in the margins, between the lines, in the wing-beat of enjambment.

The idea of angel is hinted at in the next line with: under their wing. More interestingly is the end of the next line. First of all I wrote, flounder in the depths of their being, but then I remembered Ezra Pound’s translation of The Seafarer. I considered a phonological approximation of the original stärkeren Dasein. I decided to try the term stark design. It took its place fairly and squarely in the poem.

There are other phonetic equivalents in these lines. For example, zerstören calls to mind the English destroy. The ghost of the sound of the original haunts this poem like the ghost of iambic pentameter haunts Eliot’s free verse.

But the next hurdle was the iconic line: Ein jeder Engel ist schrecklich.

While it seemed impossible not to include the word angel here, it occurred to me to give the line a jolt with all the connotations and perhaps a certain immediacy that come with the word terrorist. It is only the proximity of this term and the savour of paradox here that allows the admission of the word angel. And terror rather than terrorist? The history of France and Russia and the founding of just about every modern state swirls around this word.

The real trouble in this section is to be had with the German schone. The are two options. Either the line should be paraphrased or the literal translation, the word beauty, has to be avoided. Especially with the appearance in the same line of another abstract noun. The angel of the elegies is, to my mind, more akin to Blake’s mythological characters than to the traditions of organised religion. The word ideal is an attempt to generalize. I hold my hands up here. I hit a brick wall and this fudge of a word might be the only way around it. It is less of a crime than some of the printed translations.

Gass’s book should be required reading for anyone engaging with Rilke’s poem. But there are places where his reasoning is suspect. For example, where he castigates Leishman’s translation for his wrestlerish angel but then goes on to write of the angels’s grip in his own version.

Gass only comments on his translation of the first page. I would have liked to hear him justify his next line which includes, There’ve been stars to solicit your seeing. As ‘translatory’ as it gets! There is a fake book online that purports to be a translation of Rilke by robots. But many of the official translations sound like they’ve been done by robots.

Here’s the dilemma for any translator of the elegies. For the next passage might seem like a kind of rest, a prosaic interlude. Does one translate as literally as possible or summarise to get it out of the way quickly? We want only the fireworks.

It took a long time to decide between mission, calling or vocation for auftrag. Calling sends us back to the first line. For the poet, the calling is a calling out.

Next l take Leishman’s line: with all those great strange thoughts going in and out and often staying overnight. I’ve abbreviated it to lucubrations, a rare example of a long latinate word in this version but I felt that it captured the sense of the lines succinctly.

A note on the overall style of this version. Various translations exist which make Rilke sound like staccato histrionics. To my mind, the rhetorical flourishes and the existential meditations can only work in a more laconic style, though this perhaps betrays my own failings more than anything else. I wanted it to sound as, much as possible, like it had been written in English, even if I did, at times, employ everything from William Gass to Google translation.

The next lines I have tried to keep as simple as possible. The distinction is made clearly between lovers and heroes and the former are given embodiment in the name Gaspara Stampa. I would even consider getting rid of this name as I have done with the names of the Italian places a few lines later but it carried too much weight in the original and readers will have to do some work here.

I had a lot of trouble with the aphoristic, Denn bleiben ist nirgends. For the last word I decided on inertia for the sound as well as the sense. Bleiben is translated as staying in Leishman and Gass but this word didn’t seem to have the same force as, I presumed, the original. I considered the staying put but it sounded awkward. Biding seemed closer to the original sound but didn’t fit with the rest of line even with the definite article before it. The answer lay in going back to the previous lines about the arrow released from the string and finding the opposite in the holding on, which also has echoes of lovers desperately trying to maintain a relationship, albeit with the unfortunate echoes of a certain pop ballad. It also conjures up the image of the arrow frozen at the moment before release and stuck in time.

I start the next section with soundings instead of the usual translation of voices, partly because of the similarity to the original stimmen, but also with the added meaning of sounding out. I change saint to prophet, again playing down, if only slightly, the religious connotations.

Not much later comes a passage that is at the heart of this elegy but which hasn’t been done justice in any translation I’ve read. My first version, which is close to previous ones, began with

To be in this state is laborious,
full of the little gatherings needed
to retrieve something of eternity.

 But the problem here is what sort of gatherings, or as Leishman calls it, retrieving, or as Gass writes, all that catching up, can lead, in Rilke’s terms to a hint of eternity for the newly dead?

In a letter from 1920, Rilke wrote: ‘Only … when death is not accepted as an extinction but imagined as an altogether surpassing intensity, I believe, is it possible to do justice to love’. The retrieving can be imagined as the same process that the living go through when remembering those who’ve passed away. Tennyson writes of something similar in his In Memoriam: the only immortality is the memories of others. Can we imagine the dead gleaning an altogether different kind of consciousness? This mirroring of the grieving process and the newly dead state is confirmed afterwards with the blurring of the distinctions.

Might it be too much to see this as a sort of reawakening? This nachholn is a coming round, or as I finally settled on, a stirring. Perhaps also with a sense of steeling oneself.

The paradox of Rilke’s ideas about death are inherent in one of the last lines of the elegy when he says, konnten wir sein hone sie? Both Leishman and Gass render it as, could we survive/exist without them? That last word, them, of course, is the dead who have just weaned themselves off the earth. But this rendering leaves open the misreading (to my mind) of: can we go on living after loved ones have passed away? But Rilke seems to be asking the opposite question. He’s asking here whether living is possible without death. The word, them, is so far removed from what it refers to, across several lines, as to cause unnecessary confusion. So my version avoids this for the sake of clarity and also to try to keep the sharp metallic taste of Rilke’s paradox.

I decided to shape the lines in a kind of free verse, allowing the phrasing to suggest, as naturally as I could, their own endings, but in other places the lines seem to sweep onward. They fill themselves to the brim with their own longing. The ending, for example.

Stephen Brown     June 2011