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[[File:Castello di Duino 0904.jpg|thumb|right|300px|Duino Castle near Trieste, Italy, was where Rilke began writing the ''Duino Elegies'' in 1912--recounting that he heard the famous first line as a voice in the wind while walking along the cliffs and that he wrote it quickly in his notebook.]]
[[File:Castello di Duino 0904.jpg|thumb|right|300px|Duino Castle near Trieste, Italy, was where Rilke began writing the ''Duino Elegies'' in 1912--recounting that he heard the famous first line as a voice in the wind while walking along the cliffs and that he wrote it quickly in his notebook.]]
===Duino Castle and the first elegies===
===Duino Castle and the first elegies===
In 1910, Rilke had completed writing the novel, ''[[The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge|Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge]]'' (''The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge'') in which a young poet is terrified by the fragmentation and chaos of modern urban life and loosely autobiographical. After completing the work, Rilke experienced a severe psychological crisis that did not improve over the next two years.<ref>Wellbery, David E.; Ryan, Judith; and Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich. A New History of German Literature. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2004), 723.</ref> In 1912, still facing this severe depression and despair, Rilke was invited to Duino by [[Czech Branch of the House of Thurn und Taxis|Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis]] (1855-1934) (born [[Hohenlohe-Waldenburg-Schillingsfürst|Princess Marie zu Hohenlohe-Waldenburg-Schillingsfürst]]). The princess (who was twenty years older than Rilke) and her husband Prince Alexander (1851-1939), enthusiastically supported artists and writers. She became acquainted with Rilke in 1909.
In 1910, Rilke had completed writing the novel, ''[[The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge|Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge]]'' (''The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge'') in which a young poet is terrified by the fragmentation and chaos of modern urban life and loosely autobiographical. After completing the work, Rilke experienced a severe psychological crisis that did not improve over the next two years.<ref>Wellbery, David E.; Ryan, Judith; and Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich. A New History of German Literature. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2004), 723.</ref> In 1912, still facing this severe depression and despair, Rilke was invited to Castel Duino by [[Czech Branch of the House of Thurn und Taxis|Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis]] (1855-1934) (born [[Hohenlohe-Waldenburg-Schillingsfürst|Princess Marie zu Hohenlohe-Waldenburg-Schillingsfürst]]) who he had met a few years before. The princess (who was twenty years older than Rilke) and her husband Prince Alexander (1851-1939), enthusiastically supported artists and writers.


While at Duino, Rilke and Princess Marie discussed the possibility of collaborating on a translation of [[Dante Alighieri]]'s ''[[La Vita Nuova]]'' (1295).<ref>Freedman, Ralph. ''Life of a Poet: Rainer Maria Rilke.'' (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 320.</ref> After the Princess departed, Rilke spent the next few weeks at the castle preparing to focus on work. While walking around the Adriatic cliffs near the castle ground, Rilke claimed to hear a voice calling to him speaking the words of the first line, ''Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel Ordnungen?'' ("Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the heirarchies of angels?") which he quickly wrote in his notebook. Within days, he produced drafts of the first two elegies in the series and drafted passages and fragments that would later be incorporated in later elegies—including the opening passage of the tenth elegy.
Rilke had been visiting Princess [[Czech Branch of the House of Thurn und Taxis|Marie von Thurn und Taxis]] in the [[Duino castle]] near [[Trieste]] in January 1912 and, according to his own recounting, had taken a stroll near the castle, atop the steep cliffs that dropped down to the beach.


Rilke would only finish the third and fourth elegies before the onset of [[World War I]]. The third was finished in 1913 in [[Paris]], the fourth in early 1915 in [Munich]].<ref>Freedman, Ralph. ''Life of a Poet: Rainer Maria Rilke.'' (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 340.</ref> The effects of the war triggered a severe renewal of his depression and would render him silent for several years.
Rilke said later he had heard a voice calling to him as he walked near the cliffs, and he had used its words as the opening of the first ''Elegy'': "''Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel Ordnungen?''" (Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the heirarchies of angels?).

A cycle of major poems had been in Rilke's mind already before this moment of inspiration, and within days he produced the first two elegies and some fragments which would find their way into the others, including the opening section of the tenth. After this, inspiration for the cycle stopped abruptly and could not be recaptured, although he continued with other poetic drafts.


===Château de Muzot and the "savage creative storm"===
===Château de Muzot and the "savage creative storm"===

Revision as of 00:00, 3 February 2013

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926)

The Duino Elegies (German: Duineser Elegien) are a collection of ten elegies written by the Bohemian-Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926). Rilke, who is "widely recognized as one of the most lyrically intense German-language poets,"[1] began writing the elegies in 1912 while a guest of Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis (1855-1934) at Duino Castle, near Trieste on the Adriatic Sea. The poems were dedicated to the Princess upon their publication in 1923. During this period, the elegies languished incomplete as Rilke suffered frequently from severe depression—some of which was caused by the events of World War I and his conscripted military service. Aside from brief episodes of writing in 1913 and 1915, Rilke did not return to the work until a few years after the war ended. With a sudden, renewed inspiration—writing in a frantic pace he described as "a savage creative storm"—he completed the collection in February 1922 while staying at Château de Muzot in Veyras, in Switzerland's Rhone Valley. With their publication and his death shortly after, the Duino Elegies was recognized by critics and scholars as Rilke's most important work.[2][3]

The Duino Elegies are intensely religious, mystical poems that weigh beauty and existential suffering.[4] The poems employ a rich symbolism of angels and salvation but not in keeping with typical Christian intrepretations. Rilke begins the first elegy in an invocation of philsophical despair, asking: "Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the heirarchies of angels?" (Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel Ordnungen?) [5] and later declares that "every angel is terrifying" (Jeder Engel ist schrecklich).[6] While designation of these poems as "elegies" would typically imply melancholy and lamentation, Rilke's elegies frequently show moments of positive energy and "unrestrained enthusiasm."[2] They are, in turn, described as a metamorphosis of Rilke's "ontological torment" and an "impassioned monologue about coming to terms with human existence" discussing themes of "the limitations and insufficiency of the human condition and fractured human consciousness...man's loneliness, the perfection of the angels, life and death, love and lovers, and the task of the poet." [7]

Writing and publication history

Duino Castle near Trieste, Italy, was where Rilke began writing the Duino Elegies in 1912--recounting that he heard the famous first line as a voice in the wind while walking along the cliffs and that he wrote it quickly in his notebook.

Duino Castle and the first elegies

In 1910, Rilke had completed writing the novel, Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge) in which a young poet is terrified by the fragmentation and chaos of modern urban life and loosely autobiographical. After completing the work, Rilke experienced a severe psychological crisis that did not improve over the next two years.[8] In 1912, still facing this severe depression and despair, Rilke was invited to Castel Duino by Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis (1855-1934) (born Princess Marie zu Hohenlohe-Waldenburg-Schillingsfürst) who he had met a few years before. The princess (who was twenty years older than Rilke) and her husband Prince Alexander (1851-1939), enthusiastically supported artists and writers.

While at Duino, Rilke and Princess Marie discussed the possibility of collaborating on a translation of Dante Alighieri's La Vita Nuova (1295).[9] After the Princess departed, Rilke spent the next few weeks at the castle preparing to focus on work. While walking around the Adriatic cliffs near the castle ground, Rilke claimed to hear a voice calling to him speaking the words of the first line, Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel Ordnungen? ("Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the heirarchies of angels?") which he quickly wrote in his notebook. Within days, he produced drafts of the first two elegies in the series and drafted passages and fragments that would later be incorporated in later elegies—including the opening passage of the tenth elegy.

Rilke would only finish the third and fourth elegies before the onset of World War I. The third was finished in 1913 in Paris, the fourth in early 1915 in [Munich]].[10] The effects of the war triggered a severe renewal of his depression and would render him silent for several years.

Château de Muzot and the "savage creative storm"

Château de Muzot in Veyras, Switzerland, was where Rilke completed writing the Duino Elegies in "a savage creative storm" in February 1922.

The completion of the elegies was delayed by Rilke's battle with depression, and also by the First World War which shook the foundations of his beliefs and his way of life; the German-speaking aristocracy among which he had moved and his native country, the Austrian Empire, were among the prime casualties of the war. The cycle was completed only in February 1922, when Rilke was staying at the Château de Muzot in Veyras, Rhone Valley, Switzerland. [11] It was also during this time that Rilke wrote the Sonnets to Orpheus. Rilke described the sudden return of inspiration in a letter at this time as "a savage creative storm", and claimed that he had dropped meals because the poetic spirit took hold of him for many hours on end, but his host denied that he had ever appeared disorderly or untidy, or missed out on a meal, and the few surviving manuscript drafts do not look as if written in frantic haste.

Publication and reception

Duino Elegies was published in 1923. While many critics in the German-speaking nations and abroad praised the work and claimed that it invoked the legacy of Hölderlin and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, many of the younger generation of poets and writers did not take a liking to them because of their obscure symbols and philosophy. Poet Albrecht Schaeffer dismissed them as "mystical blather" and decribed them as impotent.[12]

Symbolism and themes

At the onset, Rilke is frightened by beauty which he describes as "nothing but the beginning of terror which we are barely able to endure / and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us."[13]

Loneliness and alienation

Rilke is concerned with existential angst trying to come to terms with the coexistance of the spiritual and earthly. He portrays human beings as alone in a universe where God is abstract and possibly non-existant, "where memory and patterns of intuition raise the sensitive consciousness to a realization of solitude."[7] He depicts the alternative, an spiritually fulfilling possibility beyond human limitations in the form of angels.[14] There is a deeply-felt despair and unresolvable tension in that no matter man's striving, the limitation of human and earthly existence renders him unable to reach out to the angels.[7] The narrative voice Rilke employs in the Duino Elegies strives "to achieve in human consciousness the angel's presumed plenitude of being."[15]

The terrifying perfection of angels

Rilke did not use the traditional Christian interpretation of angels but instead focused on the depiction of angels found in Islam.[16] For Rilke, the symbol of the angel represents a perfection that is "beyond human contradictions and limitations" in a "higher level of reality in the invisible." Where there is incongruity that adds to man's despair and anxiety is that because we "cling" to the visible and the familiar, we find the invisible and unknown higher levels represented by these angels to be "terrifying" (schrecklich).[3][7]

Life and mortality

Of love and lovers

The poet's task

Legacy

In his book My Belief: Essays on Life and Art, German novelist Hermann Hesse (1877-1962) describes Rilke as evolving within the confines of exploring his existential problems, that "at each stage now and again the miracle occurs, his delicate, hesitant, anxiety-prone person withdraws, and through him resounds the music of the universe; like the basin of a fountain he becomes at once instrument and ear."[1][17]

Rilke's rich symbolism and lyrical rhythms inspired many twentieth century writers, including British poet W.H. Auden (1907-1973), who used the imagery of angels but also referenced Rilke and the writing of the Duino Elegies in his poem cycle In Times of War (1939).

Tonight in China let me think of one
Who through ten years of silence worked and waited,
Until in Muzot all his powers spoke,
And everything was given once for all.
And with the gratitude of the Completed
He went out in the winter night to stroke
That little tower like a great old animal

The reference here to stroking "that little tower" is derived from a letter wrote to his former lover, Lou Andreas-Salomé, in which after completing the Elegies he writes "I went out and stroked the little Muzot, which protected it and me and finally granted it, like a large old animal."[18]

Translations

Rilke's Duino Elegies are likely his most popular works in the English-speaking world, and have been translated over twenty times since they were first published in England with a translation by Vita Sackville-West in 1931, and in the United States with a translation by J. B. Leishman and Stephen Spender in 1939.

  • Duineser Elegien: Elegies from the Castle of Duino, trans. Vita Sackville-West (Hogarth Press, London, 1931)
  • Duino Elegies, trans. J.B. Leishman and Stephen Spender (W. W. Norton, New York, 1939)
  • Duino Elegies, trans. Jessie Lemont (Fine Editions Press, New York, 1945)
  • Duineser Elegien: The Elegies of Duino, trans. Nora Wydenbruck (Amandus, Vienna, 1948
  • Duinesian Elegies, trans. Elaine E. Boney (University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1975)
  • Duino Elegies, trans. David Young (W. W. Norton, New York, 1978) ISBN 0-393-30931-2
  • Duino Elegies, trans. Gary Miranda (Azul Editions, Falls Church, VA, 1996) ISBN 885214-07-3
  • Duino Elegies, trans. Robert Hunter w/ block prints by Mareen Hunter (Hulogosi Press, 1989))[19]
  • Duino Elegies trans. Stephen Cohn (Carcanet Press, 1989) ISBN 978-0-85635-837-1
  • Duino-Elegieë trans. H.J. Pieterse from German to Afrikaans (Protea, Pretoria, 2007) ISBN 978-1-86919-151-1
  • Duino Elegies, trans. Martyn Crucefix (Enitharmon Press, London, 2008)

References

Notes

  1. ^ a b [1]. Retrieved 2 February 2013.
  2. ^ a b Hoeniger, F. David. "Symbolism and Pattern in Rilke's Duino Elegies" in German Life and Letters Volume 3, Issue 4, (July 1950), pages 271–283.
  3. ^ a b Perloff, Marjorie. "Reading Gass Reading Rilke" in Parnassus.
  4. ^ Gass, William H. Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999).
  5. ^ Rilke, Rainer Maria. "First Elegy" from Duino Elegies, line 1.
  6. ^ Rilke, Rainer Maria. "First Elegy" from Duino Elegies, line 6; "Second Elegy", line 1.
  7. ^ a b c d Dash, Bibhudutt. "In the Matrix of the Divine: Approaches to Godhead in Rilke’s Duino Elegies and Tennyson’s In Memoriam" in Language in India Volume 11 (11 November 2011), 355-371.
  8. ^ Wellbery, David E.; Ryan, Judith; and Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich. A New History of German Literature. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2004), 723.
  9. ^ Freedman, Ralph. Life of a Poet: Rainer Maria Rilke. (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 320.
  10. ^ Freedman, Ralph. Life of a Poet: Rainer Maria Rilke. (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 340.
  11. ^ By the cliffs of Duino - existence and ecstasy
  12. ^ Freedman, Ralph. Life of a Poet: Rainer Maria Rilke (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 515.
  13. ^ Rilke, Rainer Maria. "First Elegy" from Duino Elegies (1923), lines 4-5 translated by Mitchell, Stephen (Boston: Shambhala Publications, Inc., 1992)
  14. ^ Flemming, Albert Ernest (translator). Rainer Maria Rilke: Selected Poems. (New York:Routledge, 1990), 20-21.
  15. ^ Gosetti-Ferencei, Jennifer Anna. “Immanent Transcendence in Rilke and Stevens” in The German Quarterly Volume 83, Issue 3 (Summer, 2010), 275-296.
  16. ^ Freedman, Ralph. Life of a Poet: Rainer Maria Rilke. (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 327.
  17. ^ Hesse, Hermann, in the essay "Rainer Maria Rilke" (1928, 1927, 1933) in Part II of Hesse; Ziolkowski, Theodore (editor). My Belief: Essays on Life and Art (New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974), 337-342.
  18. ^ Rilke to Lou Andreas-Salomé (11 February 1922)
  19. ^ The Duino Elegies by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Robert Hunter

Further reading

  • Baron, Frank; Dick, Ernst S.; and Maurer, Warren R. (editors). Rainer Maria Rilke: The Alchemy of Alienation. (Regents Press of Kansas, 1980).
  • Gass, William H. Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999).
  • Graff, W. L. Rainer Maria Rilke: Creative Anguish of a Modern Poet. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956).
  • Guardini, Romano; (trans. by Knight, K.G.). Rilke's "Duino Elegies": An Interpretation (Henry Regnery, 1961).
  • Kleinbard, D. The Beginning of Terror: A Psychological Study of R.M. Rilke's Life and Work (1993).
  • Komar, Kathleen L. Transcending Angels: Rainer Maria Rilke's "Duino Elegies". (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1987).
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