German Poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926)
from Sonnets to Orpheus, Part Two, # 29
Let This Darkness Be Your Bell Tower
Quiet friend who has come so far,
feel how your breathing makes more space around you.
Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell. As you ring,
what batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change.
What is it like, such intensity of pain?
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.”
In this uncontainable night,
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.
And if the world has ceased to hear you,
say to the silent earth: I flow.
To the rushing water, speak: I am.
Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) from In Praise of Mortality, trans. and ed. Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows, Riverhead Books, 2005
This poem by the German poet, Rainer Maria Rilke: what a hymn to being consciously alive! And present. Its call to confront the terror of life, or its dreadfulness as Rilke calls it in a letter quoted below, and turn it into music, something beautiful.
And what a command at the end of this poem which is also the final sonnet in Rilke’s acclaimed Sonnets to Orpheus. To the rushing water, speak: I am. Yes, the poet seems to say, we will disappear like rushing water. But while here be in your life. Find the extraordinary in the ordinary: live in a way that declares: I am!
At the risk of losing my readers, which I don’t want to do because I want you to read the long quote at the end of this blog post, I need to address the issue of translation! As much as I like Barrows’ and Macy’s translation of Rilke’s poem I am always aware of the challenges of translation! I am always aware that a translated poem by its nature is no longer the original. It has been made new. This version especially. I find the translations by Barrows and Macy to sit so well with my sensibilities but the key lines in this version for me, which give this version its power, differ greatly from others:
Let this darkness be a bell tower/and you the bell. As you ring,// what batters you becomes your strength. What strong lines, perfect for inspirational workshops. What batters you becomes your strength. But is this what Rilke really said?
Here are those lines translated by Stephen Mitchell, thought to be one of Rilke’s translators most loyal to Rilke’s originals:Let your presence ring out like a bell/ into the night./ What feeds upon your face// grows mighty from the nourishment thus offered.
And here is William Gass’s version from his book on Rilke subtitled Reflections on the Problems of Translation! Yes, indeed: From the dark tower let you bell peal./Whatever feeds upon your face// grows strong from this offering.
Celebrated Scottish poet Don Paterson gives us this: ring out, as a bell into the earth/ from the dark rafters of its own high place -// then watch what feeds on you grow strong again.
For me the line : what feeds upon your face seems jarring and something out of a horror movie! But according to Gass it is essential to Rilke who uses this expression in another poem and for whom our attention to the world, our presence, brings something vital to the world! As it feeds us and we live to our fullest of who we are, it is fed in return. The earth, this world is not an inanimate object but in relationship with us!
While I like the Barrows and Macy translation: what batters you becomes your strength I am also drawn to the Paterson version! Oh well, what counts for me is that in the versions I read this poem as a whole shouts out: be who you are! this is your gift to yourself and the world!
So, enough of the problems of translation! Who is the poet Rilke and why does he matter? He is said by many to be one of the great poetic voices of the 20th century. Stephen Mitchell gets more specific when he says Rilke’s acknowledged masterpiece, The Duino Elegies, is widely acknowledged to be the greatest poem of the twentieth century. He adds: The Sonnets to Orpheus, in their subtler way are at least as great.
What makes these two series of poems stand out even more is how most of the elegies and all of the sonnets were created during February 1922 in what Mitchell calls; surely the most astonishing burst of inspiration in the history of literature.
Rilke said the poems were dictated to him as if from inside a god. He says he spent those days and nights howling unbelievably vast commands and receiving signals from cosmic space and booming out to them my immense salvos of welcome.
The scope of these poems is terrifyingly big. No less than trying to sum what it is to be a human on this planet. I am haunted by a letter Rilke wrote to a great friend describing the purpose of these poems.
Life—and we know nothing else—, isn’t life itself dreadful? But as soon as we acknowledge its dreadfulness (not as opponents: what kind of match would be for it?), but somehow with a confidence that this very dreadfulness may be something completely ours, though something that is just now too great, too vast, too incomprehensible for our learning hearts—: as soon as we accept life’s most terrifying dreadfulness, at the risk of perishing from it (i.e., from our own Too-much!)—: then an intuition of blessedness will open up for us and, at this cost, will be ours. Whoever does not sometime, or other, give his full consent, his full and joyous consent, to the dreadfulness of life, can never take possession of the unutterable abundance and power of our existence; can only walk on its edge, and one day when the judgement is given, will have been neither alive nor dead. To show the identity of the dreadfulness and bliss, these two faces on the same divine head, indeed this one face, which just presents itself this way or that, according to our distance from it or the state of mind in which we perceive it—: this is the true significance and purpose of the Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus.
Rainer Maria Rilke in a letter To Countess Margot Sizzo-Norris-Crouy, April 12th, 1923 from Rainer Maria Rilke – Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus, trans. Stephen Mitchell, Vintage International, 2009
That’s a big quote to digest. The lines that that speak most clearly to me are these:
Whoever does not sometime, or other, give his full consent, his full and joyous consent, to the dreadfulness of life, can never take possession of the unutterable abundance and power of our existence; can only walk on its edge, and one day when the judgement is given, will have been neither alive nor dead.
The courage to live like this. Do have that courage? Do I? Let our answers be yes!