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FOREWORD
“All of my poems are about time,” the Nobel Laureate Joseph Brodsky once noted, “about what time does to man.” Inspired by the immortal god of song, Orpheus, as well as the all-too-mortal young ballerina, Wera Ouckama Knoop, Rainer Maria Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus are also preoccupied with time—what expires in it as well as what endures beyond it:
We are the driving ones.
Yet, the way time goes by—
see that as trivial,
next to what stays.
All that is rushing by,
will be long over soon;
only what then remains
consecrates us. (1:22, ll. 1-8)
Christiane Marks’s pellucid translations themselves are also about time—about how poems are absorbed and felt and understood over time. Encountering them, I was reminded of George Steiner’s important apperception that literary translation is, among other things, the most sophisticated act of reading possible. These translations are the product of a life’s attention to Rilke’s masterwork. They embody and enact one of reading’s greatest pleasures—that of returning to a text over time. Reading itself is also always an experience that occurs in time.
Poetic meter, of course, is also a kind of measuring of time, and one of the distinctions of Marks’s translations is her palpable although light-handed attention to meter, aiming in particular to convey the predominantly dactylic verse of this sonnet sequence. Marks succeeds not only in capturing Rilke’s music—often sacrificed in translation—but also in rendering his singular and indelible imagery, imagery obsessed with meditating about time, song, and listening, imagery that is always aiming to perceive things that are overlooked or hard to see:
Mirrors: There’s never been true description
of what, in your innermost nature, you are.
You, who seem made of the holes of sieves
filled with the in-between spaces of time. (2:3, ll. 1-4)
Having spent considerable time now with these translations myself, I feel about them the way Rilke describes the rose: “to us you are the filled, the numberless blossom, / the object that’s inexhaustible” (2:6, ll. 3-4). In a synesthetic moment of inspiration, Rilke likens its scent to sound. “For centuries now, your fragrance has called / over to us the sweetest of names,” he writes (ll. 9-10). Christiane Marks’s translations likewise call out and convey Rilke’s poetry to a new generation, and “It suddenly fills the air like fame” (l.11).
—Jennifer Grotz
TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION
Rainer Maria Rilke’s fifty-five Sonnets to Orpheus, written down over a few days in an astonishing burst of inspiration, came to him in spoken form, as “an interior dictation, completely spontaneous.”1 And what student of modern poetry does not recall that the beginning of the first Duino Elegy was uttered by a voice calling out of the storm as the poet walked the ramparts of Duino Castle: “Who, if I cried out, would hear me from out of the ranks / of the angels?” (Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel / Ordnungen?). The mysterious words even suggest the dactylic meter used in most of the elegies. The bulk of the Sixth and Ninth Elegies was imparted to Rilke by an inner voice as he walked home from the post office one day. Both the Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus, composed simultaneously and considered by Rilke to be “of one birth,” and “filled with the same essence,” had their beginning in a very few weeks in February of 1922, in spoken form—as sound.2
When the Elegies were completed, Rilke made a point of not sending them to his dear friend and benefactor, Princess Marie of Thurn and Taxis Hohenlohe, to whom they are dedicated, because he wanted her to hear them first, from his lips. Later, he wrote her that he did not recognize the full depth of his own sonnets until he had read them to her—again, experienced as sound.3 He often walked up and down, away from his stand-up desk and back, in composing his poetry, which would have encouraged rhythmic composition.4
Since the sound and rhythm of his poetry were of such importance to Rilke, one of my first steps in translating them was to learn them by heart, so I would have them constantly accessible orally, even while ruminating on them away from my desk. Over the years, I spoke them to myself and occasionally to others in many different settings, open always to the mysterious message of sound and rhythm behind the “meaning,” grateful to have been familiar with those particular sounds and rhythms since childhood, since I share Rilke’s mother tongue. I tried to render the original not only accurately, but also in words chosen for sound, and metrically, since it is the meter which moves the poems along so beautifully. I did not have to render over-regular or mechanical-sounding meter, because Rilke uses it quite flexibly, often breaking the metric pattern to draw attention to special words and passages. However, he never wrote in free verse.
Many of these sonnets address the reader directly, personally—as did that spontaneous, inner dictation
