for much of the poems’ appeal, as do the occasional colloquialisms like und ob!, dass ihrs begrifft!, wie aber, sag’ mir, soll, and wer weiss? (“and how!’’; “if only you could understand!”; “but how, tell me, can,”; and “who knows?”) (I:3, I:5, I:16, II:20).
Occasional particularly important words and phrases are italicized, receiving the emphasis they might in conversation, which adds to the spoken, spontaneous feel. Italicized words and phrases occur in no fewer than 18 of the sonnets. Important examples include I:8: Jubel weiss (“Jubilation knows”); I:12: Die Erde schenkt (“they are earth’s gift”); I:14: Sind sie die Herrn (“Are they the masters”); II:2: den wirklichen Strich (“the true line”); and II:2: Zwar war es nicht (“True, it did not exist.”) In some cases, English syntax or meter has required a slight shift of the emphasis. Sonnet II:5, a particularly intense one, contains three italicized words: so von Fülle übermannter (“so completely”); wieviel Welten (“countless worlds”); and aber wann (“ah, but when”). This poem was inspired by a little anemone the poet had actually seen in a garden in Rome in 1914, and strongly identified with, as J. B. Leishman relates in his valuable notes on the Sonnets.5 In Sonnet II:11 Rilke italicizes the whole line that sums up what he is saying about the human need to kill: Töten ist eine Gestalt unseres wandernden Trauerns (“Killing is just one form of our nomadic mourning”). It is simply a part of our often troubled, sometimes tragic, process of becoming. The reader/listener immediately feels involved; the poems, though cast in the traditional sonnet form, seem quite contemporary.
Preserving this fresh, spoken, quality became another important goal for me, particularly since it helps to reflect the poems’ completely unanticipated, surprise arrival. Incidentally, Rilke had always depended on inspiration; he could not “force” creation. “The utmost” that he could do, he explained to a friend, was to prepare, and then wait.6 This preparation included absolute solitude and inner openness, with perhaps some translation work and letter writing on the side.
In some of these sonnets there is a strange, one-time shift from the second to the third person, and these particular sonnets all begin in a similar way. For example, three begin with the direct-address form before making this shift: Du aber, Herr (I:20); Du aber, Göttlicher (II:7); Tänzerin, o du Verlegung (II:18). (The parallel is less obvious in translation: “What can I consecrate”; “But you, divine one”; “Dancer, how you have transmuted.”) In each case, third-person pronoun phrases—“his evening,” “when he was attacked,” and “above her”—subsequently appear. Then, Rilke returns to the second person. Translators have generally circumvented or “corrected” these shifts by substituting the expectable second-person form. Yet these irregularities are surely not oversights, and so I have tried to preserve them. Rilke is showing the reader that in the world of these sonnets, it is possible to talk to someone and about someone to others at the same time, making the point that he has a large and diverse audience in mind, and an expanded definition of speech. Though more readily dismissed as mistakes, these switches from the second to the third person are no more accidental than coinages like singender and preisender (literally “more singingly” and “praisingly”) which I render as “with stronger song” and “with more powerful praise” (II: 13). The literally translated words seemed too odd for the poem, and the sound was not pleasing, so I have used alliteration to approximate the original emphasis. Ins thorig offene Herz, a phrase in which the noun “gate” (das Thor) has been boldly turned into an adjective, I render as “the gate-open heart” (II:9). Such idiosyncratic uses of German, of which there are quite a few in the sonnets, present a special challenge to the translator: while they should not be entirely smoothed over, their oddness must sometimes be tempered so it does not overwhelm the whole poem.
As already mentioned, Rilke uses meter flexibly. Here he begins an otherwise dactylic poem with three stresses together in a command: In Schon, horch, hörst du die ersten Harken (II:25) (“Come! Listen! Already you’re hearing the first of the rakes”). Sonnet II:11 uses both metrical variation and enjambment for emphasis: Leise liess man dich ein, als wärst du ein Zeichen / Frieden zu feiern. Doch dann: rang dich am Rande der Knecht. (“Gently they lowered you; you seemed a signal to celebrate / peace. But then the hired man shook your edge.”) Rilke emphasizes Frieden (peace) by beginning a new line with the word. Doch dann (“but then”), two jolting stresses together in mid-line, introduce the pivotal statement that not peace, but killing is intended.
The sonnets in this much-loved cycle stand out in sonnet history for their formal variety, and might for this reason seem unaccustomed to those expecting only iambic pentameter, the standard English sonnet meter since before Shakespeare. Only eight of the Sonnets to Orpheus use this meter, including, however, four of the first five, which introduce the cycle—I:1,2,3, and 5—as well as I:14, II:4, II:14, and II:27. Though all the sonnets consist of two quatrains and two tercets, Sonnets I:9, 17, 18, 22, and 23 have only two or three beats per line, following the short-line sonnet form popular in France at the time, which Rilke admired in the work of Gide, Valery, and others. A few sonnets like II:10, 17, and 19, on the other hand, are written in hexameter lines; occasionally there will even be a seven or eight-beat line, usually used to build up tension or suspense. Irregular dactylic meter predominates throughout. Trochaic meter is less used, though still eight times—in Sonnets I:8, 11, 12, and 13, and in II:5, 16, 23, 29. The important final sonnet uses this somewhat solemn meter. Two particularly exuberant sonnets—I:20 and II:12, about a runaway horse and the power of transformation—are lifted and carried by dactylic meter. In II: 11 and 19, Rilke shortens the final lines of two poems in hexameter by half, to bring them to a close gradually and add additional weight to the final words. These are just a few examples of the ways in which Rilke puts meter to work for him, given because, at a time when some readers have become less conscious of the possibilities of meter, or consider it dated, I have chosen to duplicate the original meter. The meter is integral to these thoroughly modern poems—a part of their “message”—and Rilke’s natural way of composing.
My enthusiasm for the vision behind these sonnets helped me decisively in trying to render the life and beauty of the originals. Rilke’s visions simply ring true to me. As he explained to his Polish translator, he wrote both the Sonnets and the Elegies out of a growing belief in a great, unified wider world or “circulation,” a belief that had finally enabled him to re-affirm his life, envision a future, and begin composing anew after the devastating years of World War I. That breakthrough, which came along with the unexpected sonnets, was real and vivid to me. Rilke became convinced that
We who are alive here today are not satisfied with the temporal world—not for one moment. We are continually merging with those who came before us and those who appear to be coming after us…. In that greatest, that “open” world, all exist—we cannot say “at the same time,” since it’s just because there is no time that they may all be there together…. The temporal, the transitory, plunges everywhere into deep being.7
In the Second Duino Elegy, Rilke writes that in this timeless realm angels do not even distinguish between the living and the dead: “Angels (they say) often don’t know if they’re walking / with the living or dead. The eternal current / sweeps through both realms all ages / ever along with it, its song drowning out theirs.” (Engel (sagt man) wüssten oft nicht, ob sie unter / Lebenden gehn oder Toten. Die ewige Strömung / reisst durch beide Bereiche alle Alter / immer mit sich und übertönt sie in beiden.) Rilke’s response to the slaughter of the war was to begin to see death not as the opposite of life, or complete annihilation, but simply as “the side of life that’s turned away from and un-illuminated by us.”8 We must try our hardest to illuminate it with our consciousness, he stressed, which will remove our fear of it and help us to see that we are constantly nourished by both life and death together. Even in his twenties, Rilke had already held a positive view of death: “For we are only rind and leaf. / The great death which each life contains—/ that death’s the fruit, around which all else turns.” (Denn wir sind nur
