Duino Elegies 

By Rainer Maria Rilke

Translated by Alison Croggon

Newport Street Books

Rilke's Duino Elegies were begun in a burst of inspiration while the poet was staying at Duino Castle near Trieste in 1912. Walking along the battlements after receiving a difficult letter, he suddenly heard a mysterious voice calling to him from an approaching storm. Their composition was then interrupted by an artistic and personal crisis that lasted until 1922, when he finished them in an even more astonishing afflatus that included the gift of their companion-masterpiece the Sonnets to Orpheus at the Château de Muzot in Switzerland. 

Alison Croggon’s new translation of the Elegies has a physicality, sensuality and even violence that distinguishes her from precursors like J.B. Leishman and Stephen Spender (who together first introduced Rilke to the English-speaking world in an elegant if somewhat mannered rendition) or Stephen Mitchell (who gives his Rilke a more post-Beat, Zen-like spiritual cast).

Croggon (who is also a theatre writer and critic as well as a novelist and poet) has a sense of dramatic as well as poetic voice which is essential to the Elegies, with their company of stock characters drawn from Rilke’s previous repertoire – angels, saints, puppets, dolls, acrobats, clowns, dancers, musicians, lovers, Gods, heroes and other figures from Greek mythology and the Bible, women (especially betrayed or abandoned), children, animals, cripples, beggars, invalids and those who die young. These characters (apart from the mysterious ‘Laments’ who appear in the final Elegy) are thrown together regardless of provenance to make up a theatrical world that is all the more obviously artificial because of its heterogeneity. They appear (or in the case of the Angel fail to appear, at least when initially prompted) against a backdrop of stage settings (including theatres and circuses) that are furnished with scenery and props such as city streets, facades, statues, doorways, windows, curtains, wardrobes, violins – and even (in the final Elegy) amusement park backlots, fields, valleys, rivers, mountains, ancient monuments, starry skies, bare trees and falling rain. 

Rilke explicitly bares the device of this slightly shop-worn theatricality halfway through the Fourth Elegy in a characteristically apostrophic aside to the reader, who is suddenly cast in the role of audience observing their own lives unfold on stage. In Croggon’s translation: 

Who hasn’t timidly sat before his own heart’s curtain? 

It flings itself up: the scenery is parting.

Easy to understand. The familiar garden 

slightly swaying: then first of all, the dancer.

Not him. Enough. And if he moves too lightly

he’s just disguised, he turns into a bourgeois

passing through the kitchen in his apartment.

 

I’ll not have these half-filled masks, 

rather the puppet. That’s full. I’ll endure

the skin and the wire and its sight

that’s all outlooking. Here. I’m waiting.

Even if the footlights go out, even if they 

say to me, Nothing more – even if the stage 

breathes out grey draughts of void, 

even if none of my silent forebears 

will sit with me, no woman, not even 

the boy with the brown-eyed squint. 

I’ll stay anyway. It’s always a spectacle. 

[…]

Angel and puppet: that’s finally drama.

This sense that people, places and objects have become stage characters, scenery and props – a sense that borders on the psychological phenomenon of derealisation – springs from an underlying mood of abandonment and loss. (The cause of this remains obscure, given the little we know about the 'difficult letter', the arrival of which preceded the 'voice' that dictated the opening lines of the First Elegy, or the precise nature of the crisis that followed soon afterwards, but its effects appear to have been catastrophic in terms of Rilke's creative flow.)

As the poet (or rather, his poetic-dramatic persona) rhetorically asks in Croggon’s translation of the First Elegy’s opening line: ‘Who, if I cry, hears me among the angelic / orders?’ Croggon’s use of the factual conditional present is more direct and active than the counterfactual conditional past of Mitchell’s ‘Who, if I cried out, would hear me…’ The latter is grammatically truer to Rilke’s ‘Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich…’ but lacks his (or Croggon’s) sense of urgency. In Croggon’s version, the poet actually cries out; and that ‘cry’ is the poem itself.

Further down in the same stanza she translates the line ‘Denn das Schöne ist nichts / als des Schrecklichen Anfang’ as ‘For beauty is nothing / but this terrifying beginning’ rather than ‘For beauty is nothing / but the beginning of terror’ (Mitchell). Once again, the latter is more accurate (‘des Schrecklichen Anfang’ literally means ‘the beginning of the Terrifying’), but Croggon’s grammatical and semantic reversal is more performative and self-referential, as it enacts and points to itself as its own ‘terrifying beginning’.

There’s something deeply playful – in both the ludic and dramatic sense – about Croggon’s approach to translation as a form of interpretation which sometimes privileges rhetorical over literal fidelity. (Here I’m using the term ‘interpretation’ in the performative sense, as when one speaks of a musician or actor ‘interpreting’ a score or text.) For example, in the Ninth Elegy, Rilke’s eulogy for mortality itself – ‘Aber dieses / ein Mal gewesen zu sein, wenn auch nur ein Mal: / irdisch gewesen zu sein, scheint nicht widerrufbar’ – is translated by Croggon as: ‘But this / once was real, even if only once: / earthly and real, shining beyond revocation.’ Here Mitchell’s somewhat contorted version reads: ‘But to have been / this once, completely, even if only once: / to have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing.’ In Croggon’s version, ‘shining’ is a false cognate for scheint (as she acknowledges in her Afterword), but more concrete and suggestive than ‘seems’; and the whole passage is more striking for being rendered in the simple past, and with fewer words.

In terms of prosody, Croggon more or less follows Rilke’s own fairly loose adaptation of the rising and falling dactylic hexameters and pentameters of classical Greek and Roman elegies, as well as the similarly alternating longer and shorter lines and irregular accentual rhythms of the Biblical Lamentations. She also exploits the natural affinity of the Elegies with the rhythms of colloquial English to evoke a more direct and conversational tone than the somewhat formal language of Leishman and Spender, or the more deadpan and at times enigmatic approach of Mitchell. Her stronger sense of rhythmic propulsion is heightened by adopting Rilke’s use of alliteration, in a way that harks back to the common origins of Old English and Old High German, and evokes those early medieval Anglo-Saxon laments of loneliness and exile, The Wanderer and The Seafarer. 

The term ‘elegy’ comes from the Greek term elegos, which originally referred to a lamentation performed on behalf of the dead so that they can complete their final journey rather than being endlessly reborn. These lamentations were performed as part of the Orphic mysteries, so-called because the mythical figure of Orpheus is supposed to have founded them and to have written and sung the Orphic Hymns. In this light one might read the Elegies like the Sonnets to Orpheus as contemporary ‘Orphic Hymns’, with Orpheus as a character-mask for Rilke himself.

This sense of the Elegies as a form of Orphic rite is strongly suggested by the final Elegy, which introduces a new group of characters to the list of dramatis personae. These are a strange species, class or family of beings (the German word Geschlecht covers all of these, but Croggon opts for ‘family’) called ‘the Laments’ (‘die Klage’) who appear in the fields behind a tawdry amusement park on the outskirts of ‘the city of pain’. A young female ‘Lament’ leads a newly dead young man into a ‘landscape of Lament’ that mirrors the familiar world, but also seems timeless. However, the word Klage is also a German translation of the Greek word elegos. Thus the ‘Laments’ could also be read as personifications of the Elegies themselves. This would imply that ultimately Rilke’s poem-cycle is addressed to the dead as a kind of linguistic offering, in order to lead and welcome them home. 

Two brief stanzas at the end of the final Elegy return us to ourselves and the land of the living. The penultimate stanza presents the wintry images of ‘catkins hanging / from empty hazels’ and ‘rain falling on dark earth’. Croggon asserts at the end of her Afterword that these lines encapsulate the radical immanence of the whole poem; and the following stanza certainly reinforces this sense of a bruising fall to earth: ‘And we, who think of happiness / climbing, would feel the emotion / which almost confounds us / when happiness falls.’ However, the closing lines also suggest the rhythm of rising and falling that animates elegaic (and possibly all) language (and certainly all breath) – as well as the rising and falling of stage scenery or curtains. This rhythm of rising and falling maintains the tension between immanence and transcendence, presence and absence, body and soul, puppet and angel – a tension which is also, in the words of the Fourth Elegy, ‘finally drama’.

*

This review is a somewhat rewritten and more substantial version of the one that appeared in Australian Book Review in July 2022 under the title: 'This Terrifying Beginning: A New Translation of Rilke's Masterpiece.'