Duino Elegies: Difference between revisions

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926)

The Duino Elegies (Template:Lang-de) 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," began writing the elegies in 1912 while a guest of Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis (nee Princess Marie zu Hohenlohe-Waldenburg-Schillingsfürst) (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 one brief episode of writing in 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.

The Duino Elegies are intensely religious, mystical poems that weigh beauty and existential suffering. While the name "elegies" implies melancholy and lamentation, Rilke's elegies frequently show moments of energy and "unrestrained enthusiasm." They are, in turn, described as a metamorpohsis 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."

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?) and later declares that "every angel is terrifying" (Jeder Engel ist schrecklich).

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.

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

Rilke had been visiting Princess 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 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.

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 Muzot castle in Veyras, Rhone Valley, Switzerland. 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.

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."

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." He depicts the alternative, an spiritually fulfilling possibility beyond human limitations in the form of angels. There is a deeply-felt despair in that no matter man's striving, the limitation of human and earthly existence renders him unable to reach out to the angels.

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."

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."

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))
• 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

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).

External links

• The Duino Elegies in German
• The Duino Elegies in English. Translated by A.S. Kline
• The Duino Elegies in English. Translated by S.M. Cohn