TOP: Rainer Maria Rilke, c. 1900 BOTTOM: Porträt des Rainer Maria Rilke, 1906 (Öltempera auf Pappe, 32,3 × 25,4 cm) BY Paula Modersohn-Becker Paula Modersohn-Becker Museum More About Rilke Academy of American Poets Duineser Elegien (The Duino Elegies) The Poetry Foundation

Translator’s Note T.S. Eliot proposed that “poetry can communicate before it is understood,” and readers of Rilke’s Duineser Elegien may find this both true and helpful. Since their publication, these ten poems have stirred controversy and bewilderment. Attempts to pinpoint and paraphrase the work’s thought processes have often been reductionist. But how is one to work with Rilke’s insight that “the work of sight” had been “realized” in his earlier writing, and “now” was the time for “some heart-work / on all those pictures, those prisoned creatures within you”? How can it possibly be pinpointed? Perhaps, if not paraphrased, it can be translated. That might mean beginning with Rilke’s “heart-work” in German and working it toward English. The Elegies may preclude exact significance. An insistence on understanding the exact significance of Rilke’s acrobats, for example, could hamper the reader’s opening toward the poems; and the reaching for “openness,” das Offene, lies at the heart of Rilke’s thought. By translating the Duino Elegies, we have found that the words, like doors, are less statements about something than invitations into an expanding architecture. As we have lingered with the words, translating has offered a wonderful entrance into the Elegies’ shifting world, in which, Rilke said, “the eternal thing … possess[es] the unheard of, unsurpassable intensity of… inner equivalents.” How to begin to translate this world? “Alles/ ist nicht es selbst” (All / is not itself). This laconic claim appears in the “Fourth Elegy,” a poem invoking the play of puppets at the theater — and indeed, all is not itself when one attempts to translate Rilke’s language. His syntax is at once elastic and controlled. In German, sentences can be tightly dovetailed, held together by the force of noun declensions and verb conjugations. Verbs are often placed at the end of sentences, and in the Elegies, typically after long strings of modifiers and appositives. The reader has to reach for the verb. This structure contributes to the Elegies’ noted “onwardness.” As we have translated, as we have worked to move the verb forward in the English sentence, there has always been the danger of wrecking Rilke’s high-strung syntactical arches, and thus curtailing his imaginative breath — unless the English is able to find its own “onwardness.” A translator of Rilke must be wary of straightening out, of cleaning up his syntax, and of precluding an “onwardness” in English in which one is always about to discover what the writing could mean.

Then there are semantics. Try to grasp the meaning of a German word, phrase, and sentence; and the diction, too, will reveal its “openness.” The meanings expand. Aside from frequent neologisms, one discovers rich layers hidden in word-stems that suggest primary senses and radical origins from which more familiar meanings surface. Rilke’s German language is elaborately spun, quickly paced, and intensely compressed. How to translate this rhythmic coming into being? The impulse is metamorphic, and it would be a mistake for the translator to stabilize it.

In the “Fifth Elegy,” a group of street performers is introduced — jugglers and acrobats who fling their bodies into the air. Then the tricks of the acrobats shape-shift into the plight of lovers; the crowd of spectators who were watching the acrobats becomes an imaginary audience of the dead. The poem has been wondering about the performers’ often painful training and futile effort:

Then, projecting the possibility of excellence that may follow a hard apprenticeship, the poem offers an answer:

It is vital that the translation allow words to accumulate and change in ways one might not expect in English so that the metamorphosis of acrobats into lovers and “surrounding spectators” into the “silent dead” can take place. Like the German, the English words must have a kind of Shakespearean “ripeness” or “readiness” for what they will become.

As we have puzzled over the translation for these lines, the work of translating may also have offered us a central theme or impulse in the Elegies. Clearly, the lines progress from the lovers/acrobats’ failed attempts toward the possibility of perfect achievement, from “could not” to “could.” The German verb können, to be able to, is used also as a noun here, but to translate it as “ability” will not quite capture the original’s complexity. Why? Können has a range of meanings in German, depending on usage: to be able to, to be permitted to, to know. It derives from the Old High German kunnan, which stems from the Proto-Indo-European root gno, to know, which bore innumerable linguistic offspring, including the Greek gnosis (inquiry, knowledge, fame), and the Latin cognoscere. The Germanic kunnan‘s descendants include in English “can” and in German the noun Kunst (art). Art, the German language suggests, is essentially know-how.

The Elegies conceive of the world as at once external and internal; it is a place often bemoaned by the poem as an unresponsive, uncaring world-space. In this spatially-conceived world, human eyes do not possess ‘openness,’ heaven is silent, the things are not the words, lovers do not cohere. However, the Elegies work to transform alienation into strangeness…

So what about the know-how of lovers and acrobats? The Elegies conceive of the world as at once external and internal; it is a place often bemoaned by the poem as an unresponsive, uncaring world-space. In this spatially-conceived world, human eyes do not possess “openness,” heaven is silent, the things are not the words, lovers do not cohere. However, the Elegies work to transform alienation into strangeness by imagining a place where a perfected ability — können —is possible. The “Fifth Elegy” suggests a place where the impossible happens, where without a ground, we see the lovers “leaning long since into each other their ladders trembling — and they could.” After ten years of striving to complete the Elegies, Rilke’s arrival at these lines was momentous. (The “Fifth Elegy” was actually completed last.) In the handwritten first draft, which otherwise very much anticipates the finished version, Rilke writes (translated literally): “How often was I there / in my heart / where they not yet / can.” Later in the same draft, the word könnten in the projected “where they could” is written in large letters and underlined four times. Clearly, the longed-for excellence in performance refers also to the author, and more generally to the artist.

For Rilke, much had been at stake, and much came to fruition here. Already in 1909, he expresses in a letter to Jacob Uexküll his view of art as transformative. Multiple acts of artistic upsurges, Rilke says, could overcome (bewältigen) the terrible, by turning negation into a positive, even producing a surplus — “as witnessing existence, as willingness to be: as an angel.” Rilke refined this idea of art as transformed negation in February 1912, at the time he wrote the first two Elegies. “The magician,” he says, “transforms that which cannot be overcome into a series of long, hovering tones, belonging neither here not there, but claimed by all for themselves.” The Elegies are such tones, we imagine, still suspended in the air, still audible after all the terror that was to come. In the same decade, Freud suggested that negation articulates a repression but denies its impulse. Rilke transforms negation — not by overcoming — but in “hovering tones” through which the impulse transforms the articulation.

In December 1919, in a letter to Nanny Wunderly-Volkart, Rilke compares success in writing, in finding the exact term, with the acrobats’ expertise. It is all about precision, about Können. The acrobats’ spinning bodies “at the edge of the world” may compensate for much failure in other arenas of life. And immediately preceding the days of his most intense artistic output, in January 1922, Rilke writes as a prelude to the Elegies the lyric “Solang du Selbstgeworfnes fängst…” in which he explores the concept of können within the imagery of play, of catching and throwing a ball —at last effortlessly, the way “the year tosses birds.” The hands are merely releasing a momentous force.

And so “all / is not itself.” In the Duineser Elegien, alienation, failure, even the terrible could be transformed — counterweighted by effortless können. For Rilke, this is the calling of the artist. But können has to remain a projection, its tense the subjunctive. It lives in “openness.” Is it achieved by effort? By grace? The Elegies seem to want it both ways. As translators, we strive to relay the willful ambiguities as precisely as possible. As the English stand-in for Können, we considered “ability,” “mastery,” “facility,” “know-how,” “excellence.” Or avoiding the noun, we tried “to succeed,” “to know,” even “to find.” But listen to the poetry. None of these words fully name at their core the radical possibility that is about to be in Können, and that impels Kunst, that is, art. And so, honoring the etymology, the heritage of kunnan, its journey from knowing to art (to Kunst), we have chosen the English word that says this most easily and, we would like to think, most artfully: “could.” At least for now.