Vaulting Transcendence

By Paul Gray

DUINO ELEGIES AND THE SONNETS TO ORPHEUS

by RAINER MARIA'RILKE

Translated by A. POULIN JR.

205 pages. Houghton Mifflin. $10.95.

$4.95 paperback.

Pacing outside Duino Castle near Trieste in early 1912, German Poet Rainer Maria Rilke heard a voice above the Adriatic surf: "And if I cried, who'd listen to me in those angelic orders?" Rilke took this enigmatic question as the signal to begin his chef-d'oeuvre: a series of poems that would unite the visible order of things with the invisible universe of thought--to see the world as the angels might. He finished two elegies and fragments of several others before inspiration deserted him. Ten years and a world war later, it suddenly reappeared. In an astonishing single month, Rilke completed the ten Duino Elegies and wrote the 55 Sonnets to Orpheus.

English renditions of these two triumphant works have never before been available in one book. And Translator A. Poulin Jr., 38, has done more than simply collect Rilke. He gives the German a tight, idiomatic English style that is both readable and remarkably in tune with Rilke's own:

And how confused is anything

that comes from a womb and has to fly. As

if afraid

of itself, it darts through the air like a crack through a cup, the

way a wing of a bat crazes the porcelain of

night.

And we: spectators, always.

everywhere, looking at everything and never from!

Rilke did not look for vaulting transcendence in airy phrases. He squeezed the words in his possession hard enough to make their substance felt. Poulin's words are naturally different from Rilke's, but he too puts language under a similar pressure.

Those who learned Rilke from earlier translations may miss some cherished lines or bridle at Poulin's occasional use of contemporary vocabulary. Yet a comparison between his version and one of the best previous translations suggests that Poulin's is closer to current taste. In their 1939 rendering of the Duino Elegies, J.B. Leishman and Stephen Spender wrote:

Between the hammers lives on our heart, as between the teeth the tongue, which, nevertheless, remains the bestower of praise.

Poulin unbuckles this Germanic syntax and pares away words that obscure the image:

Our heart survives between hammers, just as the tongue

between the teeth is still able to praise.

Great poetry is ageless. It is translations that grow old. In the future, Poulin's work will probably be superseded by a fresh interpretation. New translators will find other gems in the treasure of Rilke's work. But it may be generations before Rilke's ecstatic conclusion to the tenth Elegy sings better or truer in English:

And we, who have always thought of joy As rising, would feel the emotion that almost amazes us when a happy thing falls.

Paul Gray

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