why the hell isn't there a thread for RILKE dammit

dude's writing is graceful, not regal

ah ok I see what you're getting at. I do German no prob, but eg Persian um yes relying on translations, at best.

My problem with later Rilke (we've established this is not a translation issue?) is prob that I really don't like it. Or maybe more specific, I think I don't like him much at all. He's simply wrong for the most part, would that be ok for me to say? I can't be dealing with all of that rubbish in his head, virtuoso though he was.

(I don't for a moment disagree with your graceful btw)

There already is a thread for Rilke on Ask A Drunk, as Hoos well knows. It is, of course, a shambles, but nevertheless...

I'd forgotten the existence of that one. The shambles of that thread is certainly not to blame on its starter. At the first post, I only just now laughed so I cried.

Freud: Ah! (Frowns.) I am sorry. I said "ah" again.

Rilke: (Nods acknowledgement, very formally.) Herr Doktor.

i've been reading the duino elegies off and on for years, i dunno more than a dozen maybe, but i think yesterday was the first time i read them all the way straight through and understood the whole thing. it was really astounding.

i think i was awfully tripped up before by not having it straight, what he was doing with the angels, or with things like the marionette and the acrobats. and if i ever read through the pain-city allegory in the tenth elegy before i was probably so thrown by the allegorical turn that i couldn't appreciate the effect for what it was.

Hope to reach a day when these Elegies open up for me. Frustrating, as I love some of his other writing.

u gotta change yr life dawg

posts v. much in character.

His metamorphosis into this one and that.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/30/books/galway-kinnell-poet-who-went-his-own-way-dies-at-87.html

kinnell's was the first rilke i read, i think - big for me in terms of helping me out of my wcw and berryman partiality (to the exclusion of most other poetry)

i swear sometimes this dude has gotta be the wackest badass ever to put pen to paper

I'll try to chase some translation then.

i don't know why i still like to read the macintyre, maybe just the cute little volumes i guess, because he's kind of awful, it's no wonder he has such a low opinion of rilke (and can hardly keep it to himself in the intro, notes, etc), if this is what he thought he was reading

i like snow, he is very lucid, seems to understand quite well what's being said, but after a really gripping read of cohn's 'new poems' volume i felt that snow's lucidity came slightly at the cost of a tension that cohn is somehow better at maintaining. have yet to really read his elegies/sonnets.

i've never read the furtak 'sonnets', didn't realize until the other day it was out, but he's a philosopher well-read in a lot of the right stuff to make him a good interpreter of rilke, so as long as the actual writing is not botched i'd expect him to be interesting/insightful at least

didn't Robert Hunter, the Grateful Dead songwriter, do a translation of Rilke? is it any good?

http://theamericanreader.com/better-angels-on-rilke-in-translation/

this can't be terribly recent, but i loved this essay

letters 7 and 8 in "letters to a young poet" are everything. everything.

transcribe

http://www.carrothers.com/rilke_main.htm

I want to talk to you again for a little while, dear Mr. Kappus, although there is almost nothing I can say that will help you, and I can hardly find one useful word. You have had many sadnesses, large ones, which passed. And you say that even this passing was difficult and upsetting for you. But please, ask yourself whether these large sadnesses haven't rather gone right through you. Perhaps many things inside you have been transformed; perhaps somewhere, someplace deep inside your being, you have undergone important changes while you were sad. The only sadnesses that are dangerous and unhealthy are the ones that we carry around in public in order to drown them out with the noise; like diseases that are treated superficially and foolishly, they just withdraw and after a short interval break out again all the more terribly; and gather inside us and are life, are life that is unlived, rejected, lost, life that we can die of. If only it were possible for us to see farther than our knowledge reaches, and even a little beyond the outworks of our presentiment, perhaps we would bear our sadnesses with greater trust than we have in our joys. For they are the moments when something new has entered us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy embarrassment, everything in us withdraws, a silence arises, and the new experience, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it all and says nothing.

It seems to me that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension, which we feel as paralysis because we no longer hear our astonished emotions living. Because we are alone with the unfamiliar presence that has entered us; because everything we trust and are used to is for a moment taken away from us; because we stand in the midst of a transition where we cannot remain standing. That is why the sadness passes: the new presence inside us, the presence that has been added, has entered our heart, has gone into its innermost chamber and is no longer even there, is already in our bloodstream. And we don't know what it was. We could easily be made to believe that nothing happened, and yet we have changed, as a house that a guest has entered changes. We can't say who has come, perhaps we will never know, but many signs indicate that the future enters us in this way in order to be transformed in us, long before it happens. And that is why it is so important to be solitary and attentive when one is sad: because the seemingly uneventful and motionless moment when our future steps into us is so much closer to life than that other loud and accidental point of time when it happens to us as if from outside. The quieter we are, the more patient and open we are in our sadnesses, the more deeply and serenely the new presence can enter us, and the more we can make it our own, the more it becomes our fate; and later on, when it "happens" (that is, steps forth out of us to other people), we will feel related and close to it in our innermost being. And that is necessary. It is necessary - and toward this point our development will move, little by little - that nothing alien happen to us, but only what has long been our own. People have already had to rethink so many concepts of motion; and they will also gradually come to realize that what we call fate does not come into us from the outside, but emerges from us. It is only because so many people have not absorbed and transformed their fates while they were living in them that they have not realized what was emerging from them; it was so alien to them that, in their confusion and fear, they thought it must have entered them at the very moment they became aware of it, for they swore they had never before found anything like that inside them. just as people for a long time had a wrong idea about the sun's motion, they are even now wrong about the motion of what is to come. The future stands still, dear Mr. Kappus, but we move in infinite space.

How could it not be difficult for us?

And to speak of solitude again, it becomes clearer and clearer that fundamentally this is nothing that one can choose or refrain from. We are solitary. We can delude ourselves about this and act as if it were not true. That is all. But how much better it is to recognize that we are alone; yes, even to begin from this realization. It will, of course, make us dizzy; for all points that our eyes used to rest on are taken away from us, there is no longer anything near us, and everything far away is infinitely far. A man taken out of his room and, almost without preparation or transition, placed on the heights of a great mountain range, would feel something like that: an unequalled insecurity, an abandonment to the nameless, would almost annihilate him. He would feel he was falling or think he was being catapulted out into space or exploded into a thousand pieces: what a colossal lie his brain would have to invent in order to catch up with and explain the situation of his senses. That is how all distances, all measures, change for the person who becomes solitary; many of these changes occur suddenly and then, as with the man on the mountaintop, unusual fantasies and strange feelings arise, which seem to grow out beyond all that is bearable. But it is necessary for us to experience that too. We must accept our reality as vastly as we possibly can; everything, even the unprecedented, must be possible within it. This is in the end the only kind of courage that is required of us: the courage to face the strangest, most unusual, most inexplicable experiences that can meet us. The fact that people have in this sense been cowardly has done infinite harm to life; the experiences that are called it apparitions, the whole so-called "spirit world," death, all these Things that are so closely related to us, have through our daily defensiveness been so entirely pushed out of life that the senses with which we might have been able to grasp them have atrophied. To say nothing of God. But the fear of the inexplicable has not only impoverished the reality of the individual; it has also narrowed the relationship between one human being and another, which has as it were been lifted out of the riverbed of infinite possibilities and set down in a fallow place on the bank, where nothing happens. For it is not only indolence that causes human relationships to be repeated from case to case with such unspeakable monotony and boredom; it is timidity before any new, inconceivable experience, which we don't think we can deal with. But only someone who is ready for everything, who doesn't exclude any experience, even the most incomprehensible, will live the relationship with another person as something alive and will himself sound the depths of his own being. For if we imagine this being of the individual as a larger or smaller room, it is obvious that most people come to know only one corner of their room, one spot near the window, one narrow strip on which they keep walking back and forth. In this way they have a certain security. And yet how much more human is the dangerous in security that drives those prisoners in Poe's stories to feel out the shapes of their horrible dungeons and not be strangers to the unspeakable terror of their cells. We, however, are not prisoners. No traps or snares have been set around us, and there is nothing that should frighten or upset us. We have been put into life as into the element we most accord with, and we have, moreover, through thousands of years of adaptation, come to resemble this life so greatly that when we hold still, through a fortunate mimicry we can hardly be differentiated from everything around us. We have no reason to harbor any mistrust against our world, for it is not against us. If it has terrors, they are our terrors; if it has abysses, these abysses belong to us; if there are dangers, we must try to love them. And if only we arrange our life in accordance with the principle which tells us that we must always trust in the difficult, then what now appears to us as the most alien will become our most intimate and trusted experience. How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races, the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.

tl;dr

you sort of feel bad for this kappus dude as you read through those letters, the guy obviously idolized rilke so much and struggled to live the solitary, monkish existence rilke prescribed and seemingly was always writing to him saying "man i really don't know if i'm cut out for this" and rilke just keeps coming back with "my dear mr kappus, everything that is worthwhile is SUPPOSED to be difficult" and kappus just goes "welp ok" and presses on with this miserable existence and sending rilke his shitty poetry

The sky puts on the darkening blue coat
held for it by a row of ancient trees;
you watch: and the lands grow distant in your sight,
one journeying to heaven, one that falls;

and leave you, not at home in either one,
not quite so still and dark as the darkened houses,
not calling to eternity with the passion
of what becomes a star each night, and rises;

and leave you (inexpressibly to unravel)
your life, with its immensity and fear,
so that, now bounded, now immeasurable,
it is alternately stone in you and star.

hi!

dude is just slaying me lately

btw if a hoos is still looking for a good translator, i think stephen mitchell towers above the others i've read.

THE DWARF’S SONG
My soul itself may be straight and good;
ah, but my heart, my bent-over blood,
all the distortions that hurt me inside—
it buckles under these things.
It has no garden, it has no sun,
it hangs on my twisted skeleton
and, terrified, flaps its wings.

Nor are my hands of much use. Look here:
see how shrunken and shapeless they are:
clumsily hopping, clammy and fat,
like toads after the rain.
And everything else about me is torn,
sad and weather-beaten and worn;
why did God ever hesitate
to flush it all down the drain?

Is it because he’s angry at me
for my face with its moping lips?
It was so often ready to be
light and clear in its depths;
but nothing came so close to it
as big dogs did.
And dogs don’t have what I need.

happy birthday to this bad-ass SOB

otm <3

As one puts a handkerchief before pent-in-breath-
no: as one presses it against a wound
out of which the whole of life, in a single gush,
wants to stream, I held you to me: I saw you
turn red from me. How could anyone express
what took place between us? We made up for everything
there was never time for. I matured strangely
in every impulse of unperformed youth,
and you, love, had wildest childhood over my heart.

THIS. GUY.

(btw, the mitchell translation is better, predictably)

that one is beautiful, thx k3v

http://hiphopgoldenage.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/tbt-ll-cool-j-wearing-rope-chains-rapperbling_com.jpg
Rilke cereal

"All companionship can consist only in the strengthening of two neighboring solitudes, whereas everything that one is wont to call giving oneself is by nature harmful to companionship: for when a person abandons himself, he is no longer anything, and when two people both give themselves up in order to come close to eachother, there is no longer any ground beneath them and their being together is a continual falling."
^^ possibly my favorite thing anyone has ever said about relationships

― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Saturday, August 22, 2009 11:08 PM (eight years ago)

christ

Love Song

How can I keep my soul in me, so that
it doesn't touch your soul? How can I raise
it high enough, past you, to other things?
I would like to shelter it, among remote
lost objects, in some dark and silent place
that doesn't resonate when your depths resound.
Yet everything that touches us, me and you,
takes us together like a violin's bow,
which draws one voice out of two separate strings.
Upon what instrument are we two spanned?
And what musician holds us in his hand?
Oh sweetest song.

finally going to give the duino elegies a proper go, wish me luck

Good luck! I suggest listening to the originals as well, even if you don't have German, just so you can get a feel for Rilke's ear. For instance:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=giKMhvg36QA

I'd prefer a slightly less theatrical reading, but hearing these poems is always a pleasure.

thanks! I’ll check that out

But Nature, spent and exhausted, takes lovers back
into herself, as if there were not enough strength
to create them a second time. Have you imagined
Gaspara Stampa intensely enough so that any girl
deserted by her beloved might be inspired
by that fierce example of soaring, objectless love
and might say to herself, “Perhaps I can be like her”?
Shouldn’t this most ancient of sufferings finally grow
more fruitful for us? Isn’t it time that we lovingly
freed ourselves from the beloved and, quivering, endured:
as the arrow endures the bowstring’s tension, so that
gathered in the snap of release it can be more than
itself. For there is no place where we can remain

Every time I go back to Rilke I find more and more and more. I really think it could be possible to fully self-analyse in deep contemplation of his work.

As a slight aside, not only does Maurice Blanchot's The Space of Literature single-handedly justify literary criticism, it features several outright life-altering readings of Rilke's work (granted, most of them deal with death). Blanchot's is a very partial view, of course, but it's the one that stuck with me.

O trees of life, when does your winter come?
We are not in harmony, our blood does not forewarn is
like migratory birds’. Late, overtaken,
we force ourselves abruptly onto the wind
and fall to earth at some iced-over lake.
Flowering and fading come to us both at once.
And somewhere lions still roam and never know,
in their majestic power, of any weakness

O trees of life, when does your winter come?

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=When+is+winter

been working through the notebooks of malte for a few months. started on the most recent penguin translation but it was a library copy that had fell to bits in my bag, in transit, so i picked up another, but it's an old hogarth press edition - so i started again. translation matters! a particular passage stuck out, to date -- "the existence of the terrible in every particle of the air". that writing on uncanny childhood, domesticity, silence is unlike anything.

https://i.imgur.com/bqU8l3X.png

also! i plan to visit duino castle at some point this/next year. one of a few literary excursions i have planned - the woolf's house in sussex, dylan thomas' boatshed, trieste...

the third elegy has a lot in common with that passage. might be my favorite so far — his utter love of humanity, how he considers his childhood and recognizes beauty, terror, longing, love, death were always present...imprinted, like a gene...is so overwhelming

btw on the topic of translations, I’ve got the stephen mitchell brick, and I really love it

i've only read sonnets to orpheus, and just finished letters to a young poet about 10 minutes ago. i wish i would have read the letters to a young poet 20 years ago.

all of the words on solitude, the theme that probably comes up the most often in these letters, hit hard. i'm in the most extended solitary time of my life right now, and it hadn't really struck me to try to make it a virtue or to learn a damned thing from it. but rilke is very persuasive.

you sort of feel bad for this kappus dude as you read through those letters, the guy obviously idolized rilke so much and struggled to live the solitary, monkish existence rilke prescribed and seemingly was always writing to him saying "man i really don't know if i'm cut out for this" and rilke just keeps coming back with "my dear mr kappus, everything that is worthwhile is SUPPOSED to be difficult" and kappus just goes "welp ok" and presses on with this miserable existence and sending rilke his shitty poetry

-k3vin k.

extremely relatable. the young poet, kappus, provides a kind of epilogue to his own story in the intro, when he write "...my regular correspondence with Rainer Maria Rilke which lasted until 1908 and then gradually petered out because my life drove me off into those very regions from which the poet's warm, tender and touching concern had sought to keep me." sometimes you get the all-time best advice, and length, delivered just for you after great contemplation from one of the most thoughtful people who ever existed, and it still doesn't work and your life peters out. the nature of rilke's advice on solitude is such that it still provides a path forward for a creative life that has seemingly lost its value and has gone quiet. i like the way he talks about "things" (animals and plants, etc) existing and growing as they are, without all the human nonsense that we (i) endlessly pile on it. things just grow and go about their business, not knowing why or being able to ask why, and are divine in a sense because of it

"Almost everything serious is difficult; and everything is serious."