The debate over translation of Rilke is its own subject. For good reason, as a less then thoughtful translation performs a tragic disservice to the emotional punchline of a poem. Rilke is almost all emotional punchlines. There are many I have enjoyed, but comfortably my favourite is Robert Bly’s. He and Stephen Mitchel both translate the infamous line from the first Duino Elegy as this:
For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror,
which we are still just able to endure,
and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.
Every angel is terrifying.
“Serenely disdains to annihilate” pays extraordinary faith to the original German.
I first read Letters to a Young Poet while driving myself around America playing shows in support of Once I Was An Eagle. The Aquarian in me normally prohibits my enjoyment of things that are popular, but I gave myself I pass with Rilke. A few times on that trip I was interrupted by strangers who, noticing my book, would stop to say how much it had effected them. This only happens in America and, despite my solitary disposition, is one of my favourite things about being there. I then had a brief love affair with a man who insisted on Robert Bly’s translation, for which I am very grateful. That time of my life was very transient, romantic, breathless - Rilke was good company. And he has continued to be. I wrote my masters thesis on the relationship between him and Lou Salomé, his sometime lover, part-time editor and analyst.
His influence is mostly indirect, lyrically, though perhaps somewhat responsible for the mild spiritual psychosis I was experiencing during the writing of Short Movie (though the psychedelics and kundalini yoga probs factored heavily in that). But someone mentioned in the comments in my last post a song I suppose a lot of people won’t have heard (if my royalty statements are correct) which owes itself entirely to Rilke.
I have a band, called LUMP, with Mike Lindsay, and on our second record there is a song called Red Snakes, within which is the line ‘ at the mount of ancient song’. I believe I lifted it directly from the Tenth Elegy. Or, I should say, believed. Because no such line exists. But I was absolutely certain I remembered the feeling of reading it. One of the more annoying problems of translation is that it’s very hard to google the line you’re looking for as it will have innumerable variations. I searched my entire collection of books by or about Rilke and found nothing. Finally, I remember a book I read when I was first getting my head around psychoanalysis: Psychoanalysis and Culture, A Kleinien Perspective. I highly recommend it as a first step into reading about culture from a psychoanalytic perspective.
Within this book is a chapter written by British Kleinian analyst, Ronald Britton, about Rilke’s Duino Elegies, which I had heavily underlined and notated. It serves as a good example of what I find so interesting about how psychoanalysis reads the world, adding essentially another layer of poetry, in this case to a poem itself. Britton suggests that in the final elegy, Rilke has concluded that the angels (who are referred to throughout) can only interpret the intangible glory of emotion, but know nothing of the thing to which now he places great importance, that of terrestrial grief. And in a psychoanalytic sense, the object of grief must be named and addressed for the afflicted to move forward. That damaged objects (in the analytic sense) from infancy must be repaired is the Kleinian answer to why artists produce art.
It seems it was not Rilke who had written “the mount of ancient song”, nor anyone else, but Britton had mentioned “the mountains of primal grief” in reference to the fact that the Laments had taken the place of angels in the poems closing lines.
So it was, that an entirely misattributed quote, in an entirely misremembered context, provided the bases for the song. I had inadvertently performed my own translation. The title, Red Snakes, also springs from psychoanalysis, from Jungs uncanny paintings of the unconscious. And the rest of the song was loosely drawn from a dream I had where I saw my mother, standing alone in a body of water in the moonlight, serenely unaware of the serpents surrounding her. My analyst had a field day with that one, as you can imagine.
Here it is:
Enjoyed your post. And great of you to give a shout out to Rilke/Mitchell/Bly, all of whom have similarly shaped my life, process, imagination. I listened to Red Snakes after reading your post and hear the whole production landscape differently, those floor tom rolls and warbling synths now angels and serpents surrounding the watery moonlight of piano and voice. And well done with the deeply moving vocal performance on that recording. It was rewarding to listen through this lens, thanks for sharing about the context.
This was perhaps the most fascinating of your blog posts yet, mainly because I am German and have never read Rilke in translation. I often get angry when I write and it doesn’t come out the way your lyrics do (or any other writer’s lyrics/poetry that I admire). This post reminded me that there is also something to be gained from English not being one’s first language. The notion that “beauty is terror” is so fascinating to me and it made me think of a German word you might like: hinreißend. “hin” can mean towards, gone, or there; “reißend” means something like tearing or ripping. The word is used to describe something so beautiful it rips you apart, it tears at you until you’re gone. It can’t ever be translated in its entirety and it’s just one tiny little word, so how could we ever translate a whole poem, or even a book? I like the idea that I know this word, and might therefore be able to describe it in English in a way that a non-German speaker couldn’t. The same is true for any language, of course. Don’t know what my point is exactly, but I think language shapes the way we see the world and even though it can be alienating, it’s also pretty cool to think how much our perception of the world differs, or doesn’t differ, just because we might or might not know certain words and their meaning