Etudes: A Rilke Recital

Review by Wally Swist

Just to be a Silken Thread Woven into a Grand Design

“It’s a need we have to lie together as

delicately interwoven as petals and stamen.

Until all the unbridled elements overflow

                        everywhere and cover us in waves.”

—Rainer Maria Rilke, from “Dawn Song,”

Translated by Art Beck

The anecdote of Joseph Campbell’s seems apt regarding my carrying Art Beck’s Etudes: A Rilke Recital in my shoulder bag for some months, especially this second winter of Coronavirus, with Art Beck’s Rilke translations acting as a beneficent constellation of guiding stars. When Campbell published his first book, which he co-authored with Henry Morton Robinson, A Skeleton Key to Finnegan’s Wake (Harcourt, 1944), he commented that he had the distinct pleasure of having his wife, Jean Erdman, on one arm and a copy of A Skeleton Key to Finnegan’s Wake under the other. During this second winter of Covid, I had the similar delight of having my partner, Tevis, on one arm and Art Beck’s Rilke, literally, under the other.

I have often thought that we are quite fortunate to live in what I consider to be a golden age of translations. Translations of all sorts—and from all sorts of works of literature—have deepened our appreciation of every genre of literature. I recall first reading Another Republic: 17 European and South American Writers (Ecco, 1976), edited by Mark Strand and Charles Simic, and intuitively come to know that doors opened to me that I didn’t know were even there, to borrow a phrase from Joseph Campbell himself. Concurrent to my discovering such delight in the wealth of reading world literature in translations that were gloriously and aptly translated was the felicitous acquaintanceship with Stephen Mitchell, who was a graduate student at Yale at that time, and whom I sometimes practiced zazen with a small group in the basement of Yale Divinity Chapel. Stephen was then initially working on his own translations of Rainer Maria Rilke, and would quite often stop me as we passed in the street between classes, students sometimes streaming around us, to unlatch his brown briefcase with a golden metal latch and show me his newest translations, always neatly typed with a fresh black typewriter ribbon on a clean with page. Those moments, time and again, were gifts that he bestowed on me, explicating how difficult it was to capture the music of Rilke’s German in our less than musical English. Now, nearly fifty years later, I am deeply delighted by another translator of Rilke whom I greatly admire, Art Beck, a longtime resident of San Francisco, who is the recipient of many accolades for his translations, including those of Luxorius, which won the 2013 Northern California Book Award for translated poetry, as well as an honorable mention in the American Literary Translators Association 2018 Cliff Becker Prize for his translations of Martial’s epigrams.

It is significant in introducing the work of Art Beck, and especially that of his translations, since he is an accomplished poet in his own right, that he is both a literary purist and not just an intellect but an actively erudite intellect. I recommend reading Art Beck’s essays in Rattle and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Few writers and thinkers exhibit any intellectual rigor these days. However, Art Beck does, and he does so with an unwavering humility, which also seems to be vacant from literary thought and much writing in today’s egoic discussions, reviews, and essays. In reading Art Beck, there is an ostensible sense of integrity—as well as freshness of vision and resonance in the written word itself.

Art Beck’s Etudes: A Rilke Recital: Translations and Commentaries is a work of translation and insightful commentary that originated over the last forty years—finally culminating in his finishing the last dozen or so poems of Rilke’s Orpheus Sonnets only in the last year or so. To hold such concretized life work between the covers of a reasonably thick book is a distinct pleasure, especially when it is as achieved as Art Beck’s translations of Rilke. What makes these translations so accomplished, especially for those who have read Rilke in countless translations over the last half-century, is that they read with a crisp freshness, a sculpted line free of adverbs and adjectives, and a light touch in bringing what is probably one of the most mystical poetic sequences in all of 20^th-century literature, The Orpheus Sonnets, into an English that is not only just highly readable but is liberated from the heavier-handed versions of Rilke, one of which Art Beck describes as sounding like “Pennsylvania Dutch.” Art Beck’s Rilke does seem, indeed, to be sculpted but even more distinctly as a stone cutter might split slabs of granite. Art Beck’s Rilke reads in clean lines that snap like fresh white sheets in a spring wind. It is nothing less than refreshing to read a work such as The Orpheus Sonnets, which can be so mystically inscrutable, and to finally begin to soar, as Rilke must have, in comprehending, and if not quite comprehending, then experiencing the mystical transformation of Orpheus not only in song itself but also in taking the “risk” to actually become Orpheus, as Rilke writes, and Art Beck translates, in Sonnet XXIII, Second Part: “It’s only fitting for us to keep praising,/ because, as it is, we’re the branch and/ the axe and the sweet ripening risk.”

Although Art Beck doesn’t mention it, we, as readers, can nearly intuit, and possibly feel, Rilke going back and forth from the first desk that Nanny Wunderly-Volkart sent to him, and then to the second, which she sent just in case the first never arrived, in composing the fifty-five sonnets that he wrote in the winter of 1923 in just a matter of two weeks. However, what Art Beck does make ostensible in his translations is an intimation of Rilke’s clear sense of urgency and ebullience in the necessity to channel the work and to craft it, as an act of grace, written in a white heat, resonant for all time.

*

Initially, what makes Art Beck’s translations of Rilke different from others is the quality of commentary that he introduces Etudes with and then closes it with. Parts of the commentary have appeared in such notable critical journals as Jacket and Journal of Poetics Research. Art Beck cites Scots poet Don Paterson’s 2006 adaptation of Rilke’s Orpheus, and why his own work is translation due to their “remain[ing] performances, perhaps, etudes of Rilke;” and that “they should be judged for their English, not for their German.” He also delineates a brief time line of his own striving in translating Rilke in citing noted American poet and editor Dana Gioia publishing “a slim 1983 volume,” edited by Gioia, entitled simply, Rilke (Elysium Press Poetry Series No. 5), in which a principle close to Art Beck’s best as a translator remains as ‘“performance” doesn’t preclude or qualify “translation,” rather it helps to explain its possibility.”’

He continues that “translating poetry is writing poetry, but only harder.” And this is where we hear Art Beck’s humility speaking, whereas there are some translators who wear their hubris on their sleeves. He was aided by a grant from Centrum Arts in Port Townsend, Washington to translate The Orpheus Sonnets back in 2004, and finished some fifteen years later in 2019, during which time he states, “I think I became not only a better reader of Rilke, but [also] a more technically adept poet. Both, I think, were the result of taking the time to internalize the poems, the way a pianist’s fingers, say, absorb the spontaneity of the score through long repetitive practice.”

The selection of poems that follow are primarily selected from Rilke’s books New Poems (1907 & 1908), following his tenure as secretary to Rodin, which proved to be a formative experience for both poet and sculptor. These serve as a kind of list of not so much Rilke’s better known poems but his most iconic, such as “Panther” and “Spanish Dancer,” with “Panther” exhibiting both more of the animal’s impatience as well as range within the close quarters of his cage, a rare agility within the never dying fires of the animal’s wild eyes; and with the flamenco of “Spanish Dancer” going way past just the dance to enter into the Duende of life itself well after the dance has ended and that essence resonating in the air. However, what Art Beck also includes here as a sort of Rilkean primer is a triptych of “Crucifixion/Resurrection” poems that bear more toward a Gnostic interpretation of Christ’s death and His life after the crucifixion in such poems as “Crucifixion;” “Pieta” (1907), which belongs within this grouping of poems and which was inspired by Rodin’s “Christ and the Magdelen’” and “The Risen.” Especially in “Pieta” (1907), we see the sensuality and spirituality Rilke exhibits so poignantly in these lines, with of course Magdelen speaking:

“So it’s like this, Jesus, I see your feet again.

They were a sweet stripling’s feet then, when

I nervously undressed them to wash—

the way they stood confused in my hair

like a white deer caught in brambles.”

Art Beck also connects Rilke’s “Infant Apollo,” which serves as a kind of first bookend in New Poems (I) and what is now one of Rilke’s most famous poems “Archaic Torso of Apollo” that appears in New Poems (II), in which as Art Beck points out in his commentary which closes Etudes that several eminent translators of Rilke, including William Gass, Stephen Mitchell, M. D. Herter Norton, and Edgar Snow have translated the denouement of the poem’s final phrase similarly as “You must change your life” to what Art Beck nuances as “You have to live another life,” which resonates quite differently philosophically, musically, and semantically.

This selection of Rilke’s poems before both sets of The Orpheus Sonnets, which make up the bulk of Etudes couldn’t be referenced properly without mention of the poems “Beggars,” “Corpse Washing,” and “The First Elegy.” In “Beggars,” unlike Rilke’s penchant for poems of praise, he creates a vignette in which “A stranger who/ stumbled on beggars peddling/ the palms of their hands there” also “spit as he tries/ to say something,” almost as if this tableaux that is being exhibited is not only just a street scene but is even possibly Rilke’s own fear expressed that his poetry may be rejected as too ethereal, and as in the poem “his foreigner’s face collapses/ right in front of their ruined eyes.” “Corpse Washing” is another painterly poem forged in dark hues of the Dutch masters, as those tending to the menial task of cleaning the corpse are only shadows themselves and where “on the wallpaper/ their twisting shadows in a silent pattern/ flipped and flailed as if in a net.”

However, a leap is detected from these masterful poems, and their translations, to “The First Elegy,” written in 1912, the first of nine Duino Elegies, which presages WWI, and which Art Beck compares to T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, that we begin to see Rilke building the brilliance of his true masterworks: both The Duino Elegies and, in my mind, The Orpheus Sonnets. It is impossible not to quote the entirety of the first verse of the Art Beck translation, since it is so seminal to Rilke’s oeuvre and understanding him at all:

Then even if I screamed to high heavens, who’d listen

to me there among the angelic orders? And

suppose one of them did swoop me to heart:

I’d die, seared by exposure to that stark, concentrated

being. Because beauty’s nothing, the mere beginning

of a panic we’re still just barely able to contain.

And we continually praise it, hoping it continues

to disdainfully refrain from obliterating us.

Every one of the angels is horrifying.

*

What makes Art Beck’s translation of “The First Elegy” not only different but quite separate from some of the better translations of it, such as the one by William Gass, is that Art Beck relays in his commentary that he is “tempted to take that wry intimate voice farther in English, bordering on idiom.”  He explicates further in his wanting to craft poems and not only representations of them: “Above all they seem to lack the element of risk that—like flight—poetic translation demands.” What makes Art Beck’s translations not only different but quite separate is not only this aspect of his risk taking for the sake of “flight” that poetic translation may demand but also his predilection for perfection as he relays in an anecdote about his finding a tattered Hachette German-English dictionary at a garage sale in San Francisco published circa 1910, about the time Rilke may have been finishing “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” and Art Beck’s rumination of the definition for Kandelaber, which is “chandelier.” In several former translations he cites there are other words used for Kandelaber, but he makes his choice as “chandelier,” and as we observe this illumines the poem in quite another way, never mind making for a more apt assonance and alliteration in English: “But his torso/ still stares like a chandelier turned low,/ dimmed to illuminate just its own steady/ flame.”

However, as significant as these translations of Rilke are they are significant because of the achievement of their sere, yet compliant, translations of The Orpheus Sonnets. These are nonpareil. We can read other translations by other adept translators but it is in Art Beck’s Orpheus Sonnets we can see more clearly than in any other the tree growing out of Orpheus’ ear, and “a temple of resonance/ in their deepest hearing, a refuge of darkest desire,/ an entrance of trembling door posts” like no other translation I’ve read before. Perhaps it is in Art Beck’s own words we can plumb not only the intent of his translation but also the depth of his understanding of Rilke’s very ethos and the composition of these fifty-five sonnets he didn’t even expect to write; yet after having written The Duino Elegies, a much protracted sequence having taken over a decade to complete, Rilke’s creative floodgates opened fully. As Art Beck extrapolates about The Orpheus Sonnets:

“ . . . [they] are rich with death, but imbued with Rilke’s own demise, still unaware of that weight about to fall. For Rilke in the Sonnets, death and the dead seem like deep bass notes from an organ preparing to soar . . . Not the rumbling of a pitiless volcano . . . but the Minotaur’s cold breath.”

These sonnets are, eminently, rich in life, too. Dedicated to a girl Rilke’s daughter, Ruth, knew, named Vera Knoop, a former dancer who died tragically at a young age, these sonnets exhibit a kind of sonic dimensionality unto themselves, and in Art Beck’s translation, they do, indeed, soar as he makes reference to in his introductory notes, much like the rising octaves of an organ’s bass notes.

What is also apparent is that especially in Art Beck’s translations of The Orpheus Sonnets there is a clarity within a clarity in that what becomes clear, besides the Orphic song registering through Rilke and in Art Beck’s English, is that in Part I Orpheus is presented and alluded to in all of his glory, whereas in Part II we can observe, and hear, Rilke’s metamorphoses in Orpheus, and by the end of the sonnet sequence, it is Rilke who becomes Orpheus. Moreover, it is my own interpretation of rereading this translation that we, as readers, also are given our own Orphic lift in staying the course with Rilke through this transporting journey in The Orpheus Sonnets—not that we become God-like in the Nietzschean sense but we are brought about, in more of a Jungian concept, closer to our archetypal origins of elemental song.

What does this mean? If we are to follow some of the more radiant sonnets, VII, Part I we can discover Rilke’s credo expressing praise as one of the better forms of poetry, as well as in life. Rilke is clear, as Art Beck’s translation is as fresh as a bucket of water drawn up from the depths of a well:

That’s what it’s all about: Praise and all its glory.

From one who’s on a mission of praise, glittering

like ore in the mute stone. His humanity

a mortal grape press, squeezing out the eternal wine.

Praise for Rilke is not anything that occludes the reality that our lives are riven also with the depths of sorrow and grief. In VIII, Part I, this sonnet is so perennially fresh that immemorial dew still remains on the images themselves and that lightness exhibits a feeling as if we could magically enter a holograph, and exist there, momentarily. Art Beck’s italicization also presents a knowing touch.

Jubilation knows, and Longing’s already confessed.

Only Grief ‘s still learning her role.

All night she enumerates the ancient wrongs

                                                                                                           [Stanza Break]

on girlish fingers. Yet suddenly, surprised

and raw, a constellation of our voices leaps

out of her into the sky untouched by her breath.

What also makes Art Beck’s translations of The Orpheus Sonnets both different and separate from any other, and very possibly due to the clarity that signifies these translations, are the connection between each sonnet, and their own tintinnabulation which resonates among themselves. An example of this is in considering the last two sonnets of Part I. With Rilke writing possibly up to four or more sonnets per day over a two-week period, and perhaps changing from one desk to another, even depending upon the sunlight slanting in one way or in an alternative direction, Rilke not characterizes Orpheus as heroic but also in concluding Part I intimates our own heroism in these lines from XXV and then in XXVI, which also points particularly toward transcendence:

Again and again the intervals of darkness and ruin returned

Your blood slickened with earth and pounded like a hammer.

The door hopelessly opened—and you entered.

                                                                                                            [XXV]

Forsaken god. Eternal echo and scent. Only

because of the hate that rent and scattered you

does nature have a voice that speaks with us.

                                                                                                            [XXVI]

*

If The Orpheus Sonnets, Part I can be thought of as a kind of descent into song then Part II is not only the ascent of song but also its example of one aria after another. And this is true enough that it is not only song but it is dance, too:

Breath you imperceptible poem!

Constantly pulling our splintered existence

into genuine commerce with the universe.

Counterpoint whose dance I rhythmically become.

Herein, Rilke begins his own Orphic transformation, as do we. This occurs openly and in a similar and surprisingly Whitmanesque voice. The organic ontological musing here is not without its ascendant arc and not without its apparent realization. However, we’ve only just begun Part II, and we enter depth after depth as we enter aria after aria. In III, Part II, “mirrors” become prescient of what filmmaker Jacques Cocteau would recreate in his classic La Belle et la Bette (Beauty and the Beast, 1946):

 Mirrors—no one has ever been able to really guess

who you are when you’re alone with yourselves:

When the spaces between time sift

like water through your sieve.

In XI, Part II, Rilke conjures his own iconic image of the rose, and his intended eternal nature, as well as providing rather stunning imagery evocative of “the etheric body.” This, indeed, is Rilke being Rilke; however, it is also Art Beck skillfully translating Rilke, not under-translating him or over-translating, not making him more mystical or less mystical, but in an almost secular fashion translating Rilke as he is, in his essence, which allows a light, albeit a mystical light, shine through the interstices of the images themselves, even the “costumes” of the ego:

Enthroned rose: In the old days

you were a chalice with a simple brim.

But, now—you’ve fully bloomed for us,

an infinitely, inexhaustible subject.

In your richness you’re like cloak upon

cloak covering a body of nothing but

light. All the while each individual petal

eludes and disdains all costumes.

Possibly what is the most inscrutable but yielding to understanding of all of The Orpheus Sonnets, as well as so immemorially Rilkean, even inexhaustibly so is XIII, Part II, in which begins “Anticipate each goodbye as if it were/ already behind you like a winter that’s passed./ Because underneath these winters is such an interminable/ winter, that only by hibernating can your heart survive.” However, it is in the conclusion of this sonnet that we find Rilke, as well as Art Beck, plumbing depths few poets or their translators ever discover new meaning with each rereading: “To those already used and discarded/ and to the numb, mute/ stockyard of bloated nature—to that unspeakable sum—/ count yourself gladly in and nullify the count.” The psycho-spiritual counterpoint here is that we accept life fully in living life fully, and in that we reach a kind of apotheosis in which we let go of it and give way to living it concomitantly.

This notion is expressed differently in XXI, Part II, and is reminiscent of Jack Gilbert’s opening poem in Refusing Heaven (Knopf, 2005), entitled “A Brief for the Defense,” in which he concludes: “To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat/ comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth/ all the years of sorrow that are to come.” Although in Art Beck’s Etudes, we have Rilke reiterating a theme of giving yourself up to become one, to become not only Orpheus but Orphic, to become one with everything:

Resist the illusion of privation. Let yourself

accede to that longed for decision: Just be!

A silken thread woven into the grand design.

Whatever image in it calls you (even if it’s

just a moment in a lifetime of grief), feel

how the whole glorious carpet is implicit.

Even more simply than becoming one with everything, through Rilke’s observation we can become aware what Joseph Campbell intimated—that in looking back upon your life, in times of self-assessment and in rumination, you can observe the wholeness of it, the holistic nature of each thread having woven itself immeasurably among all the others to have become an entity unto itself.

For The Orpheus Sonnets to come full circle is no surprise with such a lyrical masterwork, however, for it to honor, once again, Vera Knoop, the young dancer, is a preeminent conclusion, a finale of consequence—and, of course, the message of final two Orpheus Sonnets, and of the entire sequence, itself: transcendence. We can’t help but notice how the ending of both the penultimate sonnet and the final one resonate and are in harmony with one another.

… But you

still danced to that once-upon-a-time,

even a little bit annoyed if a tree seemed

slow to attend your impatient ear.

You always understood the lyre’s

resonant source—its outrageous heart.

And so you rehearsed lovely steps

hoping to one day guide your friend’s

attention to this healing celebration.

                                                                                                [XXVIII, Part II]

… At the crossroads of this overwhelming

night be the sorcerer and spell, the catalyst

of your being’s uncanny convergence.

And if what’s earthly forgets you,

remind the silent earth: I flow.

Tell the hurrying water: I am.

                                                                                               [XXIX, Part II]

*

Distinguished writer and critic Marjorie Perloff is quoted by Art Beck in his commentary in closing Etudes in suggesting that Rilke’s voice in The Duino Elegies “remains conversational and contemporary, unlike the highly mannered “high poetic” tone of many of the translations.” With this adroit speculation, and in giving consideration to Art Beck’s translations of Rilke in Etudes, we clearly see how Art Beck’s Rilke actually becomes achievements unto themselves, since besides their uncanny but hard-won crispness, they attain conversational and contemporary lyricism—in English.

In writing about “The First Elegy,” Art Beck contemplates, “I’ve always felt that Rilke stands with one foot in the nineteenth-century and the other planted in the twenty-first. I’ve sometimes thought of him, especially in The Elegies as the poetic leg of a three-legged stool—the other two being Einstein and Freud/Jung.”

If Rilke is then one of three poetic legs of such a stool that it is the glue and artistry that Art Beck represents in making Rilke’s writing, particularly The Orpheus Sonnets, poetry that is providentially resilient and substantive that it should be sturdy enough to hold firmly with Einstein and Freud/Jung. Of the many translations of Rilke, Art Beck’s work, which is the effort of a lifetime, of nearly fifty years, is abundant in its accomplishment. In its accomplishment, there is a keen sense of achieving a translation that resonates within itself but also resounds among other writers of formidable talent and message, such as Art Beck’s translation of XXV, Part II, in which there is an almost ghostly tinge of a Georg Trakl-like timbre, which is also similar in tone and image, but clearly Rilkean itself, as Rilke lavishes praises on “what always captured you,” but it is with his patent sense of the tranquil within transcendence that he, and Art Beck, can see, hear, and inhale in this world, and as secular as Art Beck can be in his pursuit of the extraordinary amid the ordinary, we are presented with yet another immemorial vision in the timelessness of the ever-present.

Tonight, even the budding leaves of

wintered oaks glow in an olive dusk.

Soft gusts whisper and nod. The shrubs

are still black, but heaped fertilizer spreads

its richer black across the open land. Every

hour that passes grows younger.

Etudes: A Rilke Recital
Art Beck
Shanti Arts
ISBN: 9781951651565