When I Go
— Selected French Poems —
Rainer Maria Rilke
Translated with an Introduction by Susanne Petermann
Foreword by David H. Rosen
WHEN I GO
Selected French Poems
Copyright © 2017 Susanne Petermann. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.
Cascade Books
An imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers
199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3
Eugene, OR 97401
www.wipfandstock.com
ISBN 13: 987-1-5326-0427-0 (paperback)
ISBN 13: 987-1-5326-0429-4 (hardcover)
ISBN 13: 987-1-5326-0428-7 (ebook)
Cataloging-in-Publication data:
Names: Rilke, Rainer Maria, 1875–1926, author | Petermann, Susanne, translator.
Title: When I go : selected French poems / Rainer Maria Rilke ; translated with an introduction by Susanne Petermann.
Description: Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2017 | Includes bibliographical data.
Identifiers: 987-1-5326-0427-0 (paperback) | 987-1-5326-0429-4 (hardcover) | 987-1-5326-0428-7 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Poetry | Rilke, Rainer Maria, 1875–1926—Translations into English | French poetry—Translations into English.
Classification: PT2635 .I65 W57 2017 (print) | PT2635 (ebook).
Manufactured in the U.S.A.09/17/15
Previous versions of some of these translations originally appeared in the following publications: Agni, Arroyo, Cave Wall, Cerise, Dark Mountain, Epiphany, the Inflectionist Review, Inventory, the Jefferson Monthly, Jerseyworks, the Jung Journal of Culture and Psyche, Loaded Bicycle, Manzanita Quarterly, Passageways, Rhino, Rowboat, Solstice, To Topos Poetry International, and Transference.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Foreword
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1: Roses Your Freshness
Half-Open Book
Whole and Perfect Thing
The Challenge
Ecstasy
One Rose
Holding You
Drunk on Your Dream
Rose, All Passion
Friend
My Being
Against Whom
Who Are You?
Summer
Abundant Flower
Ineffable
You’re the One
We Know Nothing
What Is the Source?
Round Rose
The Earth of the Dead
Late-Blooming Rose
Rose of the Earth
Dear to Our Traditions
The Opening Rose
Here You Are
Chapter 2: Windows All It Takes
Your Invitation
Our Geometry
Measure of Longing
You Make Ceremony
From the Bed
We Count on You
Anxious Hours
My Whole Abyss
Vertical Plate
I’m in a Window Mood
She Was in a Window Mood
How Long Have We Played You
Chapter 3: Affectionate Tribute to France The Sleeper
Pegasus
The Magi
Stillness
“L’Indifférent” (Watteau)
Prayer of One Not Indifferent Enough
All Must Be Well
Evening Lamp
Lovers and Writers
When I Go
The Grave
What Longing, What Regret
Chapter 4: Valaisian Quatrains This Land
Rose and Wall
Towers
Lovely Curve
Silent Land of Quiet Prophets
Alpine Meadows
The Invisible
Altars Where the Fruit Was Laid
This Sanctuary
The Belltower Sings
The Year Turns
A Rosy Mauve
Yesteryear
How Calm the Night
Everything Changes
Serious Darkness
Clematis and Morning Glory
After a Day of Wind
The Astonishment of Origins
Earth’s Role
The Silvering Hour
Green
The Towers Remember
Hard and Soft
Song of Silence
The Artisan
Permission
Lanes Leading Nowhere
What Goddess, What God
Blue Wind
Perfecting the Slow Face
A Story
Book of Flight
Valaisian Sky
Chapter 5: Orchards Visitation
Strange Assignment
The Hand of the Invisible
Palm
The Last Word
The Exchange
Venetian Glass
A Summer Passerby
The Whole Night
The Temple of Love
Water and Love
Eros
May the God Be Satisfied
What We Are
Equilibrium
The Turn
We Forget
The Fountain
My Body
Verger [Orchard]
All the Joys of the Ancestors
Interior Portrait
This Hand
Elegy
A Parting Melody
The Soul-Bird
Angel-Eye View
Friends and Strangers
Seeing Double
Spring
Light
Winter’s United Silence
Nature Reveals Herself
The Flame
The Approach
A Question
In the Eyes of Animals
The Doe
Let’s Chat for a While
Good-Bye
Foreword
What an honor to celebrate this collection of Rilke’s French poems, When I Go. My association with Susanne came about through Rilke. As a Jungian analyst, I was reading The Journal of Analytical Psychology and there was an article on Rilke by Susanne. Her byline listed her name and said she was a “Professional Organizer.” We were moving, so contacted her. She is a mover and shaker! Synchronicity was at work!
Susanne has become much larger than life. She became a translator, without training. And I became a poet with no training, as mine was in medicine. Later with William Carlos Williams as my mentor and my mother as a model (Thin Mask [New York: Crown Publications, 1939]).
Rilke is a favorite poet of mine. And I always loved his bow to the feminine. I had read Poulin’s translation of his French poems, but found it lacking. So Susanne’s translation is welcomed and needed. How grounding and liberating for Rilke to end up in the French part of Switzerland. The poet’s last years were in a special place. These poems were planted and then blossomed and bore fruit in the Valais.
Over the years, I have read Susanne’s refreshing translations. All of us await that day, when we go to that great beyond. It’s clear from these end of life poems that he loved nature, as I do. What a joy to read “Roses,” as my surname means just that. And the small pond in front of our small house in the woods has roses in two places, where you can sit, gaze and smell the roses.
—David H. Rosen
Acknowledgments
Deep gratitude to all who read t
hese poems so generously. You comprise my writing tribe, and I dedicate this book to you.
To Sedonia Cahill and Beverly White, my dear departed teachers: you saw this book before I ever did. To Aaron Scott who offered a singularly poetic view, his brother Ramsey who was at the right place at the right time, and their parents Ginger and George who suffered through early versions but read them anyway. To the “Thursday Poets” Patricia Sempowich, Joyce Epstein, and Peggy Heiner for their unwavering support during our Monday meetings. To the Southern Oregon Women’s Writers Group, Chorus and Gourmet Eating Society who have heard these poems more than anyone else: thanks for your gracious listening and wise, fierce feedback. To R. Ellis Dye, my college German professor, who I will always remember for lighting in me the eternal flame of the love of fine literature. To Priscilla Hunter and Lia Beeson, fellow translators who never let me lose hope for this project. To Rebecca Reilly and Joe Stroud for living and breathing your poetry and being willing to write blurbs. To French speakers Isabelle Alzado and Reneé Côté who helped me untangle Rilke’s meanings, insofar as humanly possible. To Joanna Macy, Franz Wright, Robert Bly and Coleman Barks for their unsurpassed translations, and for writing back when I felt lost and confused. To Ray MacKenzie for being the first to read the whole manuscript and suggesting much-needed changes. To Susan Hagen, Story Woman, for helping me tell the story of these poems. To the late Al Poulin for being the first to collect all of Rilke’s French poems into one book. To Anne Stine, whose wilderness work will change the world, with much love. To the Wild Hearts Circle who clucked and fussed and ceremonied every time I announced progress on this book. And to my most ardent supporter, life partner and companion on the writer’s road, Holly Hertel: your love sustains me.
Introduction
“We could easily be made to believe that nothing happened, and yet we have changed, as a house that a guest has entered changes.”1
Like many students of German literature, I sailed through college with a passing understanding of Rainer Maria Rilke’s work. More than a dozen years of post-college adventures and foreign travels followed, until I finally landed in Los Angeles where I encountered these poems in a close, dusty bookstore, by sheer happenstance.
I didn’t quite believe that Rilke had really written so much in French, so I bought the hefty volume, The Complete French Poems.2 I read enough of it to learn that, yes, Rilke had written eight or nine series of poems and fragments (about 400 in all) in French shortly before he died. Before I could get very far, life intervened and the book lay half-forgotten among the others on my shelves, all of which tumbled to the floor a few months later, January 1994, during the Northridge earthquake. Luckily, I was living a few suburbs away from the epicenter, so, for me, results of the shaking were no worse than kitchen cupboards being emptied, a few dishes broken, and a living room floor littered with books. Exhausted from the shock and its aftermath, I sat down and opened Rilke’s French poems quite at random.
I was looking for comfort in the musical words of the master I remembered from college; I wanted desperately to nourish myself with words, learn something by heart that would affirm and soften my inner state. Instead, I was dismayed to find that the translation conferred little of Rilke’s melancholic charm and depth. Even more surprising was the discovery that I was holding in my hands the only existing English translation of these poems to date. And, it was a book that hadn’t even been compiled until 1979, more than five decades after Rilke’s death!
My curiosity was stirred. After all, I had just spent four uninterrupted years completely immersed in the French language while living in France and Casablanca. It was clear to me, when I compared the original to the translation, that these poems had not yet found the fullness of their expression in English. I set the book aside for further study, and over the next weeks and months, tentatively used a light pencil to change a word here and there.
Slowly the poems grew on me, and, with the encouragement of friends, I continued to re-translate them. It took years before I joined the American Literary Translators’ Association and actually considered myself a translator. As a non-academic, I struggled to find my way through the translation process without the anchor or constraint of theory and background knowledge.
The process of taking the poems apart and putting them back together in my native English felt unfamiliar and difficult. But the poems kept pulling on me, and I craved guidance from the translators I loved to read. I decided to reach out. I wrote to Robert Bly and Coleman Barks asking them to direct me toward books, literary clubs, someone, anyone who could help. To my utter amazement, both men wrote back. A hand-typed letter on an old-fashioned half sheet of stationery bore a short message from Robert Bly, referring me to his excellent pamphlet, The Eight Stages of Translation,3 which served as my only direct instruction on how to think about a poem while attempting to translate it.
From Coleman Barks came a postcard: “I’m retired now, but I certainly share your enthusiasm for Rilke. Good luck.”
Later I wrote to Franz Wright, whose collection of translations, The Unknown Rilke4—far and away the best Rilke translations I have experienced—inspires me still. He had the humility to tell me that he’d been driven half-mad while translating Rilke, which, of course, had the effect on me of great encouragement. I will be forever grateful to these three poet-translators for their open-hearted responses to my efforts.
This book includes five chapters: “Roses,” “Windows,” “Affectionate Tribute to France,” “Valaisian Quatrains,” and “Orchards.” Rilke published these as separate books of poems, in some cases posthumously. There are a few exceptions to and repetitions in the way the poems are grouped together. I based my decisions on A. Poulin’s book, with much gratitude for his pioneering efforts. The interested reader should refer to his introduction in The Complete French Poems for careful analysis and justification of the chapters and their chronology. I have included almost all the poems in each of the series, leaving out those poems I felt did not fit with the series due to the style or subject matter.
After two decades, I have not yet completed this project: there are almost two hundred French poems I have not included in this book. I am a bit chagrined about the amount of time it has taken me. But Rilke himself justifies the slowness of the creative process, exhorting the artist to avoid guilt and pressure, to embrace unencumbered time, even fallow periods and apparent indolence to let the work rest and mature. All of these poems have become long-term guests in my house, and even when I am not interacting with them directly, they are acting on me.
1. Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, trans. Stephen Mitchell (Boston: Shambala, 1993), 93–94.
2. Rainer Maria Rilke, Complete French Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. A. Poulin Jr. (Saint Paul: Graywolf, 1979).
3. Robert Bly, The Eight Stages of Translation (Saint Paul: Ally, 1991).
4. Rainer Maria Rilke, The Unknown Rilke: Expanded Edition, trans. Franz Wright (Oberlin: Oberlin College Press, 1990).
Rilke
Rilke is an explosive experience . . . and it is as music that Rilke is best approached; let the reader give himself to the rhythm, the melody, and the exaltation of the poems; the understanding will follow.”5
So much is known about Rilke’s fifty-one-year sojourn on this earth. His Collected Works fill six dense volumes that don‘t even include his letters, which are estimated to number an astonishing 11,000 by translator Ulrich Baer. Numerous biographers have filled thousands of pages with every detail of his life. Countless translations (of his German works) each include biographies of various lengths.
It would take years for even the most ardent researcher to slog through the many interpretive critical articles. What was important to me was to stay with my private experience as I read through the French poems, supplementing my knowledge from time to time with biographical writings. This man was a twentieth century literary for
ce comparable to a fire that creates its own weather system. In this case, his literary output unleashed a firestorm of opinions from gushing admiration to contempt, based on stories about him that were sometimes just myths.
I will focus here on merely outlining the aspects of Rilke’s trajectory that pointed to his last years in Switzerland where he produced most of the French poems. He was born in December, 1875, in Prague. The name given him, René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke, betrays his Catholic heritage and echoes his family’s origin stretching from Alsace to Moravia.
Indeed, there was never a feeling in this family that Prague was home. Socially, his mother fancied herself of royal blood and was consumed with resentment about her husband’s lack of status and career ambition. She did, however, give little René the gift of teaching him French even before he went to school.
Geographically and culturally, the poet always disparaged Prague as a backwater. The young Rilke suffered the push-pull of conflict between his mother’s extreme sentimentalism and religiosity, and his father’s hopes that he be groomed for the ranks of officialdom. He was sent away to military school. By age eighteen, he had rebelled and begun to seek artistic stimulation by traveling and living in far-flung places from Moscow to Pisa.
To say that Rilke was compelled to write is to understate his drive. He prioritized his writing over everything else, so that, even when he married and had a daughter, he couldn’t shake the feeling of being separated from his work. He felt trapped and isolated within the confines of the young family and left their home in northern Germany, never to return.
Franz Wright says that Rilke transcends his reputation as either a “chaste and solitary high priest of art” or as a “kept man who flitted back and forth between the estates of adoring, wealthy women.”6 His dedication was unwavering and he was adored and supported by readers from the time he began publishing in his early twenties. True, he was often devastatingly lonely and, for most of his life, homeless. But he cultivated connection with anyone who would engage him, from famous contemporary poets to lowly housemaids, in philosophical, artistic and spiritual discussion. His many letters prove my point, as do these heartfelt poems.