Spinozablue: An Eclectic Journal of the Arts

Cas­tle Duino, Italy. Photo by Johann Jaritz.

Rainer Maria Rilke was a sub­lime poet, one of the great­est lyric poets of the 20th cen­tury, and quite pos­si­bly a lousy human being. His Duino Ele­gies and Son­nets to Orpheus rank among the finest works of art in any lan­guage, tak­ing us softly, pro­foundly to the nexus between life and death, pain and redemp­tion, mourn­ing and new hope. Through his poetry and other writ­ings, he con­veyed a level of empa­thy and under­stand­ing toward women that may sur­pass any poet in the last 100 years. Though it seemed he rarely showed that insight and under­stand­ing in real life, at least if we are to believe sev­eral recent accounts about Rilke’s life and loves.

If those por­traits of the real Rilke are accu­rate, it wouldn’t be the first time such an appar­ent con­tra­dic­tion occurred. Not the first time a great artist, poet, nov­el­ist, musi­cian, or philoso­pher led a less than exem­plary life. Per­haps there is a dynamic that rears up as a near-​​impossible obsta­cle to over­come, in the case of artis­tic genius. Per­haps in order to make great art, one has to be self­ish in ways that all too often hurt loved ones and friends, shock them, abuse and exploit them – at times. Per­haps another part of the drama and dynamic is the abuse and exploita­tion the artist suf­fers, espe­cially when young. Though there can never be any hard and fast rule regard­ing this, it seems a com­mon strain among the best artists that their own fam­ily drama was sor­did, sickly and filled with pain.

In Rilke’s case, his child­hood was turned upside down by the fact that his mother, Sophie, so mourned the loss of a week-​​old daugh­ter that she dressed lit­tle Rene in girls’ clothes and tried to replace her with him. To make the impact even more vio­lent on his psy­che, his father, Josef, later tried to reverse course by send­ing him to a very harsh mil­i­tary school. I’m guess­ing it didn’t help his anx­i­ety lev­els much when he, six years later, fell in love with Lou Andreas-​​Salome, Nietzche’s ideal dis­ci­ple and fan­tasy lover, and a mar­ried woman at the time of Rilke’s fall. From 1912 – 1913, she trained with Freud to become a psy­choanal­ist. She shared her insights with Rilke until his death in 1926, out­liv­ing him by eleven years. Lou is gen­er­ally cred­ited with get­ting Rilke to change his name from Rene to Rainer.

Black Pan­ther. Photo by Qilinmon.

Rilke’s life remained fas­ci­nat­ing until the end. He trav­eled widely, had sev­eral affairs with bril­liant women and cre­ated great poetry. I’ll explore that in future posts. Will end this one with my trans­la­tion of The Pan­ther. A trans­la­tion in the tra­di­tion of Ezra Pound. I do not read Ger­man, as he did not read Chi­nese. So I trans­late a trans­la­tion already made. Stephen Mitchell’s, in this case .…

I mourn the fact that I do not live in a cas­tle as I write this, espe­cially one that over­looks the sea. And that I lack a stand-​​up writ­ing desk, the kind Rilke used in that cas­tle, with the wind com­ing through the medieval win­dows and the can­dles flick­er­ing, the smell of the sea, the song of the gulls, the moon­light across the floor. I mourn the fact that Rodin did not teach me how to craft poems like a sculp­tor, and that I was never a wel­come guest of roy­alty. Then again, Rilke never heard the Bea­t­les, or read Murakami or Kun­dera, or saw a film by Wong Kar-​​wai .…

The Pan­ther

His world­view from the con­stantly mov­ing bars
Has become pre­dictable, bor­ing and can­not hold
Any­thing more. The black cat sees a
Thou­sand bars, and beyond the bars, nothingness.

As he paces again and again in cramped cir­cles,       
The move­ment of his pow­er­ful, ath­letic strides
Is like a rit­ual dance cir­cling a core
In which a mighty will is engulfed in stone.

Only now and then the cur­tains of each pupil
Lift, slowly – . An image, a sound enters in,
Rushes down through the tensed, locked and wait­ing
Mus­cles, plunges straight into the heart and disappears.

–by Rainer Maria Rilke. Trans­la­tion by Dou­glas Pin­son, after Stephen Mitchell.

– by Dou­glas Pinson

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