First things first: the sub-title is misleading. To say that Reading Rilke is about the "problems of translation" would be like saying that the Duino Elegies is a series of longish poems about angels. True, the extended middle section of Gass's book is taken up with a detailed comparative reading of various versions of Rilke in English - and there are dozens - interspersed with grumpily rueful illustrations of just how difficult it is to translate this most concrete and at the same time most elusive of the great 20th-century poets. Yet for all the hardships involved, and despite Robert Frost's dictum that poetry is what gets lost in translation, the effort, Gass declares, is worthwhile: "Translating is reading, reading of the best, the most essential kind." As illustration, he closes with his own no-nonsense, tough and harshly musical versions of the 10 Elegies (translated in collaboration with Heide Ziegler, to whom the book is dedicated). For these alone, Reading Rilke is a treasure.
More than any other poet of our time, more than Yeats, even, Rainer Maria Rilke had the determination, and in many instances the capacity, to verify the myths he made of himself. Here are some of the facts. He was born in 1875 in Prague, second city of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, into a German-speaking family which claimed its origins in Carinthia, where the knights of Rulko had ruled in the Middle Ages. From the start Rilke considered himself an aristocrat, if not genuinely of the blood, then certainly of the spirit. After a brief stint at a military academy - yes, it is hard to think of Rilke as a soldier - Rene Rilke, as he was called then, went to Munich and Berlin to study. Although his education was a patchy affair, he had a gift for languages, and, most importantly, for love. In 1897 he met Lou Andreas-Salome, 14 years his senior, one of the most extraordinary women of her time, who had been loved in vain by Nietzsche, and would be the confidante of Freud, among many other great intellectual figures. She took young Rene under her formidable wing, beginning her make-over by having him change his name to the more manly Rainer. Together they travelled to Russia, where they had a memorable, but not entirely comfortable, meeting with Tolstoy.
Lou was the first of a long line of women, not all of them lovers, whom Rilke would fasten upon, like a bee fastening on a flower, to suck inspiration from them - as well as hospitality, cash donations, and living accommodation. It was at the castle of Duino, outside Trieste, where he was lodging as the guest of his friend Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis Hohenlohe, that the first lines of the Elegies came to him, a miraculous gift - Gass: "The Duino Elegies were not written; they were awaited" - one stormy winter night when he was walking on the battlements. All his life he was a wanderer across the face of Europe, alighting like a Troubador in this or that Schloss or chateau where the pretty hostess would welcome him with open arms, and purse.
He was of course a sponger and a snob, but who could begrudge bed and board to one so gifted? He did marry, unsuccessfully. It was at the artists' colony of Worpswede, near Bremen, that he met the painter Clara Westhoff. They had a child, a little girl, who figures hardly at all in his life: he was not the paternal type. Also at Worpswede he met another painter, Paula Becker, whom he seems to have found more interesting than Clara, and whose early death provoked one of his greatest poems, "Requiem for a Friend", of which Gass has made a fine version, included here. Towards the end of his life Rilke settled in the little tower of Muzot, in Switzerland, where he finished the Elegies, and where in the space of hardly more than a few days he wrote the two cycles of the Sonnets to Orpheus - or "received" them, for he felt these poems were not so much composed as spoken through him: Ein Gott vermags, as one of the sonnets says: "A god can do it."
The story of Rilke's last illness and death in the closing days of 1926 is, as Gass remarks, "even among his myths, the most remarkable". Gathering roses for a visitor to Muzot, he pricked his finger on a thorn; the wound would not heal, and soon his entire arm was swollen; the doctors were called, and leukaemia was diagnosed. It is a pretty tale; however, according to his most recent biographer, cited by Gass, the incident of the thorn took place a full year before the disease attacked. Truth or legend? Take your pick. What cannot be questioned is the astonishing last poem, a direct address to his illness, that he wrote a fortnight before he died [see panel].
W.H. Auden once remarked, in his witty and waspish way, that Rilke was the greatest lesbian poet since Sappho. Certainly, one can be irritated by Rilke to the point of grinding one's teeth: the studied melancholy, the endless laments, the immaculate suits and the white gloves, all those roses, all those poses. For Rilke, says Gass, the true poet was always "on the job"; the true poet never hankered for a flagon of wine or a leg of mutton or a leg of lady either (women were "the Muse," to be courted through the post); nor did the true poet mop floors or dandle babies or masturbate or follow the horses or use the john; the true poet was an agent of transfiguration whose sole function was the almost magical movement of matter into mind.
If the cost of living was high, the poetry is priceless. Rilke's greatness lies precisely in his ability to dwell poetically in the ether and at the same time on wholly solid ground; his work is always at once angelic and mundane. This is a reason that he is so hard to translate, for his German tends to come into English with a lisp of affectation. Gass is generous to J. B. Leishman, Rilke's first and still probably best interpreter.
Most English-speakers will know Rilke through Leishman, and we will not have been ill-served. Other interpreters will keep trying, for a closer meaning, a firmer music, a better set of rhymes. William Gass is a novelist and short-story writer - In the Heart of the Heart of the Country is one of the century's finest story collections - a philosopher and critic, and now a superb translator. His book is the best introduction imaginable to the life and work of a great poet who saw his task as ceaseless celebration not of transcendence, but of ordinary matters in what Wallace Stevens calls "our unique and solitary home". As the "Ninth Elegy" ringingly declares:
Praise this world to the Angel, not the unutterable one.
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John Banville is Associate Literary Editor and Chief Literary Critic of The Irish Times