Chekhov’s Mistess

Patience is everything

One of my first encounters with Rilke (Was there ever a first encounter? He is so familiar to me that had she not told me otherwise, I could’ve sworn my mother read him to me in the womb.) was as a teenager enthralled by E. E. Cummings. In nonlecture one, Cummings sets the groundrules for his Harvard talks and declares,

During my six fifteenminute poetry readings, I shall only try to read poetry as well as I don’t know how. If you object ‘but why not criticize as well?’ I shall quote very briefly from a wonderful book, whose acquaintance I first made through a wonderful friend named Hildegarde Watson—a book whose English title is Letters To A Young Poet, and whose author is the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke:

Works of art are of an infinite loneliness and with nothing to be so little reached as with criticism. Only love can grasp and hold and fairly judge them.

In my proud and humble opinion, those two sentences are worth all the soi-disant criticism of the arts which has ever existed or will ever exist. Disagree with them as much as you like, but never forget them; for if you do, you will have forgotten the mystery which you have been, the mystery which you shall be, and the mystery which you are […]

I immediately copied this passage into my “journal” (which was really a commonplace book, but at that time I didn’t know such a thing had a name) and I read Letters to a Young Poet soon after, finding my way to a poet through his prose. (The passage became a faithful standby several years later in college when I had to confront the unimaginable existence of young would-be “intellectuals” who philosophized about literature without particularly caring for it.)

And then there came the years of reading Rilke’s work. Of learning bits off by heart. Of reaching for that book in the dead of night. Of finding recognition and resonant echoes in the struggles of a poet on the page. The idea of writing a personal appreciation of Rilke is too overwhelming. What words could I possibly use? What do you say about the person who has saved your (inner) life?

So instead, I’ll offer a recommendation: The Duino Elegies. Particularly William Gass’ translation. Particularly William Gass’ translation as found in Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation. It’s revelatory. His love for this work “can grasp and hold and fairly judge” it in a way that gives a sturdy spine to Rilke’s apparently sentimental dictum.

Singing is Being. This is what Rilke knew to the inner marrow of his bones. The paper, the ink, the fingers, moving as in Fitzgerald’s sappy Persian poem. Having writ, they move on to other writing. Knowing that his words cannot be canceled. Because, I believe, Rilke felt himself to be a failure and a fraud except when he was writing. Then he was the writer who he wished was the man he wasn’t. Then he was the lover he hoped he could—as we say now—commit. Rilke understood his shortcomings so thoroughly that his knowing was a shortcoming. But on the page, in a poem, the contradictions which were his chief affliction could be reconciled. There he could answer every question with “I praise.”

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About this Post

• Posted by: amcorrea
• Date: October 23, 2007
• Filed Under:
  Wise Men Fish Here: Literature

Tags: Rilke, William H. Gass

• Comments:0
• Links to this Post: Technorati

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