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An Austrian writer, born in Prague, Rilke was the son of an army
officer whose mother was a religious fanatic. Although he first attended military school,
he was later on largely self-taught, studying history, philosophy, literature and art in
Prague, Munich and Berlin. He married in 1901 and fathered one daughter. He lived in Paris
for twelve years while his wife, Clara, worked with Rodin. During this time he traveled in
Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Egypt, and Scandanavia. After the outbreak of WWI he lived
mostly in Munich, served in army office work in Vienna and then went to live in
Switzerland in 1919.
He translated E.B. Browning, Gide, de Guérin, Valéry, and others. His prose works
include the semi-autobiographical Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge/Notebook
of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910), and his poetical works include Die Sonnette an
Orpheus/Sonnets to Orpheus (1923) and Duisener Elegien/Duino Elegies (1923).
Using external phenomena as symbols for inner experiences, he expressed a form of mystic
pantheism and sought to achieve a state of ecstasy in his work so that existence could be
apprehended as a whole. He was a poet of his own intensely personal vision of reality. His
work gives clarity and validity to personal experiences, unfamiliar conceptions, and
subtle and illusive perceptions.
from The First Elegy
True, it is strange to inhabit the earth no longer,
to use no longer customs scarcely acquired,
not to interpret roses, and other things
that promise so much, in terms of a human future;
to be no longer all that one used to be
in endlessly anxious hands, and to lay aside
even one's proper name like a broken toy.
Strange, not to go on wishing one's wishes. Strange
to see all that once was relation so loosely fluttering
hither and thither in space. And it's hard, being dead,
and full of retrieving before one begins to espy
a trace of eternity.-Yes, but all of the living
make the mistake of drawing too sharp distinctions.
Angels, (they say) are often unable to tell
whether they move among the living or dead. The eternal
torrent whirls all the ages through either realm
for ever,and sounds above their voices in both.
translated by J.B. Leishman and Stephen Spender
from The Second Elegy
Every Angel is terrible. Still, though, alas!
I invoke you, almost deadly birds of the soul,
knowing what you are. Oh, where are the days of Tobias,
when one of the shining-most stood on the simple threshold,
a little disguised for the journey, no longer appalling,
(a youth to the youth as he curiously peered outside).
Let the archangel perilous now, from behind the stars,
step but a step down hitherwards: high up-beating,
our heart would out-beat us. Who are you?
Early successes, Creation's pampered darlings,
ranges, summits, dawn-red redges
of all beginning,-pollen of blossoming godhead,
hinges of light, corridors, stairways, thrones,
spaces of being, shields of felicity, tumults
of stormily-rapturous feeling, and suddenly, separate,
mirrors, drawing up their own
outstreamed beauty into their faces again.
For we, when we feel, evaporate; oh, we
breathe ourselves out and away; from ember to ember
yielding a fainter scent. True, someone may tell us:
'You've got in my blood, the room, the Spring's
growing full of you'...What's the use? He cannot retain us.
We vanish within and around him. And those that have beauty,
oh, who shall hold them back? Incessant appearance
comes and goes in their faces. Like dew from the morning
grass
exhales from us what is ours, like heat
from a smoking dish. O smile, whither? O upturned glance:
new, warm, vanishing wave of the heart--alas,
but we are all that.Does the cosmic space
we dissolve into taste of us, then? Do the angels really
only catch up what is theirs, what has streamed from them, or
at times,
as though through an oversight, is a little of our
existence in it as well? Is there just so much of us
mixed with their features as that vague look in the faces
of pregnant women? Unmarked by them in their whirling
return to themselves. (How should they remark it?)
translated by J.B. Leishman and Stephen Spender
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