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Rainer Maria Rilke The Sonnets of Orpheus
in a new translation by David Cook


Rainer Maria Rilke
Rainer Marie Rilke
read by David Cook
David Cook's

Rainer Maria Rilke, the great German poet, was born in Prague in 1875 and died in Switzerland in 1926. He had a very unhappy childhood, but in his twenties he rapidly found his voice as a poet and never had any doubt that he should make his living by poetry.

He had a wandering life and had the good fortune to be supported by many wealthy patrons and enthusiastic admirers.

Duino Castle
Duino Castle

In 1912 he began to write some elegies when he was staying at Schloss Duino near Trieste, which was owned by his wealthy friend, Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis.

These poems he felt to be the most important he had ever embarked on, but he was unable to finish them, and during the First World War and subsequently, he felt agonisingly frustrated by the fact that he was unable to complete them. However with his lover Baladine Klossowska, he found a rather remote medieval castle in Sierre in Switzerland, where he set up home in 1921, and having lived there with her for three months, continued to live there alone into 1922 and indeed for the rest of his life.

Chateau de Muzot
Chateau de Muzot, near Sierre

In February 1922 he had an extraordinary period of poetic productivity. Not only did he complete The Duino Elegies, but he also wrote over fifty sonnets, which he entitled The Sonnets to Orpheus and these came in two bursts. They were dedicated to a young girl, Vera Ouckama Knoop, who tragically died of leukaemia in 1919 and whom he had seen dance in Munich in 1914, shortly before the outbreak of war. In 1920 - 21 he resumed correspondence with Vera's mother Gertrud Ouckama Knoop and he asked her to send him a memorial, so that he could preserve his memory of Vera, because her dancing had so touched him. She sent him a book of notes Vera had written in the weeks coming up to her death. He was very, very touched by these and they were an inspiration on producing these wonderful poems.

Interwoven with the Orpheus myth are poems that specifically refer to Vera's dancing, but also many that refer to memories of his own from years past. In March 1922 Rilke wrote to Gertrud Ouckama Knoop that one poem above all was closest to him and his most important one and it does express his central concerns. It is number 2.13 and I shall read it.

Rilke with Baladine Klossowska
Rilke with
Baladine Klossowska

Be ahead of all leaving as though it were behind you
like the winter, which is now relenting.
For among winters, there is is one which is so endless,
that only by outwintering does the heart survive.

Be dead for ever in Eurydice and rise more strongly singing,
more strongly praising, back in pure accord.
Here in their faded company, in the unlit kingdom,
be a shivering glass, carry death in your ringing.

Be - and in the same breath know not-being,
infinite ground of your recurring strength,
that you inhabit fully this one time.

To the blunted and stifled masses of teeming Nature
as well as to the spent, to the unthinkable sum
jubilantly add yourself, then destroy the score.

This poem does touch on the central concerns of the whole sequence; and something which haunted Rilke throughout his life was the agony of irretrievable loss. So Orpheus when he loses Eurydice forever, having tried to get her back from the underworld, renounces her, but nevertheless recovers the capacity to sing. So these lines:

"Be dead for ever in Eurydice and rise more strongly singing,
more strongly praising, back in pure accord."

are the central theme, how after irretrievable loss, the poet, or indeed any creative person can recover the strength to go on with life and to affirm their experience.

Sonnets 2.1 and 2.29

Rilke also wrote other poems in which breathing is very central. He said that the first poem in the second part of the Sonnets to Orpheus was the last poem that was written; and it is a rather delightful and light poem about breathing.

read by David Cook
Sonnets 2.1
& 2.29

Breathing, you invisible poem!
Again and again I trade
with the pure replenishing void. Counterweight
against whom rhythmically I beat.

Single wave, whose
swelling sea I am ;
you, least of all possible seas, -
a breath won from the air.

How many parts of space have already
been within me? Often a wind
is like my own son.

Do you know me, sky, still full of places once mine?
you, who were then the smooth bark,
round limb and leaf of my words.

If that was indeed the last poem that Rilke wrote, then the poem that he placed last of all in the sequence, which also refers to breathing, was the last but one poem that was written; and it is a poem of mystery, illumination and synaesthesia.

Silent friend of many distances, feel
how your breath enlarges even space.
Beneath the timbers of gloomy belfries
let yourself be rung. Air which feeds on you

grows vigorous from this fare.
Through the exchange toll yourself back and forth.
What is the deepest suffering you have known?
Is drinking bitter to you, turn into wine?

In the darkest part of the night's depth,
at the mysterious crossroad of the senses,
by the intention of their strange encounter.

And if through daily use you are forgotten,
to the still earth whisper: I flow.
To the rushing waters say: I am.

I think you learn in those last two lines that there is a reference to the mysteriousness of selfhood, the fact that we are both verb and noun. But the final statement is "I am", the affirmation of one's existence.

Sonnets 2.7 & 2.14

The poems of the Sonnets to Orpheus do not make up a consecutive narrative, but there are many themes. There are themes about the machine age. There are themes about the seasons. There are a large number of poems about flowers. All of them are marvellous. One of them is a real tour de force in that it is a sonnet without a single full stop.

Girl's hands with flowers
Girl's hands with flowers

Flowers, kin in the end to hands which are your guide,
(to the hands of girls from now and from the past),
you who have lain on garden tables, often from edge
to edge, wilting and gently hurting,

waiting for water, so that death, already
within you, might be postponed - , and now
taken up again between the streaming fingertips
of touching hands, which, more than you might have guessed,

are able to restore your better health,
provided you are given time to revive in a vase,
slowly becoming cooler, and the girl's warmth leaving you

like a confession, like a dull discolouring sin
committed when you were picked, yet linking
you back to these your friends who also bloom.

read by David Cook
Sonnets 2.7
& 2.14

And another one with a very similar feel. Number 2.14

Look at the flowers, these cut ones, true to their earthly origin,
to whom we lend a fate from the edge of our fate, -
yet without even noticing it! If they regret their dying,
surely it should fall to us to be their sorrow.

All things want to be joyful. But here we travel
weighed down by our self-importance;
O what dreary teachers we are of nature,
while she quite simply lives in endless childhood.

If someone took what is real into innermost sleep
and dwelt there in it deeply, O how lightly would he rise,
another person to another day, out of the common depths.

Or he might stay perhaps, and they would grow and praise him,
now so changed that he is closer to them,
the quiet brothers and sisters of windy meadows.

Sonnet 2.28

read by Shaun
Sonnet 2.28

The penultimate poem of each of the two groups was dedicated to the memory of Vera, as recorded in notes that Rilke made to the whole series of poems. The last poem but one of the whole sequence is particularly mysterious and interesting and refers to the unheard centre or the withheld centre - difficult to translate this. But it suggests some very mysterious sense of the universe and our place within it. Number 2.28

Orpheus with Lyre and Animals
Orpheus with Lyre and Animals,
Virgil Solis (1563)

O come and go. You, almost still a child,
reconcile for an instant the dance's pattern
with the starry heavens, that private rapture
through which we may, though fleetingly, surpass

dull lawful nature. For she herself was raised
only to absolute hearing when Orpheus sang.
You were still at that sound quickened
and easily astonished, as when a tree delayed

from going with you into the listening ear.
And still you knew the place from where the lyre
created its own sound, the withheld centre.

For nature's sake you tested graceful steps
and hoped one day to turn the face and actions
of him, your friend, towards the healing rite.

Sonnet 2.4

read by Susan Cook
Sonnet 2.4

There is a very lovely poem about the unicorn. The unicorn is of course a creation of the imagination, but simply because of the beauty of the image has become a symbol of the imagination as well.

Orpheus with Lyre and Animals
15th c. illumination
from a Medical journal

And here we have the creature that is not.
But they did not allow this , and as it happens
- his gait and bearing, his arched neck,
even the light in his eyes - they loved it all.

Yet truly he was not. But because they loved him
the beast was seen. And always they made room.
And in that space, empty and unbounded,
he raised an elegant head, yet hardly fought

for his existence. They fed him make-believe grain
so as to give him strength to struggle free.
This gave the beast such power

that out of his own forehead he grew a horn. A single horn.
Then pure white to a young girl he came near,
and was in her silver mirror and in her.


1. In this concise, beautiful and profound translation each sonnet is a meditation to be dwelt upon. As Gabriel Marcel writes: "If Rilke's poems would not ring with the marvellously fraternal understanding which souls cruelly wounded in life's journey find in them; there would not follow from them those emanations for which I do not believe we could ever discover a parallel."

This is particularly true of this translation.

I cannot recommend it too highly.

2. This is a delightful new translation of Rilke's sonnets making them accessible but not losing the magic. The language is idiomatic and clear and yet the verse is full of feeling and emotion. Strongly recommended.

3. Having previously read two translations of Sonnets to Orpheus which I found very demanding, the first thing to strike me about these was how concise they were. In addition many of them have a clarity of expression which encouraged me to persist with them over a number of readings. Some were so good (eg I,17; II,3; II,9) that I felt I understood them for the first time. The accompanying notes are excellent, although I would have liked to have had comments on every sonnet.

The appendix contains a translation of a poem, "Sketches from Two Winter Evenings" which I had not read before. Cook says he included it because it is "a stunning account of the origins of Rilke's muse-inspired poetry." It reads very well and is certainly worth its place here.

Perhaps the most useful thing I can do is give some examples of Cook's frequent happy turns of phrase.

.... Then the two are one
But are they? Or do they rather
each intend the way they choose together?

Single wave, whose
swelling sea I am;
you, least of all possible seas
a breath won from the air.

And never for a moment suppose
something lost, since you chose this: your path.
Silk thread you are part of the tapestry.
From images which deeply connect you,
(one of many from this life of pain),
know the whole sublime pattern intended.

I have a feeling that this small volume will become a companion to me for some time to come and will repay many re-readings.

We recommend the following, which can ordered from Amazon.co.uk : Homo Viator by Gabriel Marcel, the French Christian Existentialist Philosopher, has two interesting chapters on Rilke.