Poetry month: versions of Rilke

[radiantfracture]

I have done several chores and even some work, choosing close reading passages from the novel, but I have not written any poems today, or not yet, so here is one of Rilke's, in two versions.

Sunday night was charcuterie and white wine with J., -- the Gewurztraminer from Emandare Vineyards, which she shared with me in a gesture of nearly divine generosity.

She also loaned me Don Paterson's Orpheus: A Version of Rilke.

Normally I don't hold with any translations but Stephen Mitchell's luminous transubstantiations, and I feel deeply suspicious of anything that calls itself a version (even though, of course, every translation must be only that). However, the one flaw I'll admit in Mitchell's translations is that he doesn't capture Rilke's rhyme, which is heavy and insistent; in Mitchell, this becomes elusive slant-rhyme, must more palatable to a contemporary English-language ear, but not so sonorous.

Anyway, I opened the book to the first sonnet and immediately felt compelled to read it out (both drunk on language and, you know, drunk). Here's Paterson's version:

A tree rose from the earth. O pure transcendence –
Orpheus sings: O tall oak in the ear!
All was still. And then within that silence
he made the sign, the change, and touched the lyre.

One by one they crept out from the wood,
emptying each set and form and lair;
and looking in their eyes, he understood
they’d fallen quiet in neither stealth nor fear,

but in their listening. Growl and bark and roar
died in their breast as each took to the clearing.
Before this day, there hadn’t been a shack

that might have held the song, a plain earthwork
hollowed by their most obscure desire:
today the temple rises in their hearing.

Here is Mitchell:

A tree ascended there. Oh pure transcendence!
Oh Orpheus sings! Oh tall tree in the ear!
And all things hushed. Yet even in that silence
a new beginning, beckoning, change appeared.

Creatures of stillness crowded from the bright
unbound forest, out of their lairs and nests;
and it was not from any dullness, not
from fear, that they were so quiet in themselves,

but from simply listening. Bellow, roar, shriek
seemed small inside their hearts. And where there had been
just a makeshift hut to receive the music,

a shelter nailed up out of their darkest longing,
with an entryway that shuddered in the wind –
you built a temple deep inside their hearing.

Notes

So the first things I notice are some differences of sense.

First, the disappearing shack. In Paterson, there is no shack; in Mitchell, merely a shack, or "makeshift hut".

I'm afraid I have no German, but if I plug the original into Google translate, for "Und wo eben / kaum eine Hutte war," I get "where there was scarcely a hut," which makes me a little dissatisfied with both versions, but preferring Mitchell's, which seems to me to make more sense: the animals have only a shack, cognitively speaking, a poor apparatus of perception and understanding, with which to appreciate the sacred; Orpheus transforms this into a temple.

For this reason, I prefer "You built a temple deep inside their hearing," to the more ambiguous "today the temple rises in their hearing."

Okay, fine details.

Paterson likes to make Rilke's imagery more concrete and specific. I think as a line I might like Paterson's "a tree rose from the earth" better than Mitchell's elegant but diffuse "a tree ascended there," though there is no earth in the original. Similarly, Paterson gives us an oak in the ear (snort) where Rilke has only "baum," and I don't find a lyre in the original first stanza.

So, a version, as Paterson announces. He does do better by the rhyme.

I like Paterson's incantatory O over Mitchell's exclamatory Oh, but Mitchell gives all three of Rilke's original cries and keeps the exclamation point.

I like Paterson's rendition of the turn a lot:

and looking in their eyes, he understood
they’d fallen quiet in neither stealth nor fear,

but in their listening.

I think that lands better than Mitchell's take and is the one place where Paterson's translation feels like it better captures Rilke's peculiar science, the way the poet dreamily condenses actions and ideas into objects of his gentle regard. As against that, I think Mitchell's "Creatures of stillness crowded from the bright / unbound forest" is one of my favorite lines and a really fine bit of enjambment.

I'd like to know if "Seemed small inside their hearts" is an idiom Mitchell is rendering literally (in which case Paterson is probably right to change it to an English idiom) or Rilke's own invention.

Since he likes the concrete, I'm surprised that Paterson removes the striking direct address to "you" in the last line and renders it in the neutral third person instead. The line is the equivalent of the poem suddenly turning to face the reader -- I want to look over my shoulder and see if Orpheus is standing there -- and I much prefer Mitchell's final line.

My favorite moment is Rilke's own, that enjambment between the octave and the sestet that forces you to take a breath before "but in their listening."

{rf}