Posts Tagged ‘Rainer Maria Rilke’

Archivist extraordinaire Elena S. Danielson (at right) kindly took me out to the Stanford Faculty Club for lunch last week. The kindness didn’t stop with the tiramisu. The former director of the Hoover Library & Archives also gave me a new edition of Rainer Maria Rilke‘s “Larenopfer” – to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the poet’s birth. The volume includes ninety of Rilke’s early poems from turn-of-the-century Prague, in German and English. Another treat, a copy of a 1926 letter from Rilke to Leonid Pasternak, the Russian poet’s father, an eminent painter.

In the letter dated March 14, 1926, the celebrated poet, already seriously suffering from the fatal illness that would end his life nine months later, wrote a lengthy, detailed, and graciously cordial letter to a Russian artist living in Berlin, Leonid Pasternak (1862-1945), the father of poet and novelist Boris Pasternak, who remained at that time in Moscow. Despite premature rumors of Rilke’s death, news reached Leonid that he was still alive, though ill, and celebrating his 50th birthday. Elated by the good news, the artist sent the great writer a birthday greeting by way of his publisher, since he didn’t have Rilke’s mailing address.

Rilke responded as soon as the letter finally reached him at the isolated medieval stone tower where he was writing his final masterpieces in an obscure corner of Switzerland. He starts out in Russian, which they had once used for their correspondence, but he switches quickly to German as his Russian skills had faded; he knew Pasternak, originally from multicultural Odessa, was fluent in German. (On the original paper, someone, possibly a family member, lightly penciled in a translation of the brief Russian phrases into German.) Rilke goes on to emphasize his continuing love of Russian culture and his faith that it will be restored, despite the chaos cause by war and revolution. And he renews their ties of friendship.

Before the Great War, Leonid had met the then unknown poet, just in his mid-twenties in Moscow in 1899, and once again by chance at a train station with the artist’s 10-year-old son Boris in 1900. A couple more brief encounters in Italy in 1904 and a few letters. That is all.

And yet they both remembered each other with great fondness. Both had a talent for lasting intellectual friendships. In his memoirs Leonid writes of the 1899 meeting: “Before me in my studio stood a young, very young, delicate, blond foreigner in a Loden coat … And already after the first short conversation we were like good old friends (which we later became).” (Die Familie Pasternak: Erinnerungen, Bericht, Geneva: Éditions Poésie Vivante, 1975, p. 62) The cordial feelings lasted even though they had no contact during the turbulent war years.

The 1926 letter in question – the first page shown here – had been published in German, but the original artifact with its still elegant handwriting, despite serious illness, conveys far more meaning than the copy in cold print. The Pasternak family carefully preserved this artifact for many years through the trauma of war, relocation, and exile. It was treated as something of a holy relic for the family. Starting in 1996, the Pasternak family began donating family papers to the Hoover Institution Archives at Stanford University for safekeeping. Among the many treasures in the collection is this original letter. In the published version, there is a brief postscript printed at the end. The original document shows this added afterthought displayed prominently in the upper left-hand corner of the first page. This brief note, crammed at the top, was even more important than either the writer Rilke or the recipient Leonid Pasternak realized at the time:

Gerade in ihrer Winter-nummer, hat die sehr schöne grosse pariser Zeitschrift “Commerce”, die Paul Valéry der grosse Dichter herausgibt sehr eindrucksvolle Gedichte von Boris Pasternak gebracht, in einer französischen Version von Hélène Iswolsky (die ich auch in Paris gesehen habe.)

Here is a translation of the note: “Just now, in its winter issue, the very beautiful, big Paris journal, Commerce, that Paul Valéry, the great poet publishes, are very impressive poems from Boris Pasternak, in a French translation by Hélène Iswolsky (whom I also saw in Paris).”

The full significance of the letter, especially the note in the corner, was not well understood in the English-speaking world until Nicolas Pasternak Slater translated and published the family correspondence in 2010. (Boris Pasternak: Family Correspondence 1921-1960, translated by Nicolas Pasternak Slater, Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 2010. Reviewed in The Book Haven in 2011 here.) Leonid did not forward the original letter from Berlin to Boris in Moscow – he feared it might be lost – so he gave it to his daughter Josephine, who was also in Germany. Boris had previously written in August 1925 that he was devastated when he heard (erroneously as it turns out), that Rilke had already died.

When Boris learned about the letter from Rilke to his father, and got the news that Rilke was not only still alive and but had actually mentioned his poetry in the March 14, 1926 letter, Boris wrote to his sister from Moscow: “Our parents told me about Rilke’s letter, which has so thrown me that I haven’t been able to work today. What excited me wasn’t what probably pleased Papa and Mama, since after all I only got to hear of it by ricochet—that someone, somewhere, in France or England, knows me, is translating me, mentions me—but naturally I haven’t seen any of this with my own eyes…you need to know what Rilke was for me, and when this all started. This news was a short-circuit between widely separated extremes of my life. The incongruity of it shattered and devastated me, and now I don’t know what to do with myself.

Boris had told his sister that he had been dreaming, in fact quite unrealistically, of visiting Rilke – whom he had briefly encountered as a child 26 years earlier – in the poet’s medieval Swiss tower. At this point Boris was just trying to survive in Moscow after the devastations of the Great War and the catastrophic conditions precipitated by the Russian Revolution and Civil War while his father, mother, and sisters enjoyed the temporary safety of Germany. They would later be forced to leave Germany for England.

On top of everything else, you need to know who Valéry is—assuming this really is Paul Valéry, which is totally unlikely!” (Correspondence p. 43.)

(At right: the poet Rilke, painted by Leonid Pasternak)

Once Boris Pasternak in Moscow knew that Rilke was still alive, he and his dear friend, the poet Marina Tvetaeva, living in France, began a brief but passionately poetic three way-epistolary romance with Rilke in Sierre, Switzerland just before Rilke died. Rilke wrote something on the order of 17,000 letters in his lifetime, corresponding right up to the end of his life December 29, 1926. (The exact number of letters is not knowable, but it is certainly more than 10,000.) Of this remarkable correspondence, the last letters with Rilke in Sierre, Switzerland, Tsvetaeva in Paris, and Boris Pasternak in Moscow are among the most lyrical and most beautiful. And this remarkable exchange was initiated by the March 14, 1926 letter in question.

More on the two photos: “Rilke (1875-1926) in Moscow,” by Leonid Pasternk, an oil painting made in 1928, so a posthumous portrait based on earlier sketches depicting Rilke as a young man when he visited Moscow, prior to World War I, as an unknown poet. Apparently painted in Berlin some two decades later, the portrait is now in the Pinakothek Museum in Munich. A version in pastels is preserved at the Ashmolean in Oxford, in the UK where many family members live today.

The Stanford Repertory Theater (SRT) has launched its annual summer festival with “Voices of the Earth: From Sophocles to Rachel Carson and Beyond.” The polished reading from nearly a hundred writers, thinkers, scientists, and politicians, compiled by the Artistic Director Rush Rehm and Charles Junkerman, Stanford’s dean (emeritus) for Continuing Studies, ends tonight, alas! But other shows on this year’s theme, “The Environment and Social Justice,” will debut in the coming weeks. Go here to read about two new plays, Polar Bears, Black Boys & Prairie Fringed Orchids, by Vincent Terrell Durham, and Anna Considers Mars, by Ruben Grijalva. SRT also hosts a popular film series.

“Voice of the Earth” was a moving tribute to our planet. However, the first quarter-hour made me wonder if the seven performers/readers could keep the show together for 90 minutes, entirely on snippets from the 7th century B.C. to now. Yet they did!

I had some quibbles about the tendentiousness – Reagan, Bush, Nixon, and inevitably Trump were excoriated, with satisfied groans from the liberal audience. But what about Obama‘s complicated relationship with fracking? And were the Native Americans really all peace and love and Great Spirit? (One quote referred to whispering to the bears, rather than killing them. Do not try that at home.)  There’s always a danger of sentimentalizing, even kitschifying nature, extracting the roughness and toughness of our familiar earth – it’s radical foreign-ness.

I was happy to see a number of Stanford “Another Look” book club author’s featured: J.A. Baker, Joseph Conrad, W.H. Hudson. And a few personal friends and favorites – Richard Wilbur, too.

Kudos to cast members Gianna Clark, Thomas Freeland, Jake Harrison, Sequoiah Hippolyte, Brenna McCulloch, Emma Rothenberg, Gabe Wieder.

I picked out a few quotes from the evening. Here they are:

“Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence, so that never again will Americans be free in their own country from the noise, the exhausts, the stinks of human and automotive waste . . . ”

– Wallace Stegner (from a letter)

Do you still remember: falling stars,
how they leapt slantwise through the sky
like horses over suddenly held-out hurdles
of our wishes—did we have so many?—
for stars, innumerable, leapt everywhere;
almost every gaze upward became
wedded to the swift hazard of their play,
and our heart felt like a single thing
beneath that vast disintegration of their brilliance—
and was whole, as if it would survive them!

– Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. Edward Snow

“… I lay on the bowsprit, facing astern, with the water foaming into spume under me, the masts with every sail white in the moonlight, towering high above me. I became drunk with the beauty and singing rhythm of it, and for a moment I lost myself – actually lost my life. I was set free! I dissolved in the sea, became white sails and flying spray, became beauty and rhythm, became moonlight and the ship and the high dim-starred sky! I belonged, without past or future, within peace and unity and a wild joy, within something greater than my own life, or the life of man, to life itself! To God, if you want to put it that way. Then another time, on the American Line, when I was lookout on the crow’s nest in the dawn watch. A calm sea, that time. Only a lazy groundswell and a slow, drowsy roll of the ship. The passengers asleep and none of the crew in sight. No sound of man. Black smoke pouring from the funnels behind and beneath me. Dreaming, not keeping lookout, feeling alone, and above, and apart, watching the dawn creep like a painted dream over the sky and sea which slept together. Then the moment of ecstatic freedom came. The peace, the end of the quest, the last harbor, the joy of belonging to a fulfillment beyond men’s lousy, pitiful, greedy fears and hopes and dreams! And several other times in my life, when I was swimming far out, or lying alone on a beach, I have had the same experience. Became the sun, the hot sand, green seaweed anchored to a rock, swaying in the tide. Like a saint’s vision of beatitude. Like the veil of things as they seem drawn back by an unseen hand. For a second you see—and seeing the secret, are the secret. For a second there is meaning! Then the hand lets the veil fall and you are alone, lost in the fog again.”

Eugene O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey Into Night

“THE BEAST WE HAVE WITHIN US WILL STICK ITS HEAD UP THE MINUTE HE CAN GET AWAY WITH IT.”

When Halley’s Comet passed over the world in 1910, newspapers prophesied doom. The era was already overshadowed by social, spiritual, and political unease. That year, Sigmund Freud published Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis and formulated his first sketch of the Oedipal complex. Rainer Maria Rilke published his only novel, Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. Writer and philosopher Carlo Michelstaedter completed his thesis and shot himself, one of the era’s many suicides. Meanwhile, Arnold Schoenberg was emancipating dissonance with his Theory of Harmony, which was written in the summer of 1910. The following year, Oswald Spengler would begin his landmark Decline of the West.

“The nihilism of the First World War was presaged, summarized, and mourned in the music, poetry, and thought which a great many artists and thinkers produced in the year 1910,” said Entitled Opinions host Robert Harrison. “It seemed to play out all the worst nightmares that had obsessed the Expressionists.”

This episode of Entitled Opinions at the Los Angeles Review of Books is a family affair. Said Robert Harrison, “Brothers punctuate cultural history. We have the Brothers Grimm, the Marx Brothers, the Schlegel brothers, the Goncourt brothers. It so happens I have a brother, too, who like me, is a professor of literature who has written a few books.”

In the introduction to his 1910: The Emancipation of Dissonance (University of California Press, 1996), UCLA professor Thomas Harrison wrote, “Nineteen ten is the spiritual prefiguration of an unspeakably tragic fatality, heard in the tones of the audacious and the anguished, the deviant and the desperate, in the art of a youth grown precociously old, awaiting a war it had long suffered in spirit.”

In this fraternal conversation, Thomas and Robert Harrison discuss leading figures in the umbrella movement called “Expressionism,” including poet Georg Trakl, painter Wassily Kandinsky, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Filippo Marinetti, as well as Rilke, Spendler, Schoenberg, and others.

What do the Expressionists say to us today? “Of course, the darkness of their vision didn’t turn a lot of people on,” explains Thomas Harrison. “During the reconstruction of Europe after World War I, we had to forcibly leave that stuff behind. But don’t forget that every time you leave something behind it comes back. So it came back in World War II. Human nature does not change, although we think we’re getting better and more rational. The depths of the soul that they probed are the same depths that people try to keep hidden and secret, over and over and over. While it may not be not much fun to listen to Schoenberg’s atonal music, it’s a reminder that the beast we have within us will stick its head up the minute he can get away with it.”

Listen to the podcast of this fascinating Harrison-on-Harrison discussion here.

“HUMAN NATURE DOES NOT CHANGE, ALTHOUGH WE THINK WE’RE GETTING BETTER AND MORE RATIONAL.”

More potent quotes from Thomas Harrison:

“These artists were perhaps the most ethically and philosophically committed generation of artists since the Romantics.”

“They developed a metaphysics of negativity. Being itself was considered a rotten set-up.”

“We no longer share this negative metaphysics today. We do everything we do to ignore it and forget about it and put it under the rug – to repress it again.”

A dear friend referred recently to having “a Rilke moment.” That returned me to Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet (trans. Stephen Mitchell), perhaps the most famous and most treasured letters of the last century. The ten letters were written to Franz Xaver Kappus, a 19-year-old cadet at the Theresian Military Academy. He was seeking advice from the young Rilke, who was less than a decade older, for guidance on writing his own poetry. He got advice on a lot more than that.

An excerpt from the seventh letter, written on May 14, 1904:

It is also good to love: because love is difficult. For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation. That is why young people, who are beginners in everything, are not yet capable of love: it is something they must learn. With their whole being, with all their forces, gathered around their solitary, anxious, upward-beating heart, they must learn to love. But learning-time is always a long, secluded time, and therefore loving, for a long time ahead and far on into life, is –: solitude, a heightened and deepened kind of aloneness for the person who loves. Loving does not at first mean merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person (for what would a union be of two people who are unclarified, unfinished, and still incoherent –?), it is a high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world in himself for the sake of another person; it is a great demanding claim on him, something that chooses him and calls him to vast distances. Only in this sense, as the task of working on themselves (“to hearken and to hammer day and night”), may young people use the love that is given to them. Merging and surrendering and every kind of communion is not for them (who must still, for a long, long time, save and gather themselves); it is the ultimate, is perhaps that for which human lives are as yet barely large enough. …

Whoever looks seriously will find that neither for death, which is difficult, nor for difficult love has any clarification, any solution, any hint of a path been perceived; and for both these tasks, which we carry wrapped up and hand on without opening, there is no general, agreed-upon rule that can be discovered. But in the same measure in which we begin to test life as individuals, these great things will come to meet us, the individuals, with greater intimacy. The claims that the difficult work of love makes upon our development are greater than life, and we, as beginners, are not equal to them. But if we nevertheless endure and take this love upon us as a burden and apprenticeship, instead of losing ourselves in the whole easy and frivolous game behind which people have hidden from the most solemn solemnity of their being, – then a small advance and a lightening will perhaps be perceptible to those who come long after us. That would be much.

Busy day today, so we thought we’d share this invitation with you in lieu of a post. It’s an indication of some of the glamorous events we get invited to, but can’t attend. We like the poster. Details (in French) below. Who is Barbara? We don’t know, either. But we’re not going to quibble. The venue sounds magnificent, and Rainer Maria Rilke, Paris – what’s not to like?

 

Yesterday, upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn’t there.
He wasn’t there again today,
I wish, I wish he’d go away…

When I came home last night at three,
The man was waiting there for me
But when I looked around the hall,
I couldn’t see him there at all!
Go away, go away, don’t you come back any more!
Go away, go away, and please don’t slam the door…

Last night I saw upon the stair,
A little man who wasn’t there,
He wasn’t there again today
Oh, how I wish he’d go away…

I read this poem to my daughter at least two decades ago when she was a very young girl, and she was silent for a long time afterwards, thinking long and carefully. “But he wasn’t there!” she finally exclaimed. “That’s right,” I said. And then she lapsed into silence again, and pondered some more. “But then, how … ? Why did he …?”

I didn’t tell her anything about the poem. I didn’t tell her that it was written by a young man at Harvard in 1899, describing a purportedly haunted house in Antigonish, Nova Scotia. Its author, Hughes Mearns, would go on to be an educator. His notions about encouraging the natural creativity of children, particularly for ages 3-8, were apparently novel at the time. According to a 1940 Current Biography: “He typed notes of their conversations; he learned how to make them forget there was an adult around; never asked them questions and never showed surprise no matter what they did or said.”

I ran across these verses by chance today and, now that my daughter is a woman of twenty-something, I emailed the poem to her and asked her if she remembered it. “Wow! Yeah! I do remember that poem!” Without analysis or explanation, the poem had lodged in her memory, undisturbed for the last two decades. The poem may not qualify for the immortals sweepstakes, and yet it was, clearly, “memorable speech.”

Which brings me to Dana Gioia‘s major essay, “Poetry as Enchantment,” in the current issue of Dark Horse. (It’s online, here.)

“In the western tradition, it has generally been assumed that the purpose of poetry is to delight, instruct, console, and commemorate. But it might be more accurate to say that poems instruct, console, and commemorate through the pleasures of enchantment. The power of poetry is to affect the emotions, touch the memory, and incite the imagination with unusual force. Mostly through the particular exhilaration and heightened sensitivity of rhythmic trance can poetry reach deeply enough into the psyche to have such impact. (How visual forms of prosody strive to achieve this mental state requires a separate inquiry.) When poetry loses its ability to enchant, it shrinks into what is just an elaborate form of argumentation. When verse casts its particular spell, it becomes the most evocative form of language. ‘Poetry,’ writes Greg Orr, ‘is the rapture of rhythmical language.’”

I doubt he had a poem like “Antigonish” in mind, and yet I think we would be unwise to dismiss a poem that lodges so securely in a child’s imagination. In the absence of religion today, it may be the closest they come to mystery. Again from Dana:

Academic critics often dismiss the responses of average readers to poetry as naïve and vague, and there is some justification for this assumption. The reactions of most readers are undisciplined, haphazard, incoherent, and hopelessly subjective. Worse yet, amateurs often read only part of a poem because a word or image sends them stumbling backwards into memory or spinning forward into the imagination. But the amateur who reads poetry from love or curiosity does have at least one advantage over the trained specialist who reads it from professional obligation. Amateurs have not learned to shut off parts of their consciousness to focus on only the appropriate elements of a literary text. They respond to poems in the sloppy fullness of their humanity. Their emotions and memories emerge entangled with half-formed thoughts and physical sensations. As any thinking person can see, such subjectivity is an intellectual mess of the highest order. But aren’t average readers simply approaching poetry more or less the way human beings experience the world itself?

Life is experienced holistically with sensations pouring in through every physical and mental organ of perception. Art exists embodied in physical elements—especially meticulously calibrated aspects of sight and sound—which scholarly explication can illuminate but never fully replace. However conceptually incoherent and subjectively emotional, the amateur response to poetry comes closer to the larger human purposes of the art—which is to awaken, amplify, and refine the sense of being alive—than does critical commentary.

As Rainer Maria Rilke pointed out in his “Sonnets to Orpheus”:  “Gesang ist Dasein,” or “Life is singing.” His words meant enough to Lady Gaga to that she had them tattooed on her arm, a distinctly modern kind of tribute. Dana points out that William Blake‘s “The Tyger” is the most anthologized poem in the English language – children love it, love its rhythm and its images, even though they have no idea what it means. Probably nobody does.

It is significant that the Latin word for poetry, carmen, is also the word the Romans used for a song, a magic spell, a religious incantation, or a prophecy—all verbal constructions whose auditory powers can produce a magical effect on the listener. Ancient cultures believed in the power of speech. To curse or bless someone had profound meaning. A spoken oath was binding. A spell or prophecy had potency. The term carmen still survives in modern English (via Norman French) as the word charm, and it still carries the multiple meanings of a magic spell, a spoken poem, and the power to enthrall. Even today charms survive in oral culture. Looking at a stormy sky, surely a few children still recite the spell:

Rain, rain
go away.
Come again
some other day.

Or staring at the evening sky, they whisper to Venus, the evening star:

Star light, star bright,
First star I see tonight,
I wish I may, I wish I might
Have the wish I wish tonight.

A rational adult understands that neither the star nor the spell has any physical power to transform reality in accordance with the child’s wish. But the poet knows that by articulating a wish, by giving it tangible form, the child can potentially awaken the forces of imagination and desire that animate the future. As André Breton proposed, ‘The imaginary tends to become real.’

Every time I hear the first schoolyard rhyme, I remember the version I heard in India, where the children sing:

Rain, rain
go away.
Ram and Sita
Want to play.

It’s just as effective in that hemisphere. The same carmen.

I have many thoughts about Dana’s essay – I’ve barely scraped the surface. I hope to explore it in the coming days, after I’ve met a few deadlines. Meanwhile, you can catch up by reading Dana Gioia’s whole essay here.