Rilke and Unicorns (3rd instalment)

Tim this morning reminded me of Paul Muldoon's brilliant translation (in his book Hay) of the Rilke unicorn sonnet I posted about last time.

To round off my investigations among Rilke's unicorn poems, here is a version of Rilke's poem that actually bears the title, "The Unicorn".

Rainer Maria Rilke 

The Unicorn 

The holy man raised his head, and prayer
fell backward like a helmet off his head:
noiselessly, the never-believed drew near,
the white creature, that like a ravished
and helpless hind used its eyes to implore. 

The legs’ ivory framework moved about
with easy poise and equilibrium,
a white sheen floated ecstatic through the coat,
and on the creature’s brow, so clear and calm,
stood, like some moon-tower, the horn so bright,
raised more upright as each step came. 

The muzzle with its grey-pink fuzz
was drawn back slightly, so a little white
(whiter than all else) shone from its jaws;
the nostrils flared and softly panted.
Yet not bounded by any thing, its gaze
tossed images into the space around it
and ended a blue cycle of legends.

                                                           [trans. Tracy Ryan]


Here is part of Naomi Segal's comment on the original German version of this poem:

"This first unicorn text is the least typical in a number of ways. Actually titled ‘Das Einhorn’, unlike any of the others, it features no maiden; femininity is not focused, as conventionally, on the unicorn’s other, but on itself. The unicorn is compared to a female animal: a hind – this is something we almost never find in the literature, at least since the Lascaux painting 160,000 years earlier, though of course it is often a feminised male. The counterpart to the creature, to its distinctively unreal reality, is instead a saint. He is the focaliser, the whole three-sentence text being his vision; in this it connects to the sonnet, where again the being of the creature is dependent on a creative state of contemplativity on the part of others: this thing walks into one’s field of vision only when one is in a kind of dream. In such a state –prayer giving way to legend, the vocative to the collective imaginary – ‘das Niegeglaubte’ is made manifest."

Rilke, Ladies and Unicorns: La Dame à la licorne

I've said it before: Rilke in translation is often misrepresented. And with the advent of the so-called "inescapable unicorn trend", he might become as misunderstood for his unicorns as for his angels.

However, that is no reason not to go on translating him (as Gass suggests, "Great poems are like granaries: they are always ready to enlarge their store.").

Despite Clive James's assertion that

"[p]oets in English continue to line up for the inevitable failure of translating his short lyrics" and "everyone falls short", 

I don't find Rilke as precious as people sometimes say -- though perhaps that's because I'm reading German not as a native speaker, so for me it has a toughness to it. The English translations sometimes do veer into being precious.

His unicorns are nothing like a high-sugar "frappuccino", or like the bizarre cake (non-vegan, not recommended!) I saw as I walked past a Miss Maud's yesterday...

He revisits unicorns in more than one poetic context: the most interesting to me is his response to the Lady and the Unicorn tapestries at the Musée national du Moyen Âge in Paris. (They also appear in his one novel.)

As a young woman I had a print of one panel from the tapestries on the wall of my flat; later in the '90s I first got to see the real thing on a visit to Paris with John and our then-small daughter.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/be/The_Lady_and_the_unicorn_Desire.jpg

There are six of these tapestries. The one shown here is for me the most mysterious: the tent bears the words, "À mon seul désir", which can mean more than one thing ("by my desire alone"; "to my only desire", etc).

Here is a very simple English-language, deliberately colloquial, approximation of Rilke's poem. He keeps the French name for the tapestries.

More unicorns will follow.

           YZ

Rainer Maria Rilke

La Dame à la licorne
(Tapestries in the Hôtel de Cluny)

for Stina Frisell

Woman and Worthiest: we’re always sure
to wound women’s destiny we just don’t get.
We are for you the still-not-matured-yet
for your life, that if we even graze against it
turns to unicorn, a shy white creature,

who flees... and has enormous fear that you
yourself / how slight it passes out of view /
after much unhappy living only
just find it again, warm, breathless, easily

startled. Then you stay with it, far from us
and softly your hands move over the keys
of the day’s work; things are meek in your service,
yet this is the sole desire you wish to fulfil:
that the unicorn find this once a forceful
mirror for its lulled image in your soul.



                                             [trans. Tracy Ryan]



Note:
Gass, W. H. (1999) Reading Rilke: reflections on the problems of translation. NY, Basic Books, p. 49

Rilke on Music and Breath

By Tracy


John likes to have music playing in the background when he writes; I can't. I have to have silence.

We've both often written poems inspired by or about music, as have many other poets.

Rilke wrote several poems about music: here is a translation of one of them.

Rainer Maria Rilke

To Music

Music: breath of statues. Perhaps:

stillness of pictures. You language where languages

end. You time,

who stand perpendicular to the way passing hearts go.

Feelings of whom? O you the changing

of feelings into what? —: into audible landscape.

You foreigner: music. You heartspace that’s

outgrown us. Our innermost

that, exceeding us, expels us —

holy farewell:

while the inside surrounds us

as the most skilful distance, as the other

side of air:

pure,

colossal,

no longer habitable.

         trans. Tracy Ryan

One of the most basic challenges of translating is the simple yet heavily polysemous words that can tilt a poem one way or the other. 

In the poem above, I chose "stillness of pictures" for Rilke's "Stille der Bilder". Stille in German means both stillness (lack of motion) and silence — the translator might go with either. 

Likewise, Bilder could refer either to literal pictures or to mental images. So the reader of German gets both (all) resonances; the translation's reader gets a narrowed interpretation. 

In this case I went for "stillness of pictures" because of the preceding literal reference to statues, and because of the assonance; however, the English-language reader thereby loses the idea of silence pertaining to music, and of the mental image (though pictures might suggest them).

It's not a matter of the choices here being right or wrong; all translations are in a sense provisional and incomplete insofar as they convey any "original". 

Of course it's also not a case of there being only one or two polysemous words — all language has this lovely problem — but often a poem is built around the charge of a particularly ambiguous word or two.

There's a similar apparently "simple" hinge-word in the following poem. 

Rainer Maria Rilke

Sonnets to Orpheus Part 2

1.

Breath, you invisible poem!

Outer space always purely

exchanged for our being. Equilibrium

in which I happen rhythmically.

Single wave, whose

gradual sea I am;

you thriftiest of all possible seas, —

gaining of room.

How many of these points in space were already

inside me. Many a current of air is like

a son to me.

Do you recognise me, air, you full of my past places?

You, once smooth bark,

curve and leaf of my words.

         trans. Tracy Ryan

The hinge-word I'm thinking of here is Blatt in German, both leaf and sheet (as in a sheet for writing on). The German text has clearly set up the plant associations with bark, curve, leaf, but though the English "leaf" can also refer to the page of a book, it doesn't sound quite as strongly for both senses in English. That is, when the reader sees it in English, it doesn't seem to stand quite as clearly as both tree-leaf and leaf written upon.

Working on translations (and especially revisiting them) is a great way to hone one's consciousness of this "problem" -- it's a problem that's really a gift.

Rilke — Lullaby

By Tracy

So many Rilke poems when translated into English become more sugary or saccharine than they are in Rilke's German. Frequently he will use an odd, twisted, offbeat or unexpected image that I find converted in some published translations into something altogether more stale or predictable than in the original.

Of course all translation involves loss, and changes are inevitable. But you have to wonder why translators of poetry are so often prepared to lose what is most knotty, individual and memorable in a poem. I think of that approach as "smoothing-out", and I would even prefer to read translations that "fail" in other ways if they nonetheless strive to convey the poem's peculiarities.

In many English versions of this poem, "Lullaby", the striking image of the eyelids being lowered disappears altogether...

Rainer Maria Rilke

Lullaby

When one day you’re lost to me

will sleep still come to you, unless

I’m there above you, like branches

whispering from a linden tree?

Unless I’m there keeping watch

and lowering words almost

like eyelids upon your breast,

upon your limbs and your mouth.

Unless I’m there to lock you, close

you up alone with what’s yours

like a garden with a mass
of lemon balm and star anise.

                           trans. Tracy Ryan

Du im Voraus -- Rilke translation

By Tracy

This poem is already well-known in English translation, so I am adding my version to the many. It reminds me in some ways of Emily Dickinson's "A Loss of Something Ever Felt I", which David Musselwhite once said to me was the ultimate "lost object" poem.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Du im Voraus

You, my beloved lost in advance, my never-appeared,

I don’t know which notes you prefer.
I no longer try, when what’s coming billows over me,

to recognise you. All the great

images in me, scenery learned at a distance:

towns and spires and bridges and un-

suspected turns in the roads

and the immensity of those countries

once traversed by gods:

grows to its meaning in me,

your meaning, elusive one.

Oh, the gardens you are,

oh, I saw them with such

hope. An open window

in a country house — and you nearly

stepped toward me, thoughtful. Alleys I found —

you had just gone along them,

and sometimes the shopkeepers’ mirrors

were still dizzy with you, and gave out, afraid,

my too-sudden image. — Who knows if the same

bird did not ring out through us

yesterday, separately, in the evening?

                                                    trans. Tracy Ryan

Rilke writing loving in a "female" voice

By Tracy

Rilke wrote more than one poem about loving from the imagined point of view of a woman.

Two of these poems bear the same title, "Die Liebende". One is from The Book of Images (between 1902-06) and one from New Poems: the Other Part (1918).

They are often translated as "(The) Woman in Love", but in these versions I have preferred, "The Woman Who Loves" as a more active idea -- "die Liebende" is the lover (not necessarily the one loved) but in the feminine, so it's hard to convey in one English word...

Both poems have an undercurrent of anxiety -- again -- I think, about loss of identity. These are not literal translations but ones which try to retain the crucial metaphors or images in each case. Both Rilke originals are rhyming -- in one I have used a kind of rhyme, in the other not. Sometimes I have made variations on a phrase that is single in the original, but whose double or triple meanings need expanding in English, to get the fuller sense.


Rainer Maria Rilke
(from The Book of Images)

The Woman who Loves

Yes, I’m aching for you. I’m slipping,

getting out of hand – my own hands,

without a hope of contesting

what’s coming to me, as if from your side

earnest, unwavering, firm.

...in those days: Ah I was all one thing,

with nothing that cried out or betrayed me;

my silence was like that of a stone,

over which the stream trails its babble.

But now in these weeks of spring

something has slowly severed me

from the dark, unwitting year.

Something has given my poor warm life

into the hands of somebody

who doesn’t know what I was even yesterday.

Rainer Maria Rilke

(from New Poems: the Other Part)

The Woman who Loves

This is my window.

I’ve just woken so

gently I thought I’d float.

How far does my life go

and where does night start?

I might think that all this

around me was still part

of me; transparent as crystal’s

abyss, darkening, mute.

So huge does my heart seem

to me, I could take in even

the stars; it so happily lets him

loose, releases him again,

him I began maybe to love,

to hold onto, maybe.

Foreign as if never spoken of

my fate watches me.

What am I laid down

under such endlessness

fragrant as meadow and blown

to and fro like the grass,

at once calling out and afraid

of my call being heard,

set, like a sun, to decline or

sink into another.

[Translations by Tracy Ryan]