Kann ich mich z. B. darin irren, dass die
einfachen Worte die diesen Satz bilden, deutsche Wörter sind, deren Bedeutung
ich kenne?
Can I be making a mistake, for example, in
thinking that the words of which this sentence is composed are English words
whose meaning I know?
—
Ludwig Wittgenstein[1]
Without spittle, no breath, no soul, no
language . . .
— Pierre Joris[2]
Yes, from Requiems to Elegies . . . and from one language of death to another.[3]
Written from 1967 to 1970, in Breathturn into Timestead Pierre Joris translates and reappraises Paul Celan’s (1920-1970) later poetry Atemwende (“Breathturn”), Fadensonnen (“Threadsuns”), Lichtzwang (“Light-duress”), and Schneepart (“Snowpart”).[4] The first collection of German poetry I read in German, I only later realized that Celan’s radical questioning of the possibilities of art led me to my interest in Cleveland publisher and poet d.a. levy (1942-1968). Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps this is a projection, but I have continually returned to Celan and Joris as I research Ohio poetry, including not only levy, but also Kenneth Patchen, Russell Atkins, Hart Crane, and others. Vielleicht, vielleicht, vielleicht; Celan’s Meridian speech treads onward.[5] praps, praps, praps, I hear levy echo from his “PRAPS I” series in return:
perhaps i
shud
have stayed dead
today
i was murdered again
by
that pseudo-christian
monopoly
on death[6]
Recognizing that his death will be interpreted in the cultural and religious context of the United States, levy questions whether his attempt to live can have any meaning outside the martyrdom of Christianity. This “monopoly on death” is rejected in SUBURBAN MONASTERY DEATH POEM, but, nevertheless, he questions his decision to overcome this death.[7] Elsewhere, levy presents this “pseudo-christian monopoly” as an American flag made of dollar signs, reinforcing the intimate relationship between capital and religion in the form of the nation-state.[8] Perhaps it is no coincidence that Celan’s most popular poem “Todesfuge,” is the only instance in his poetry where the German nation-state is invoked. Yes, death is a master from Germany (“Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland”), but death is also now the ashen hair (“aschenes Haar”) we wear and the black milk (“Schwarze Milch”) we all drink.[9] In his later poetry, our world is one of “Landscapes with Urnbeings” and our talk takes the form of “Conversations / from smokemouth to smokemouth.”[10] Yet, despite the pervasiveness of death, we are also asked to “quit with death, quit with God.”[11] Whereas Celan is starkly descriptive, levy addresses us directly:
can you imagine
a
poet with a bloody hankerchief
around
his fist
returning
home
each
night to write the same poem
over
& over for five-thousand years
tell me about
the games you play
im
sorry / i dont
understand yr
world
perhaps i shud have
stayed dead
The poem continually returns to this doubt, but it leaves guiding tracks and living traces, though they may all lead back to this doubt and its offshooting question: “perhaps i shud have / stayed dead.” The question of resolving oneself to an imposed death is all the more haunting given that levy shot himself between the eyes and Celan drowned himself in the Seine . . . but death could take neither their eyes nor consume their lives. Rather, their examples suggest that they each overcame death in order to write—the subject for Celan being the Holocaust and, for levy, the indifferent deprivations of capital as well as U.S. “interventions.”
My preliminary study of levy culminated in a thesis at the University of North Carolina—litany of the green lion—and a long poem that I published through betweenthehighway press last summer: ode to a barking rabbit.[12] After defending my thesis I was confronted with returning to Ohio, returning to Cleveland, but I first traveled to France to visit a former partner. The final book I began reading in North Carolina was a bilingual edition of Rainer Maria Rilke’s (1875-1926) collected poetry.[13] I carried it with me over the Atlantic and back again. My German was rusting, but I once again heard Celan and levy in that strange, distant voice, the strange distances of that voice. Unsatisfied with Stephen Mitchell’s translation and the many others I’ve since read, I began translating “Requiem für eine Freundin.” Doch, doch, doch . . . I found myself writing in the margins and, soon enough, between the stanzas, then slightly altering phrases, making additions to sentences, rewriting passages of Rilke’s, and writing letters to my former partner.
I collected my translations and these additions in what Above / Ground Press published as “Fragments of a Mirrored-Voice for a Friend.”[14] As I settled in Cleveland and resumed research for a full biography on levy, I felt compelled to continue with Rilke’s Duineser Elegien (“Duino Elegies”). I began translating them for someone, and this work gained in rhythm and focus—to the lover dispossessed, the lover possessed by emptiness, the lover who possesses emptiness. As of now, the project is nearing its first draft. Though it began in a flurry, this work is slow. The third stanza from the Fifth Elegy serves as a useful example of the fruits in taking a deliberate pace:
Ah, and around this
center, the Rose of Witness:
dresses and undresses. At this
pestle, the pistil, which, from its own
blossoming dust, joined itself and formed
into falsefruit
impregnated again by the dissatisfaction of
their
stagnant awareness,— gleaming with the more
slender
face of gentle, false-smiling contempt.[15]
While the stanza may read as meandering, this translation mirrors the German syntax and line breaks as closely as possible while attempting to maintain the impact of each phrase as well as the relationships between them; as elsewhere in the Elegies, I decided to use the term “witness” as Joris often does in Celan. Only now do I understand the close relationship between Celan and Rilke’s work as well as the many affinities shared between Rilke and levy. My concern has been primarily biographical with levy and, with Rilke, the task of translating, but just as with Joris’ analysis of Celan, I cannot parse out Rilke or levy’s life from their work, though their work certainly can stand alone, perhaps all the more imposingly on its own. This is also the case for Rilke’s monograph on Augustin Rodin and another of Worpswede painters, the latter of which discusses Paula Becker for whom Rilke wrote his Requiem.
As a budding translator and writer—perhaps before budding or even sprouting—I can say nothing further than Joris, but I believe his research should be affirmed and rearticulated. In the recent article “In Defense of Mimicry” writer, translator, and co-editor of Action Books Johannes Göransson discusses a kindrid approach to translation.[16] Here, on Joris’ fox trails through Celan, I arrive with Göransson at a colonial pageant and introduce Rilke to levy.
I too—obviously—believe in the possibility of translating poetry, would even call it a necessity, even if such faith is at times sorely questioned. Or maybe exactly because of this very dynamic: to question the very possibility of literature, of writing, of language, which is always already a translation, that is, both an act of translation and the result of such an act.
In his introduction, Joris explains how translating has led him to understand poetry, the poem, as incomplete and perhaps uninterpretable.[17] He recalls Celan: “The absolute poem—no, it certainly does not, cannot exist.”[18] Here, he notes that “there can only be layers upon layers of unstable, shifting, tentative, other-languaged versions, even if a given one may be the most fitting and thus the “best” one for its moment and place.”[19] Later, Joris illustrates this perspective with the transparent inserts of his medical textbooks, which overlayed eachother with additional information.[20] It is no wonder that the author of Nomad Poetics aims for both his translation and writing to express the full potential of their “complexity and multiperspectivity.”[21] Referencing Hölderin’s approach to Greek, Joris unequivocally meets Göransson when he states that “it is the aim of any poet to transform his or her language.”[22]
In his recent essay, Göransson discusses what he learned from translating Swedish poet Eva Kristina Olsson’s book-length poem Det Ängelsgröna Sakramentet, which he translated as “The Angelgreen Sacrament.”[23] Gathering “ideas about mimicry, noise, and metamorphosis from Benjamin, Taussig, and Serres into the contemporary conversation about translation,” Göransson reassess what we might consider as the inherent losses involved in the translation of poetry as, instead, transformations that embrace the vulnerabilities and excesses of language. More than merely a theoretical approach to translation, he argues that Olsson’s book demonstrates this principle of mimicry:
As a translator I am infected by what I translate. I am a mimic. I don’t need to uphold my true voice, copyrighted and made “visible.” The underworld in which I operate does not have such clear identities. The transgressive circulation of poetry changes me, and I change the poet. We can try to contain these transformations by insisting on equivalence and a restricted economy that maintains balance—or we can allow ourselves to be transformed by the poem.
Whereas translation suggests itself as an operation on the ‘source’ language (the language you are translating from), Joris and Göransson view translation more so as an operation on the ‘target’ language (the language you are translating into). Between this source and target lies the black box of translation, our mutating diaphragm. From this perspective, the act of translation clarifies how we do not write in a language but with a language and across languages; and, insofar as we write in a language when translating, we write into language. Wet, the words seeping from our pores, dripping from our bodies, we are suffused with language and it streams through us. Close with Rilke’s cry to the angels, Göransson explains the intimate relationship between poets and the voices they mimic: “The poet does not merely describe the experience, but ventriloquizes it. The angel, not just the object of the mimicry, enters the voice of the poem. The poet becomes something else, becomes the angel.” This is the heart of translation, where the heart articulates the tongue, the heart-work of the tongue whose successive attempts at expression accumulate, snag on, and burrow into the names, people, and spirits of one's time and place. But doesn’t this work resemble the absolute?
“The absolute poem—no, it certainly does not, cannot exist.”
If not the finality of the absolute, then perhaps the absolute as the face, the forest, the city. Are not these the possibilities we write toward and write from? Don’t the days we write toward or the horizons beyond our voices act as an absolute? If not the purity of the absolute, then perhaps the totality or completeness of an expression. If not the living absolute, then perhaps the language of the dying or undead—the gestures and acts of those people who have exhausted life and death. Doesn’t the ‘absolute poem’ perhaps provide the ground of possibility for the partial poem—that fragment of a shattered mirror? This aspect of Rilke, Celan, and levy is what attracts me to their poetry, particularly Duineser Elegien, Atemwende, and Cleveland undercovers.
Each work to me suggests an alternative approach to the absolute. Celan with self-containing cycles of rupturing song; Rilke with elegies that call after and traverse the realms before and beyond humanity; levy with his city dialogues. Celan clothes words with skins from within. Rilke wears and wears out the gentle movements of language. levy covers the city in lines and gives the public “cement excrement” in an attempt at purification.[24] Each act is accomplished out of necessity, the necessity of expression that is the poet’s existence.
Joris emphasizes translation as not only the ground for poetry, but a necessity for “the very possibility of literature.”[25] Though he agrees with Celan on the impossibility of the absolute poem due to this very dynamic of translation, I would argue that this necessity of translation for literature has a stake in the necessity of the absolute for literature. The character of translation and the absolute seem to be split between the former’s instability and the latter’s seeming stability, but they both always follow from a definite series of decisions. If the possibility of literature is grounded in translation, then perhaps the possibility of translation is grounded in the absolute.
Discussing his approach in the breakthrough poem “Faustus & Helen,” Hart Crane realizes how he reconstituted a Greek attitude to beauty in modern terms.[26] “And in doing so…I was really building a bridge between so-called classic experience and many divergent realities of our seething confused cosmos of today, which has no formulated mythology, yet for classic poetic reference or for religious exploitation.” In discovering this dynamic, he arrives at a means of expression for an ‘absolute’ experience.[27] The poet, Crane adds, “must, of course, have a sufficiently universal basis of experience to make his imagination selective and valuable. His picture of the period, then, will simply be a byproduct of his curiosity and the relation of his experience to a postulated eternity.” Pushing past Crane’s ironic use of the masculine perspective when describing the universal, we can clarify the absolute expression as not a final act or definite existence but rather as an aim or relation the poet situates themselves within.
Guarding himself against finality, Crane argues how “it seems evident that certain aesthetic experience…can be called absolute inasmuch as it approximates a formally convincing statement of a conceptualization or apprehension of life that gains our unquestioning assent, and under the conditions of which our imagination is unable to suggest a further detail consistent with the design of the aesthetic whole.” This description of the absolute or ‘aesthetic whole’ covers the territories of the idiom, forgotten metaphor, character, style, and in the structure of the crystal we find its natural grammar. The absolute is at once the grasping of the invisible and unspeakable as well as the realization of completeness—a quality, not an existence. If not the grounding or foundation on which literature lies, the absolute acts as the horizon of literature.
Considering authors of the absolute, Crane offers the examples of John Donne, William Blake, Charles Baudelaire, and Arthur Rimbaud, to which we could easily add Homer, Virgil, Vyasa, Ovid, Aśvaghoṣa, the “Beowulf poet,” Hafez, Milton, and Dante.[28] In their own ways, I would add Crane himself, Anne Carson, Muriel Ruckeyser, and, if I may, Rilke, Celan, and levy. Whereas Crane focuses on the poem, we can also consider how a poet’s body of work behaves “as a whole, an orbit, or predetermined direction of its own.” This is the orbit of blood and the revolution that does not repeat itself.[29]
(This is of course, an impossibility, but it is a characteristic worth mentioning.) Such a poem is at least a stab at a truth and to such an extent may be differentiated from other kinds of poetry and called “absolute.”[30]
An impossibility, yet, nevertheless, expressions shift from their narrow social contexts to broader audiences. Discussing their changing attitudes to literature, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir comment on how the writer “thinks he is creating a work [of literature] that possesses a universal value, a value that is its real meaning, even though it had been published to realize a particular action.” In posterity, this work, however, can become universal through its realization, conscious or unconscious, or perhaps in being forever yet to be realized.[31] A principle of art? No, these pillars are toppled by the author and this temple falls onto the congregation as a “concrete totality” without living witnesses. This approach to art becomes difficult to perceive in our modern period because capital has nearly subsumed all the social relations of society into the production surplus value. Interrogating Marx’s analysis of capital as a unified system of production, Lukács then argues that only when we can see our lives as a part of a dynamic historical process “can knowledge of the facts hope to become knowledge of reality.”[32] Here, we return to the necessity of the absolute in our approach to the poem and to the person.
Rilke was born in Prague on December 4, 1875—before the breaking up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and closely following the American Civil War. He was christened René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria, but later adopted with the encouragement of writer Lou Andreas Salomé the German form of his Christian name René, Rainer.[33] Though not his first lover or the first he would devotedly write to, Rilke’s relationship with Lou “transformed through the years into a deep friendship,” and she would remain a permanent feature of his inner landscape. As biographer Wolfgang Leppman explains, Rilke gained with Lou not only a name or intellectual affinities, but far more, including an awareness of the land; a more balanced disposition between his ecstasies and depressions; an aptitude for isolation; a graceful writing script; a vegetarian diet; and, through their love-making, a measure of self-acceptance.[34]
Though Requiem für eine Freundin (“Requiem for a Friend”) is dedicated to Paula Becker—specifically drawing on her 1906 self-portrait—the poem implicates many people in his life. Rilke speaks more explicitly to a host of people throughout the Elegies. The poems are the property of Princess Marie von Taxis-Thurn; in the figure of the lover, Lou is raised among the angels; passages are reconstructions from letters to wife Clara Westhoff; and, within the Elegies themselves, the Fifth is dedicated to ballet dancer Hertha Koenig and the Eighth to author Rudolph Kassner. As Rilke notes, these relationships were the constellations of his life and poetry. In contrast to how the Elegies span many stars across the figures of the lover, hero, animal, and angel, the Requiem gathers them all into the memory of Paula.
After his second visit to Russia, Rilke boarded in the secluded town of Worpswede, where he fittingly completed “Das Buch von der Pilgerschaft” (“Book of Pilgrimage”) from his Das Stunden-Buch (“Book of Hours”). He also continued to develop Das Buch der Bilder (“Book of Images”). Both in terms of his poetry and living arrangements, this period was one of transition for Rilke. Home to many painters, there he met Fritz Mackensen, Heinrich Vogeler, Paula Becker, and Clara Westhoff. Becoming close with both Clara and Paula, he began living with them and was commissioned to write a monograph on the Worpswede artists. This study and his relationship with Clara would lead him to later write a monograph on Auguste Rodin, who was Clara’s teacher.[35]
Dismayed that Paula had become engaged, Rilke married Clara in the Spring of 1907. Before the end of that year, they moved into a farmhouse near Worpswede and Clara gave birth to their only child, Ruth.[36] Soon the couple moved to Paris in order to be closer to Rodin, though Rilke also began travelling itinerantly. Their relationship would weaken in intensity and devotion, but Clara and Rilke kept intimate correspondence and both their lives would share a “faith in art and its primacy over marriage, even over life itself.”[37] This portrayal conforms closer to Rilke’s principles, but it could be restated as a shared faith in each other’s freedom.
In late 1907, at the age of thirty-one, Paula died of an embolism. This came as a shock to Rilke, but he was not yet able to respond directly to her passing. In the years preceding, Paula and Rilke had shared letters and he sat for a portrait, a portrait that was now to remain forever unfinished. As he further embraced his solitude, Rilke finished his earlier books and began developing Neue Gedichte (“New Poems”) as well as his only novel Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (“The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge”) amidst travel to Italy, Sweden, and Denmark. Paris, however, would remain his primary residence. In 1908, with aid from Rodin who joined him, Rilke began living in the former Sacré-Cœur convent. Here, he wrote the Requiem for Paula. Alongside this effort, he also wrote a Requiem for Count Wolf von Kalchreuth, “a poet and translator of Baudelaire who had shot himself during military service in 1906.” Both were printed together in 1909 and were a first step for Rilke in publishing stand-alone poems or cycles.[38]
While his Requiem for Paula has received little study in comparison to the Elegies or much of his collected poetry, it has been discussed in his biography. In The Sacred Threshold, J.F. Hendry argues that the Requiem is where Rilke first grasped the inability of lovers to fully unite with each other, though they may be able to give each other freedom, even if only in death.[39] Directly connecting the Requiem to the Elegies, Hendry notes that when the Elegies were nearing completion Rilke wrote to Clara that “he ought to dedicate both the Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus to Paula’s memory, so that she might forgive him everything.”[40] Bearing all but her name, Rilke’s Elegies and Sonnets are intangibly marked over with Paula’s brush and gaze. Earlier, in a letter to German author and actor Ellen Delp about his visit to Toledo (no, not Ohio…), Rilke illustrates:
…there the outward things themselves—forever, mountain, bridge—instantly possessed the unparalleled, unsurpassable intensity of the inner equivalents through which one would have wished to portray them. Appearance and vision everywhere merged in the object, in each a whole interior world was revealed, as though an angel who encompassed all space were blind and gazing into himself. This, a world no longer seen from the standpoint of people, but in the angel, is perhaps my real task; at least all my previous endeavors would be united in it…[41]
Just as Rilke’s guilt compels him to dedicate his writing to Paula—to place his writing within the full fruit of Paula’s unpossessive gaze—here he imagines the standpoint of his writing as united within the angel. This comment radically alters the significance of Rilke’s ‘Weltinnenraum’ (“World-inner-space” as it is often translated) from looking within one’s own world to the act of seeing from within the entirety of the world—the perspective of the absolute where lover’s are united through the vantage of the world. Naturally, the Elegies are most often translated alongside their counterpart The Sonnets to Orpheus, but the Requiem is perhaps the first example of Rilke taking an analogous approach, one that he would fully develop and express in the Elegies. In the Requiem, Rilke and Paula are brought together in the gaze of her portrait. Although lovers cannot unite within each other, in the Elegies they are subsumed “in the angel.” What the Requiem begins, however imperfectly, the Elegies complete. In an often reproduced letter to Witold Hulewicz, a polish translator of the Elegies, Rilke expresses an aspect of this unity:
Death is the side of life which is turned away from us, and upon which we shed no light. We must try to widen our consciousness of existence so that it is at home in both spheres, with no dividing line between them, so that we may draw endless sustenance from both. The true way of life leads through both kingdoms, the great circulation of the blood passes through both: there is neither a here nor hereafter but a single great unity in which the beings who transcend us, the angels, have their habitation.[42]
After all, as Rilke recalls in the First Elegy: “Angels (they say) often do not recognize / if they meet the living or the dead.”[43] This is the terror of angels: meeting one forces us to question whether we are living or dead. Both the Requiem and the Elegies journey into the realm of the dead because this is where we can encounter Paula, and where the society of departed lovers can be fully joined. In the same letter, Rilke explains that “the angel of the Elegies is the Being who sees in the Invisible a higher order of reality: terrible, therefore, for us because we who love and are transformed in him, still cling to the Visible.” Here, Hendry argues that “the first Elegy therefore took up the promise made in Requiem for a Friend to create an angel out of death which would rescue [Paula] from that oblivion—that unattainability for himself—in which she now had her being.”[44] The first stanza of the Requiem in fact begins with this impulse to acclimate oneself to death and discern the invisible:
I carry the dead, and I let them go
and was surprised to see them so confident,
so soon at home in death, so satisfied,
so unlike their reputation. Only you, you turn
back; you brush me, you skirt by, you want
to bump against something, so that it sounds of yourself
and betrays you. Oh, don’t take from me what I
am slowly learning. I am sure; you wander
when you are moved toward any one thing
out of homesickness. We transform this;
from within our being as soon as we recognize it.
Undoubtedly it is Paula that now reaches for Rilke and forces him to recognize the invisible, the very sound and movement of her wandering. She turns back as if it was Eurydice, not Orpheus, returning from the underworld to the world of the living. Already in this opening passage Rilke, with the aid of Paula, starts to draw sustenance from that other sphere of existence—death—and, as the poem proceeds, begins to inhabit that unity of life and death. Here, Rilke confronts us at once as the archetypical modern author as well as our contemporary in the struggle to reconcile the contradictions of modernity, to take that further step, to make that unattainable transition, that unattainable transformation, that unattainable translation.
Rilke, In English
Rilke has been translated and published into French, Hebrew, Russian, Spanish, Dutch, Afrikaans, Catalan, Chinese, Czech, Hungarian, Italien, Japanese, Portuguese, Polish, and Swedish. Although the English translations outnumber all the others combined, it is here in English that Rilke is often said to be an impossibility. This view is emphasized by H.F. Peters:
Those who have tried to translate Rilke’s poems know that even their best efforts are but dull mirrors reflecting an often unrecognized original. Traduttore-traditore: I know of no poet whose work is so much part of the language in which it is written as Rilke’s, none that is so greatly betrayed by the translator. And yet such is the challenge of his poetry that efforts to translate it are constantly being made. In his tentative bibliography Rilke in English, published in 1946, Richard von Mises lists over sixty translators, a figure that has grown considerably since then.[45]
Peters raises Rilke above the abilities of the translator, above perhaps even the limitations of language. Similarly but subdued, M.P Norton discusses in his translations of Sonnets to Orpheus “the unachievable goal of the translators of Rilke.” This sentiment is repeated in near ritualistic manner by commentators of Rilke, but why should his work in particular prove so difficult? If Joris can so thoroughly translate the later poetry of Celan, could Rilke present any further obstacle? Certainly not. Then, if not for the difficulty of the language itself, perhaps the challenge in translating Rilke and others lies in the interpretive approach.
In his pompously-titled anthology The Best of Rilke, Cyrus Hamlin proclaims: “Rilke stands among the supreme poets of the modern tradition in Western literature, and the labor of finding adequate English versions will continue indefinitely.”[46] Yet, even as Hamlin praises the translations of T.B. Leishman and Stephen Spender, he criticizes them for committing “violence of English.”[47] However, this very violence is the act of transformation accomplished by Joris and Göransson.
Harmut Heep argues that the history of the American translation of Rilke “is the history of a misreading into its own national and cultural environment.”[48] Severely assessing Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell, Robert Bly, and others such as W.S. Merwin, Heep criticizes existing translation and scholarship as drawing tenuous parallels between Rilke and American poetry, suggesting that any further engagement must attempt to grasp the whole of his work and evaluate him beyond any national context.[49] After all, nearly as complicated as Celan’s linguistic typology, Wolfgang Leppman describes Rilke as a German-speaking Francophile author who lived in Switzerland with a Czech passport. Although Elaine Boney’s Duinesian Elegies, Kathleen L. Komar’s Transcending Angels, and the recent comparative translation by Martin Travers have engaged deeply with Rilke’s poetry,[50] each do not consider the Elegies in the development of his work as a whole; situate him in his literary context or in a broader literary history; or pursue translation with the ‘other-languaged’ and mimetic modes of Joris and Göransson.
Perhaps this has yet to be attempted with the looseness and rigor of Joris and Göransson, but, more likely, this state of engagement with Rilke is due to a peculiarity, a discrepancy, a discrepancy shared between Rilke, Celan, levy, and others—a precarious or incongruent relationship with modernity. In The Poetics of Myth, Eleazer M. Meletinsky traces a potential trajectory before, through, and beyond modernism with myth. While “myth explains and sanctions the social and cosmic order,” it may be our only means of exploring the metaphysical conditions of being human, such as birth, death, love, and fate.[51] Meletinsky argues that “many modern authors in fact seem to be seeking refuge in mythification because of their disillusionment with historicism as a theoretical or artistic point of view, which perhaps expresses their fears regarding cataclysmic changes and their skepticism that social progress can charge the metaphysical basis of human existence and consciousness.”[52] Examining James Joyce’s Ulysses and Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, he contrasts their approaches to history and myth: Joyce mythologizes history, while Mann reconciles myth to history.[53]
However, neither comprises Rilke’s path, nor Celan or levy’s. Closer is Franz Kafka, who Meletinsky explains does not use mythological parallels in either the form or content of his work, but elucidates an experiential model of the world that resembles myth, or parable, undermining in particular law and the legal system. Perhaps the first author to take this relation to myth was Virgil or, if we are able to make a leap, the authors of the vast Mahayana sutras. But Rilke, Celan, and levy did not inherit the religious and cultural background of Greece or Rome, and certainly not Theravada or its rich origins in a Vedantic context. No, Rilke’s mythological inheritances are primarily to German protestantism; Celan, Judaism in the wake of the Holocaust as well as the vastness of literature; and, levy, the diverse, though decaying Christian traditions in America, as well as Judaism, indigenous folklore, and significantly from Mahayana traditions, specifically Tibetan Tantra. Without adopting, historicizing, or parading these traditions, each integrates disparate figures of myth into the direction of their work, into the whole of their expression. Rilke and levy both share the figure of the angel, although this angel is defaced and nameless for Rilke and, for levy, he explicitly identifies himself with the Hebrew Angel of Death. The figures of myth are faded into the language of Celan’s poetry, but shine through their scattered ashes as ‘light-tones’. Perhaps it is no accident that Göransson’s essay issues from his translation of Olsson’s “The Angelgreen Sacrament.”
Pressing further into this difficult terrain, in “Myth Today” Roland Barthes argues myth is a mode of speech that acts on language received from history. Mythical language does not speak directly of reality, but is a signification that inseparably presents a form and meaning. Forms can be taken from anywhere and meanings arise from their use; however, if the form and meaning are taken together, Barthes notes that readers can consume myths as “a story at once true and unreal,” and, in doing so, reveal the myth’s function, its underlying intention. Today, this use is often the naturalizing of historical circumstances or the depoliticizing of speech. Though institutions and governments suggest the present to be beyond myth, this apparent absence of myth is precisely the mythology of bourgeois culture—the complete naturalization of capital and nation-states, not to mention the disavowal of class society. Here, Barthes considers the potential “reconciliation between reality and men, between description and explanation, between object and knowledge.” In fact, he seeks a synthesis between ideology and poetry, “the inalienable meaning of things.” As such, poetry resists mythologizing in its continual rearticulation of meaning, though this also “makes it an ideal prey for myth.”[54] Ah, and what perfect prey it has been!
Often no longer concerned with the forms of reality, refusing myth, poetry surrenders itself to language as its true and only reality. While Barthes advocates for the creation of artificial myths as in Flaubert, I would argue that Rilke, Celan, and levy do not only steal and repurpose myths, but rather place the mythological approach within the broader discourse of their work. They avoid being consumed by myth by consuming myth. The ideal prey of myth, poetry can also be its most vicious predator. Here, just as mythological speech treats language as its malleable object, poetry can treat myths as figures to be transformed for alternative purposes. Concerned with the abolition of myth, Barthes looks to the language of man as producer and revolutionary language to prohibit mythological speech from taking root, but, at our arrival to each and every new world, we return to a reality not devoid of myth, but perhaps only without bourgeois myth—the naturalizing and depoliticizing of myth, at least on the terms of capital, nation-states, and class. These realities behind the mythological speech of today remain to be transformed, let alone be banished by merely the language of man as producer or revolutionary language. This transformation requires the labor of many lifetimes. Our labors as lovers as with Rilke, witnesses as with Celan, and printers as with levy. This work can unmask and overcome these modern realities, can and must overcome the dominating social realities of capital, nation-states, and class as mythologies.
Just as myth now transforms human history into natural history, myth can be used to accomplish the reverse. This is the self-betrayal of myth. The reinscribing of history, the reinscribing of the concrete into mythical figures. The angel as puppet or the angel as corpse dredged from the polluted Cuyahoga river. There is the reader who consumes myths, but there is also the writer of self-consuming myths. Rilke, Celan, and levy’s work acts with the necessity of not transforming the language of myth, but of transforming the reality of myth. Rilke attempts this by implicating us in the relationships between mythological and ordinary figures; Celan by burrowing inside language; and levy completes this movement by becoming myth and defeating himself as myth. Still, in the figure of the angel, the spectres of myth and history loom over contemporary literature, to the contempt of literature.
Translating Angels: Rilke, Celan, levy . . .
1.
And it came to pass after this that my spirit was translated
And it ascended into the heavens:
And I saw the holy sons of God.
They were stepping on flames of fire:
Their garments were white
and their faces shone like snow.
2.
And I saw two streams of fire,
And the light of that fire shone like
hyacinth,
And I fell on my face before the Lord of
Spirits.
3.
And the angel Michael seized me by my right hand,
And lifted me up and led me forth into all
the secrets,
And he showed me all the secrets of
righteousness.
4.
And he showed me all the secrets of the ends of the heavens,
And all the chambers of all the stars, and
all the luminaries,
Whence they proceed before the face of the
holy ones.
5.
And he translated my spirit into the heaven of heavens,
And I saw there as it were a structure built
of crystals,
And between those crystals tongues of living
fire.
6.
And my spirit saw the girdle which girt that house of fire,
And on its four sides were streams full of
living fire . . .[55]
Providing perhaps the most comprehensive overview of angels in the Elegies, Patricia Pollack Brodsky considers them as the uniting force of the collection.[56] After all, the angels have occasioned a great deal of debate among critics. To simplify, to sublimate: for Kretschmar and Dehn, the angels are “a substitute creation, an eschatological beloved.” For Mason and Günther, they are the “symbol of a demonic artistic calling,” while Holthausen sees them as an ideal to be striven for, a “projection of human possibilities.” For Angelloz, they are the “absolute existing angel,” and, to Guardini, they seem “newly arisen gods.” Two early translators, Leishman and Spender provide a representative appraisal: “a perfect consciousness…a being in whom the limitations and contradictions of present human nature have been transcended, a being in whom thought and action, insight and achievement, will and capability, the actual and ideal, are one.” Although there is wide interpretation of the elegiac angels, nearly all critics view them as symbols. In this relation, the angels are cut into the shape of literary ciphers for the poet, lover, or humanity in general. However, we must consider the angels before any literary analysis. The angels are at once the audience for Rilke’s call in his poetry and a personal audience during his stay at Duino. In addition to the poem being addressed to Princess Marie, Lou, Koenig, and Kassner, we should also consider Paula as a member of this angelic audience at the outset of the Elegies.
Who, if I cried out, would alone hear me of
the Angel’s
Orders? and even if one firmly held
me against their heart: I would decay from
their
intense being. Because beauty is nothing
other than the terrifying opening, that we
still only endure,
and we so adore because it firmly refuses
to crush us. Each and every Angel is
terrifying.
And these cries will endure with the company of each and every departure. The distress of undertaking the Elegies exceeded even Malte Laurids Brigge, though by then Rilke was closer to his own death and yet also further from the passing of Paula. Describing this severe strain, he notes that “sometimes it seems to me that I could die when it is done, with such finality do gravity and sweetness converge in those pages, so conducively does everything stand there and yet so limitless in its innate transformation that I have the feeling that I’m propagating myself with this book, far and wide with sureness, beyond all danger of death.”[57] Here, Rilke discloses his absolute confidence and faith in his audience just as he allows himself to be held in the crushing beauty of the angel.
Now, we must return to myth as rhetoric. Discussing Rousseau’s Second Discourse, Paul De Man argues that “to the extent that all language is conceptual it always already speaks about language and not about things.” He continues: “If all language is about language, then the paradigmatic linguistic model is that of an entity that confronts itself. It follows that the exemplary situation in the Essay (man confronting man) is the correct linguistic paradigm, whereas the situation of the Second Discourse (man confronting tree) is a dialectical derivation from this paradigm that moves away from the linguistic model towards problems of perception, consciousness, reflection, and the like.”[58] Placing him among Rousseau, Nietzsche, and Proust, De Man considers Rilke as a writer of rhetoric, not craft.[59] Discussing the poem “Am Rande der Nacht,” he notes that “the metaphysical entity is not selected because it corresponds analogically to the inner experience of a subject but because its structure corresponds to that of a linguistic figure: the violin is like a metaphor because it transforms an interior content into an outward; sonorous thing.” The subject of this literature is not the relationships between words, but “direct expression of subjectivity.”[60] As such, the figures in Rilke’s work act as a language not composed of words but composed by subjects with subjects. However loosely the Elegies treat a variety of subjects, they are all held together in their address to the angels and, in this mode, take on the form of an angelic address.
Concerning this constitutive aspect of Rilke’s work, De Man concludes: “The promise contained in Rilke’s poetry, which the commentators, in the eagerness of their belief, have described in all its severe complexity, is thus placed by Rilke himself, within the dissolving perspective of the lie. Rilke can only be understood if one realizes the urgency of this promise together with the equally urgent, and equally poetic, need of retractions if at the very instant he seems to be on the point of offering it to us.”[61] Yes, myth is developed across human generations, but, as rhetoric, myths have no greater or lesser existence than reality. This is the uninterrupted movement of the promise and lie in Rilke’s poetry, particularly the Elegies. What often escapes commentary is how Rilke’s call to the angels is only ever posed to its real readers . . . “Who, if I cried out, would alone hear me of the Angel’s / Orders?” Who else if not you? Holding an edition of the Elegies to my chest, I think of the angel holding Rilke in a dissolving embrace. Perhaps an act of unconscious satire, levy begins his final posthumous publication:
you see its something
like this
you become sensitive
& listen
& you get sick discovering
so many unhappy people
& so you think
if i had some money
i could print some
lovely poems
& people might slow down
& read them
& so you send a telepathic?
will power?
prayer?
for money
& the angels say “fuck you”[62]
Rilke’s call has been reduced from an existential cry to the act of begging. Whereas the angels are silent for Rilke, they openly reply to levy’s call, but all the poet receives is an all-too-clear and crude dismissal. A dismissal reflected in our own inability to respond to the decaying circumstances of humanity and its sacrifice of the world to the narrow reality of money; and what more abhorrent human event is there other than the sacrifice? The slave thrown to the lions, the believer and their books burned into the same ashes. While explicit allusions are less frequent in Celan than in levy, “disfigured” and familiarly defaced as in Rilke, the figure of the angel is able to greet us, if only as a fragment of memory, a fragment of rhetoric to be wielded against the lions:
Disfigured—angel, anew, stops dead—
a face carries to itself,
the astral-
weapon with
the memoryschaft:
attentively it greets
its
thinking lions.[63]
Despite broadly situating Rilke and perhaps levy and Celan as writers of rhetoric, this evaluation says little about their distinctive forms of address. To explore this further, we can return to Barthes. In his essays A Lover’s Discourse, he discusses how the lover’s call neither represses nor recognizes desire, but is the release of desire. This call is the release of the bow forever held in the tension of the poem; the call yet to be called; the call with the audience of one and no one; the call that exhausts itself and is without exhaustion.[64] Attentive to the beauty and horrors of humanity, Rilke, Celan, and levy’s poetry stays inexhaustibly allied to the human and can only be as alienated with humanity as we can be with ourselves.
Rilke’s Elegies
are not dedicated to Princess Marie, but they are her property (“Besitz”).
Regardless, I must quote Barthes at length when he speaks of “The Dedication.”
The dedication is what absorbs all I have to say, but this other—the person to
whom I dedicate my work—is silent, in life just as if they were to receive the
dedication in death. Although the lover attempts to write something as a gift,
this act more often smothers the loved one:
Hence I cannot give you what I thought I was writing for you—that is what I must acknowledge: the amorous education is impossible (I shall not be satisfied with a worldly or mundane signature, pretending to dedicate to you a work which escapes us both). The operation in which the other is to be engaged is not signature. It is more profoundly an inscription: the other is inscribed, he inscribes himself within the text, he leaves there his (multiple) traces. If you were only the dedicatee of this book, you would not escape your harsh condition as (loved) object—as god; but your presence within the text, whereby you are unrecognizable there is not that of an analogical figure, of a fetish, but that of a force which is not, thereby, absolutely reliable. Hence it doesn’t matter that you feel continuously reduced to silence, that your own discourse seems to you smothered beneath the monstrous discourse of the amorous subject: in [Pasolini’s] Teorema the “other” does not speak, but he inscribes something within each of those who desire him—he performs what the mathematicians call a catastrophe (the disturbance of one system by another): it is true that this mute figure is an angel.
Subsumed in the rhetoric of Rilke, Celan, and
levy’s poetry, the angel returns to the human—myth returns dissimilarly to its
habitation in the human. Perhaps we can no longer return without reservations
to ‘Humanism’, but we have not broken with the human poem.[65]
Rilke, Celan, and levy endured trials common to us all: illness, trying
relationships, and poverty, most acute with levy, and, in his case, desperate
legal trials as well; yet, they all endured beyond their small deaths to finish, to complete their work. Similar to Rilke,
both Celan and levy have come to be “regarded with pseudo-religious mystique”[66]—and
commentary of this kind may only contribute to this tendency—but myth is
prominent in all of their writing. Nothing can be said generally, but perhaps
we can regard the figure of the angel in their work as not the transcending of
humanity, but the realization of humanity through our diverse relationships,
the completeness of humanity.[67] Here, we arrive at that potential
reconciliation of myth and history that Barthes speculated. The angel that was
once the audience of the poet becomes, in levy, the poet themselves—the Angel
of Death. Amidst the decay of modernity, the poet becomes the angel and takes
humanity into themselves. This is the urn of ashes and the healing urn
inscribed by the angel with ‘Subrisio Salat’.[68]
This is the horizon of literature that preserves and transformations humanity.
Labyrinthine Views
In the translation of
poetry, Rilke’s Elegies have been
nearly raised to the example of the Bible in religious scholarship. The methods
of “literal equivalence” (word-for-word) and “dynamic equivalence”
(paraphrasing) are often discussed in Biblical studies, but neither is useful
for poetry because, as Göransson
notes, “the translator is trying to reproduce their experience of the text in a
new language.”[69] We could search for
a parallel in the methods of Martin Luther and subsequent translators of sense
(“Sinn”), but that would be beyond the bounds of this essay and there are far
closer approaches.[70]
In fact, reviewing
Damion Searls’ The Philosophy of
Translation (Yale, 2024), Göransson explains how every author and text may
require different methods of translation:
The translator is involved with a highly collaborative, dynamic relationship with the text and its author(s): the translator translates under the influence of the foreign text, but the translator is not without agency since they choose to “take up” the translation. This argument leads to perhaps the most exciting idea in Searls’ book: His model of translation as “affordance.” This model, which Searls picks up from the scholar James J. Gibson, suggests that the original has its own power: the affordance is the parameters the original text sets up for the translator. It “guides” the translator’s decisions.
To take up Searls’ metaphor, the translator adapts to the text as an animal would to another environment, another atrium of the heart, another territory of an other-tongue. Consciously or unconsciously, I absorbed Celan’s poetry alongside Joris’ translations. Yes, I read Celan’s poems in German, but I also read through the eyes of Joris and, conversely, I read the English translations back into Celan and carried that German with me into my own speech. Now, I reach for the constellations of Celan’s language through the English of Joris and often find these familiar words and phrases appearing throughout my attempts to translate Rilke. Authorless words and phrases, not because they lack an origin in the decisions of either Celan or Joris, but because their source is in that movement between authors and between languages—the affordances they gift one another. Celan may provide many allegories of writing for poetry, but when thinking of translation I dwell on the final lines from the poem “Ashglory”: “No one bears witness for the witness.”[71] If anyone is to bear this witness for the poet, it will be and has been the translator.
A majority of people throughout the world are bilingual or beyond, but we cannot all learn languages as widely as Celan and, even so, we may never be able to express ourselves so thoroughly and skillfully as in the enduring literature of another language, let alone a third or forth tongue. Translation, then, will always be a discipline of literature and of daily life; perhaps more so now than ever before does translation characterize the act of writing, but this conception carries two opposing views of language. The first we could call historical: breachable though ossified and as fractured as the tectonic plates, discontinuously deforming—moving, yes, though certainly not unstable, shifting, and tentative as Joris would emphasize. This latter view we could call organic, continuously changing, language living within time as opposed to being separated and abstracted across time. Strangely enough, the former view provides the scaffolding for many modern approaches to translation. However, this should be unsurprising if we consider how languages have standardized through printmaking and internally homogenized under the management of nation-states and their educational apparatuses. When our languages have become the most diffuse and conversant, they appear to be unchanging and distinct. Cary Stough aptly explains how this state of affairs has impacted the role of contemporary translators in their article “High Fidelities:”
Combine the inflationary rhetoric of linguistic stewardship with liberalism’s fiery passion for global connectivity, and you’ve got yourself a profession suited (or doomed) to a cycle of valorization that so many attached to the humanities possess. It’s the curse of the ostensibly valueless activity of the artist-in-capitalism that it must, in perennial sleights of contradiction, at once displace value from the market to the safety of heart.
But, while the heart has only so many
partitions, capital divides us and our labor without any limits other than
profit. Stough continues: “Despite those who would cry for a return to some
standard of professionalism and objective artistry, there are those who are,
thankfully, constructing a new language for it.”[72] Yes, Joris,
Göransson, Searls, and others have accomplished this—returning translation to
an act of literary production—but, for this very reason, we may not need any
“new language.” If I have learned anything reading Celan and translating Rilke
it is that a translation is necessarily a transformation, but a translation is
not a transformation of the poem alone. No, we operate on language itself,
carrying our mother tongue through the poem’s constellation of gestures and
aspirations into a nearly unrecognizable, though familiar breathing form. We
may not create our voices, but we can join them in the labyrinths of
literature.
Isaac: Where is the lamb
for the burnt offering?
Abraham: God will provide for
himself the lamb for a burnt offering, my son.
Teasing out Abraham’s answer to Isaac’s question in Fear and Trembling, Søren Kierkegaard argues that “he utters no untruth then, but neither does he say anything, for he speaks in a foreign tongue”—a tongue equally as foreign as it is familiar to all tongues.[73] As Levinas remarks, yes, the saying overflows the said, but how much is heard . . . , how much less is received . . . , and how much less still is acted on, let alone with faith . . . Opposite of the tragic hero, Kierkegaard elaborates on Abraham as a Knight of Faith, who renounces the universal for the particular.[74] The angel is just this figure of faith, embodying acceptance and resignation. From the very beginning of the Elegies we are engulfed in this movement of faith. However, while the universal is renounced, it is the poet who “explains the universal as repetition” because their life is “in conflict with the whole of existence.” This circumstance is often construed as a religious experience, but it is, in fact, only through the absurdity of existence where we can take hold of “the task of freedom.”[75] The either/or—what “makes man greater than angels” is our ability to grasp freedom and make decisions.[76]
But isn’t this task
something in which we could claim to be
too accomplished? We act out the desire of every freedom, and we profess to create our voices, but there is no freedom from our desires and
this search is endless. Oh, freedom,
that receding shore. While the terms of freedom may shift, we cannot afford to relinquish this aim for any
other without also abandoning the shore itself and with it the grounds for any
classless society, community of peers, and human world. In myth, the contestation of reality meets the
contestation of what is human, but what is beyond humanity is only what was
before humanity. Human, all too human?[77] Never. As Remy De
Gourmont in his eclectic work Physique de
l'Amour argues: “Man is not the culmination of nature, he is in Nature, he is one of the unities of life.” While “animals are confined to one
series of gestures,” we can vary gestures through near limitless mimicry and
explore our aptitudes beyond instinct. What cannot be preserved in the gestures
of instinct must be taught and carried on not in our bodies, but in the body of
language.[78]
Gourmont goes as far to locate the “origins of art” in the sexual games of
birds, which we assimilate into our own instinctive acts. This is another realm
where humanity, despite all its limitations, surpasses the angels—sexless, or
unable to raise further angels, but only monstrous giants. In addition to the
Even in the seeming ‘inhumanity’ of the modern period incomprehensible to
antiquity, Rilke, Celan, and levy would all affirmatively say: Homo sum; humani nihil a me alienum puto
(“I am human; nothing human is alien to me”).[79]
To this we could add that nothing living is alien to humanity, and perhaps our
humanity comes into its most stark contrast in the struggle against our
alienation as labor power and in our servile role to the machine in production.
as a poet i try to learn
how to remain human
despite technology
& their is no one to learn from
i am still too young to
be quiet & contemplative[80]
In translation, we can acknowledge and claim this inheritance, the “characteristic of all human production”—nameless and timeless generations that have been obscured under relatively recent conventions of authorship. The same way the rhetoric of Rilke may sever language from an uninterpreted reality, to translate we must break from the notion of an “original” as well as the singularity of authorship. Translating Rilke became an indispensable and urgent task that allowed me, without speaking, to express my absolute desire to a lover. Even if dismissed, I felt guarded in the otherness of the voice I spoke through. Though grounded in our full faith of the other, translation is an act of freedom where we are both guided by voices and guide a voice further into strange throats, as bounded and boundless as the light of “Fadensonnen:”
Fadensonnen
Über der grauschwarzen Ödnis.
Ein Baum—
hoher Gedanke
greift sich den Lichtton: es sind
noch Lieder zu singen jenseits
der Menschen.[81]
[1] Wittgenstein, Ludwig. On Certainty, translated by Denis Paul and G.E.M. Anscombe, 23. (Harper, 1969)
[2] Joris, Pierre. Fox-trails, -tales, -trots, “Nimrod.” (Black Fountain, 2020)
[3] Scroggins, Mark. “Paul Celan: Poems in the Language of Death.” (Hyperallergic, January 16, 2021) https://hyperallergic.com/614769/paul-celan-poems-in-the-language-of-death/
[4] Celan, Paul. Breathturn into Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry, edited and translated by Pierre Joris. (FSG, 2014)
[5] Celan, The Meridian: Final Version—Drafts—Materials, edited by Bernhard Boeschenstein and Heino Schmull, translated by Pierre Joris. (Stanford UP, 2011)
[6] levy, PRAPS I SERIES, “praps i/7 (for j.s.)” [John Scott], from ukanhavyrfuckinciti bak. (Ghost Press, 1968) This series has been reprinted elsewhere, most accessible in concrete & etc. edited by Ingrid Swanberg. (Ghost Pony Press, 1991)
[7] levy, SUBURBAN MONASTERY DEATH POEM. (Offense Fund, August 1968)
[8] levy, visualized prayers & hymn for the american $god$. (Renegade Press, 1966)
[9] Celan, “Todesfuge,” from Mohn und Gedächtnis. [Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1952]
[10] Celan, Atemwende, 46.
[11] Celan, Lichtzwang, 314.
[12] The full thesis as well as republications of d.a. levy’s work are available on betweenthehighway press. litany of the green lion: returning the concrete to the concrete and the concrete to the grass, or how grass conquers the necropolis in d.a.levy’s Cleveland undercovers. https://betweenthehighway.org/d-a-levy-receipt-excerpts
[13] The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, edited and translated by Stephen Mitchell with an introduction by Robert Hass. (Random House, 1982)
[14] Fragments of a Mirrored-Voice for a Friend. (Above / Ground, 2024)
[15] Rilke’s works have been collected in Sämtliche Werke. (Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1955-1966) All quotations of Rilke are my own translations.
[16] Göransson, Johannes. “In Defense of Mimicry.” (Poetry Foundation, 2024) https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/1601010/in-defense-of-mimicry
[17] Breathturn into Timestead, xii-xiv.
[18] The Meridian.
[19] Breathturn into Timestead, xvi.
[20] Breathturn into Timestead, xv.
[21] Joris, Pierre. Nomad Poetics. (Wesleyan UP, 2003)
[22] Breathturn into Timestead, xxvi. Göransson and Joris are translators working with similar languages, Swedish and German. In both languages compound words and syntax can be manipulated with ease. Their comparable theories of translation may stem from the intimacy of these languages.
[23] Olsson, Eva Kristina. Det Ängelsgröna Sakramentet. (Albert Bonniers Förlag, 2017)
Olsson, Eva Kristina.“The Angelgreen Sacrament,” translated by Johannes Göransson. (Black Square Editions, 2021)
[24] levy, THE PARA-CONCRETE MANIFESTO. (1966) The broadside publication was a collaboration between D.r. Wagner, Kent Taylor, levy, and, more than likely, drew from concrete artists don thomas as well as Dom Sylvester Houédard among many others. This publication was preceded by the Cleveland Manifesto of Poetry (Principles Behind the Writings of 6 Cleveland Poets), which was published in June 1964 by James Lowell at the Asphodel Book Shop. Edited by levy, this manifesto compiles brief notes from Russell Atkins, Russell Salamon, Adelaide Simon, levy, Jau Billera, and Kent Taylor.
[25] Breathturn into Timestead, xii-xiv.
[26] Crane, Hart. “General Aims and Theories.” (1925)
[27] This view of poetry as an expression of the universal as opposed to the particularity of history is shared by Aristotle. Aristotle, Poetics, translated by Butcher, 9. (London Macmillan, 1895)
[28] To expand on the example of Virgil, I would specify that Rilke, Celan, and levy share a similar distance to religious mythology as with the late Greeks, presented perhaps most comically by Aristophanes in The Frogs or The Birds. Confronted by traces of this devotional distance cultivated in Greek and Roman as well as the transmission of Buddhist traditions, though this relation is often conceived as that of our own crowning modernity, we could reconsider cultural modernity as a cyclical phenomena. Glover, T.R. Virgil. (Macmillan 1912)
[29] Celan, Atemwende, translated by Pierre Joris, 26.
Helligkeitshunger… Brightnesshunger…
den ich sich wölben ließ über that I let vault above
der wort durchschwommenen the worddrenched
Bildbahn, Blutbahn. image orbit, blood orbit.
[30] Crane, “General Aims and Theories.”
[31] de Beauvoir, Simone. Adieux, translated by Patrick O’Brian, 170. (Pantheon, 1984)
[32] Lukacs, Georg. History and Class Consciousness. “What is Orthodox Marxism?,” 8. (MIT, 1972)
[33] Leppman, Wolfgang. Rilke: A Life, translated by Russell M. Stockman, 4-7. (Fromm, 1984) [Bern und Munich, 1981] At this time, Lou was already the author of Friedrich Nietzsche in seinen Werken (1894), Ruth (1895), Aus fremder Seele (1901) among many other works. Rilke first became acquainted with Lou through her essay “Jesus der Juden” (1896).
[34] Ibid, 77-78.
[35] Ibid, 122-128.
[36] Ibid, 136.
[37] Ibid, 222.
[38] Ibid, 239-241.
[39] Hendry, J.F. The Sacred Threshold: A Life of Rainer Maria Rilke, 71. (Carcanet, 1983)
[40] Ibid, 65.
[41] Ibid, 117. August 27, 1915. Delp would later write the novel Vergeltung durch Engel und andere Erzählungen (“Retribution through Angels and Other Stories”). (Freiburg, 1952)
[42] Ibid, 149.
[43] Rilke, “First Elegy.”
[44] Hendry, 154.
[45] Peters, H.F. Rainer Maria Rilke: Masks and the Man, 4. (University of Washington Press, 1962) To this list, we can easily add these print publications:
Duino Elegies: With English Translations, translated by MacIntyre, C. F. (Berkeley, 1963)
The Duino Elegies, translated by Garmey, Stephen; Wilson, Jay. (Harper & Row, 1972)
Duinesian Elegies, translated by Boney, Elaine E. (UNC. 1975)
Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus, translated by Poulin, Alfred A. Jr. (Houghton Mifflin. 1977)
Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Mitchell, Stephen. (Random House, 1982)
Duino Elegies, translated by Hunter, Robert. (Hulogos'i. 1987)
Duino Elegies: A Bilingual Edition, translated by Cohn, Stephen. (Northwestern. 1989)
The Duino Elegies, translated by Hammer, Louis; Jaeger, Sharon Ann. (Sachem Press. 1991)
Duino Elegies, translated by Young, David. (W.W. Norton. 1992)
The Duino Elegies, translated by Norris, Leslie; Keele, Alan. (Camden House. 1993)
Duino Elegies: A Bilingual Edition, translated by Bridgewater, Patrick. (Menard Press. 1999)
Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation, translated by Gass, William H. (A. A. Knopf. 1999)
The Essential Rilke, translated by Kinnell, Galway; Liebmann, Hannah. (Ecco Press. 1999)
Duino Elegies: Bilingual Edition, translated by Snow, Edward. (North Point Press. 2000)
The Duino Elegies, translated by Waterfield, John. (Edwin Mellen Press. 2000)
Duino Elegies, translated by Crucefix, Martyn. (Enitharmon. 2008)
Rainer Maria Rilke: Selected Poems with Parallel German Text, translated by Ranson, Susan; Sutherland, Marielle. (Oxford University Press. 2011)
Duino Elegies: Bilingual English-German Edition, translated by Oswald, David. (Daimon Verlag. 2012)
Duino Elegies, translated by Miranda, Gary. (Tavern Books. 2013)
Rilke's Late Poetry: Duino Elegies, The Sonnets to Orpheus, Selected Last Poems, translated by Good, Graham. (Ronsdale. 2015)
The Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Kline, A. S. (Poetry in Translation. 2015)
Being Here is Glorious: On Rilke, Poetry, and Philosophy with a New Translation of the Duino Elegies, translated by Reid, James D. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern (University Press. 2015)
The Rilke of Ruth Speirs: New Poems, Duino elegies, Sonnets to Orpheus & Others, translated by Speirs, Ruth. (Two Rivers Press. 2015)
Duino Elegies: A New and Complete Translation, translated by Corn, Alfred. (W. W. Norton. 2021)
Duino Elegies, translated by Croggon, Alison. (Newport Street Books. 2022)
Duino Elegies: A New Translation and Commentary, translated by Travers, Martin. (Camden House, 2023)
[46] The Best of Rilke, translated by Walter Arnt and with a foreword by Cyrus Hamlin, xxv. (Dartmouth, 1989)
[47] Ibid, xxvi.
[48] Heep, Harmut. A Different Poem: Rainer Maria Rilke’s American Translators: Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell, and Robert Bly, 6. (Peter Lang, 1996)
[49] Ibid, 11.
[50] Boney, Elaine. Duinesian Elegies. (UNC, 1977)
Komar, Kathleen L. Transcending Angels. (University of Nebraska, 1987)
Travers, Martin. Duino Elegies: A New Translation and Commentary. (Camden House, 2023)
[51] Meletinsky, Eleazer M. The Poetics of Myth, translated by Guy Lanoue and Alexandre Sadetsky, 156-58. (Garland, 1998)
[52] Ibid, 277.
[53] Ibid, 312-13.
[54] Barthes, Roland. Mythologies, translated by Richard Howard. “Myth Today,” translated by Annette Lavers. (FSG, 2012) [Éditions du Seuil, 1957]
[55] The Book of Enoch, “LXXI,” translated by R.H. Charles, 93. (Dover, 2007) [Clarendon, 1893]
[56] Brodsky, Patricia Pollack. Rainer Maria Rilke. (Twayne, 1988)
[57] Ibid. Briefe an seinen Verlager, 1906 bis 1926, 52. (Leipzig: Insel, 1936.)
[58] De Man, Paul. Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust, 152-53. (Yale, 1979)
[59] Ibid, 46.
[60] Ibid, 33.
[61] Ibid, 56.
[62] levy, PROSE: on poetry in the wholesale culture & education system. (Gunrunner Press, 1968)
[63] Celan, Schneepart, translated by Pierre Joris, 356.
Entstellt—ein Engel, erneut, hört auf—
könnt ein Gesicht zue sich selber,
die Astral-
waffe mit
dem Gedächtnisschaft:
aufmerksam grüßt sie
ihre
denkenden Löwen.
[64] Barthes, Roland. A Lover’s Discourse, “I Love You,” translated by Richard Howard. (FSG, 1978) [Éditions du Seuil, 1977)
[65] Vallejo, César. Poemas Humanas (“Human Poems”), translated by Clayton Eshleman. (Grove, 1968)
[66] Bauer, Arnold. Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Ursula Lamm. (Frederick Unger Publishing, 1972)
[67] This same development oddly also occurs in the biography of Lewis Carroll as Jean Gattégno investigates Charles Lutwidge Dodgson’s Sylvie and Bruno (1889). The angel is the result of the dialectic of humanity, lovers united in the rupturing of their sexuality. Gattégno, Jean. Lewis Carroll: Fragments of a Looking Glass, translated by Rosemary Sheed, 258-259. (Thomas Y. Cromwell, 1976) [Éditions du Seuil, 1974]
[68] Rilke, “The Fifth Elegy.”
[69] Göransson, Johannes. “on The Philosophy of Translation by Damion Searls.” (On The Seawall, November, 14, 2024) Canadian poet and publisher bpNichol takes this project of affordance to its extremities in his TRANSLATING TRANSLATING APOLLINAIRE: A Preliminary Report From A Book of Research (Membrane Press, 1979), where he and guests put his poem Translating Apollinaire (Blewointment, 1964) through open-ended methods of transformation, such as recall by memory, alphabetical rearrangement, paraphrasing, “labyrinthine view[s],” homophonic translation, dictionary definition substitution, “musical translation,” rewriting by different authors, and “alchemical translation” among many others. http://www.bpnichol.ca/sites/default/files/archives/document/Translating%20Translating.pdf
[70] Perhaps a more fruitful angle concerning Luther lies in his ‘excremental’ writing. In hiding at Wartburg castle, Luther began translating the Bible from Hebrew and Greek into German. During his stay, he had severe constipation. He directly connects his constipation to his translation work on the gospels, which couldn’t be “handled without causing storm, tumult, and danger” (Vol. 1, 153). As he took in the word of God, he describes how his bodily flows stalled (Vol. 1, 255), though productive periods of translation followed his “eliminations.” Connecting his constipation also to Satan, Luther declares the devil “will have no peace until he has devoured me, [yet] if he devours me, he shall devour a laxative (God willing) which will make his bowels and anus too tight for him. Do you want to bet?” (Vol. 2, 329). Luther, Martin. The Works of Martin Luther. Volumes 48-50: Letters. (Past Masters, 2020)
[71] Celan, Paul. “Ashglory,” translated by Pierre Joris. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/58206/ashglory Here, I think also of one of the earliest poems in Atemwende:
Ein Ohr, abgetrennt, lauscht. An ear, severed, listens.
Ein Aug, in Streifen geschnitten, An eye, cut in stripes,
wird all dem gerecht. does justice to all this.
[72] Stough, Cary. “High Fidelities: On Some Recent Translator’s Notes.” (Cleveland Review of Books, August 20, 2024)
[73] Kierkegaard, Søren. Fear and Trembling: “Dialectical lyric by Johannes de silento,” translated by Alastair Hamey, 143. (Penguin, 1985) [October 16, 1843] The biblical verse is from Genesis 22:8. Rilke was a devoted reader of Kierkegaard, so it is no surprise that just as Kierkegaard says a poet should draw on the story of Tobias and Sarah, Rilke refers to Tobias' journey with Raphael in his “Second Elegy.”
[74] Ibid, 103
[75] Kierkegaard, Søren. Repetition: An Essay in Experimental Psychology, translated by Walter Lowrie. (Princeton, 1941) [October 16, 1843]
[76] Kierkegaard, Søren. Either/Or: A Fragment of Life, translated by Alastair Hanney, 490, 151. (Penguin 1992) [October 16, 1843]
[77] Nietzsche, Friedrich. Human, all too Human: A Book For Free Spirits, translated by Hollingdale, R.J.(Cambridge University Press, 1986)
[78] De Gourmont, Remy. Physique de l'Amour (“The Natural Philosophy of Love”), translated by Ezra Pound, 4, 8. (Liveright, 1922)
[79] Terentius, Publius. Heauton Timorumenos (“The Self-Tormentor”).
[80] levy, SUBURBAN MONASTERY DEATH POEM, “PART SIX - a small funeral.”
[81] Celan, Atemwende, translated by Pierre Joris, 14.
Raised in the Cuyahoga Valley, alex nested in the Cleveland area and operates offset printers for a living. He runs betweenthehighway press and is currently translating Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies and writing a biography on d.a. levy. above/ground press recently released his book Fragments of a Mirrored-Voice for a Friend, which includes translations of Rilke’s “Requiem für eine Freundin.”
