TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION

      Rainer Maria Rilke’s fifty-five Sonnets to Orpheus, written down over a few days in an astonishing burst of inspiration, came to him in spoken form, as “an interior dictation, completely spontaneous.”¹ And what student of modern poetry does not recall that the beginning of the first Duino Elegy was uttered by a voice calling out of the storm as the poet walked the ramparts of Duino Castle: “Who, if I cried out, would hear me from out of the ranks / of the angels?” (Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel / Ordnungen?). The mysterious words even suggest the dactylic meter used in most of the elegies. The bulk of the Sixth and Ninth Elegies was imparted to Rilke by an inner voice as he walked home from the post office one day. Both the Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus, composed simultaneously and considered by Rilke to be “of one birth,” and “filled with the same essence,” had their beginning in a very few weeks in February of 1922, in spoken form—as sound.²

      When the Elegies were completed, Rilke made a point of not sending them to his dear friend and benefactor, Princess Marie of Thurn and Taxis Hohenlohe, to whom they are dedicated, because he wanted her to hear them first, from his lips. Later, he wrote her that he did not recognize the full depth of his own sonnets until he had read them to her—again, experienced as sound.³ He often walked up and down, away from his stand-up desk and back, in composing his poetry, which would have encouraged rhythmic composition.⁴

      Since the sound and rhythm of his poetry were of such importance to Rilke, one of my first steps in translating them was to learn them by heart, so I would have them constantly accessible orally, even while ruminating on them away from my desk. Over the years, I spoke them to myself and occasionally to others in many different settings, open always to the mysterious message of sound and rhythm behind the “meaning,” grateful to have been familiar with those particular sounds and rhythms since childhood, since I share Rilke’s mother tongue. I tried to render the original not only accurately, but also in words chosen for sound, and metrically, since it is the meter which moves the poems along so beautifully. I did not have to render over-regular or mechanical-sounding meter, because Rilke uses it quite flexibly, often breaking the metric pattern to draw attention to special words and passages. However, he never wrote in free verse.

      Many of these sonnets address the reader directly, personally—as did that spontaneous, inner dictation addressed to the poet. Quite a few of them begin with a familiar du, dir or ihr (“you,” “to you,” “you” plural) or commands: horch, siehe, wolle (“listen,” “look,” “wish for”). This immediacy accounts for much of the poems’ appeal, as do the occasional colloquialisms like und ob!, dass ihrs begrifft!, wie aber, sag’ mir, soll, and wer weiss? (“and how!’’; “if only you could understand!”; “but how, tell me, can,”; and “who knows?”) (I:3, I:5, I:16, II:20).

      Occasional particularly important words and phrases are italicized, receiving the emphasis they might in conversation, which adds to the spoken, spontaneous feel. Italicized words and phrases occur in no fewer than 18 of the sonnets. Important examples include I:8: Jubel weiss (“Jubilation knows”); I:12: Die Erde schenkt (“they are earth’s gift”); I:14: Sind sie die Herrn (“Are they the masters”); II:2: den wirklichen Strich (“the true line”); and II:2: Zwar war es nicht (“True, it did not exist.”) In some cases, English syntax or meter has required a slight shift of the emphasis. Sonnet II:5, a particularly intense one, contains three italicized words: so von Fülle übermannter (“so completely”); wieviel Welten (“countless worlds”); and aber wann (“ah, but when”). This poem was inspired by a little anemone the poet had actually seen in a garden in Rome in 1914, and strongly identified with, as J. B. Leishman relates in his valuable notes on the Sonnets.⁵ In Sonnet II:11 Rilke italicizes the whole line that sums up what he is saying about the human need to kill: Töten ist eine Gestalt unseres wandernden Trauerns (“Killing is just one form of our nomadic mourning”). It is simply a part of our often troubled, sometimes tragic, process of becoming. The reader/listener immediately feels involved; the poems, though cast in the traditional sonnet form, seem quite contemporary.

      Preserving this fresh, spoken, quality became another important goal for me, particularly since it helps to reflect the poems’ completely unanticipated, surprise arrival. Incidentally, Rilke had always depended on inspiration; he could not “force” creation. “The utmost” that he could do, he explained to a friend, was to prepare, and then wait.⁶ This preparation included absolute solitude and inner openness, with perhaps some translation work and letter writing on the side.

      In some of these sonnets there is a strange, one-time shift from the second to the third person, and these particular sonnets all begin in a similar way. For example, three begin with the direct-address form before making this shift: Du aber, Herr (I:20); Du aber, Göttlicher (II:7); Tänzerin, o du Verlegung (II:18). (The parallel is less obvious in translation: “What can I consecrate”; “But you, divine one”; “Dancer, how you have transmuted.”) In each case, third-person pronoun phrases—“his evening,” “when he was attacked,” and “above her”—subsequently appear. Then, Rilke returns to the second person. Translators have generally circumvented or “corrected” these shifts by substituting the expectable second-person form. Yet these irregularities are surely not oversights, and so I have tried to preserve them. Rilke is showing the reader that in the world