The urgent music of the Duino Elegies

Who, if I cried out, would hear me

among the angelic orders?

Even if one should suddenly

take me to his heart, 

I would fade in the power

of his stronger existence . . .

 

Reading the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke in one of the many English translations, what kind of voice do you hear? I've heard people read his poems in a voice approaching an intimate whisper, but that's not how they're usually read in German.

Many German-speaking actors have made recordings of Rilke's work. Among the finest are these from A-Q Verlag: complete performances of the Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus by Swiss actress Irene Laett. They come from live radio broadcasts in 1989, and Laett performs the poems as Rilke did (see the next post): with urgency and great line-to-line sensitivity. Here's the beginning of the First Elegy, followed by my translation and the German text:

AUDIO: Irene Laett reads the beginning of the First Duino Elegy

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angelic

orders? Even if one should suddenly

take me to his heart, I would fade in the power of his

stronger existence. For the beautiful is nothing

but an onset of terror that we barely withstand,

and that we admire because it serenely disdains
to destroy us. Each angel is terrifying.

   And so I restrain myself and swallow my call-note

of dark sobbing. Oh, who then can we turn to

when we are in need? Not angels, not people,

and the clever animals already know

we were never entirely at home here,
in the interpreted world. There remains for us, perhaps,

some tree on a hillside that we might see it
every day; there remains a remembered street
and our twisted loyalty to an old habit

that likes it with us, and so stayed on and never left.
   Oh, and the Night: the Night, when the wind between stars

assaults our faces -- with whom has she not lingered? Longed for,

gently disappointing Night, and so hard for any single heart

to bear. But is she any easier for lovers?
Ah, with one another they merely conceal their lot.
   You still don't know? Cast the emptiness from your arms
into the spaces we breathe, and perhaps the birds

will feel the widening air in happier flight.

The opening lines of Rilke's poem in German

Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel

Ordnungen? und gesetzt selbst, es nähme

einer mich plötzlich ans Herz: ich verginge von seinem

stärkeren Dasein. Denn das Schöne ist nichts

als des Schrecklichen Anfang, den wir noch grade ertragen,

und wir bewundern es so, weil es gelassen verschmäht,

uns zu zerstören. Ein jeder Engel ist schrecklich.
   Und so verhalt ich mich denn und verschlucke den Lockruf

dunkelen Schluchzens. Ach, wen vermögen

wir denn zu brauchen? Engel nicht, Menschen nicht,

und die findigen Tiere merken es schon,

daß wir nicht sehr verläßlich zu Haus sind

in der gedeuteten Welt. Es bleibt uns vielleicht

irgend ein Baum an dem Abhang, daß wir ihn täglich

wiedersähen; es bleibt uns die Straße von gestern

und das verzogene Treusein einer Gewohnheit,

der es bei uns gefiel, und so blieb sie und ging nicht.

   O und die Nacht, die Nacht, wenn der Wind voller Weltraum

uns am Angesicht zehrt –, wem bliebe sie nicht, die ersehnte,

sanft enttäuschende, welche dem einzelnen Herzen

mühsam bevorsteht. Ist sie den Liebenden leichter?

Ach, sie verdecken sich nur mit einander ihr Los.

   Weißt du's noch nicht? Wirf aus den Armen die Leere

zu den Räumen hinzu, die wir atmen; vielleicht daß die Vögel

die erweiterte Luft fühlen mit innigerm Flug. 

The First Duino Elegy (lines 1-25), Rainer Maria Rilke, 1912
Translation by Frank Beck

Irene Laett was born in Zürich in 1929. In her youth, she studied painting with Oskar Kokoshka but then became an actress, performing on stage and in TV productions. She later taught elocution at the Saarland School of Music and the Academy of Music and Theater in Hamburg. She died in 2006.

Writing in the newspaper Die Zeit, Rene Drommert wrote that Laett's performances revealed "an intelligence that goes beyond intellectual training and vocal agility." Laett made studio recordings of the works of German author Johann Peter Hebel (1760-1826) and Swiss author Gottfried Keller (1819-1880). The Keller recordings are still available from Osiander.de, the German online bookseller.

The Duino Elegies are a landmark in German-language poetry. The ten poems were written over a period of a decade, but the excerpt above comes from the First Elegy, most of which Rilke wrote in a single day in January 1912. He was staying at the 14th-century Castello di Duino near Trieste, which is pictured above; it belonged to Marie Thurn und Taxis, one of his closest friends.

The links below include Stephen Mitchell's recording of his own, widely read English translation, which captures Rilke's lyricism, but not, I think, the full brunt of his emotions. There's also Santiago Munévar's magisterial performance of a Spanish version by Mexican poet José Joaquín Blanco (b. 1951).

Much has been written about the Elegies, but one of the most useful insights comes from a letter Rilke wrote to his Polish translator, Witold von Hulewicz, in November 1925:

The "Angel" of the Elegies has nothing to do with the angel of the Christian heaven (rather with the angelic figures of Islam) . . . a being who affirms the recognition, in the invisible, of a higher order of reality.

• Irene Laett's Rilke recordings on CD and as e-books
• AUDIO: Gert Westphal reads the First Elegy
  
• AUDIO: Stephen Mitchell reads his English translation of the Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus
  
• AUDIO: Santiago Munévar reads a Spanish translation of the Elegies
  
• Rilke's Collected Poems from Suhrkamp/Insel Verlag
  
• Lou Andreas-Salome's portrayal of a character based on Rilke in her 1921 novel, 'Das Haus'
  
• Recommended: Christiane Marks' translation of Sonnets to Orpheus
• VIDEO: Trailer from a new film about Lou Andreas-Salome and Rilke
• Castello di Duino: a place of pilgrimage for Rilke's readers

Rilke in Valais, Switzerland in 1925