Notes

Introduction

1. I’m quoting this and all other poems of Rilke from Edward Snow’s translations, whose power and brilliance I deeply admire.

Pont Du Carrousel

A bridge over the Seine to the Place du Carrousel in Paris.

The Ashanti

A region in West Africa, now part of Ghana; here signifying the inhabitants of or from that region.

An amusement park with zoo in the Bois de Boulogne, Paris.

Abishag (II)

1 Kings I:1–4: “And when the king [David] was old and burdened with years, he could not grow warm, even though they covered him with clothes. Then his servants said to him: ‘Let there be sought for my lord the king a young girl, a virgin, who will stand before the king and care for him and sleep in his arms and warm my lord the king.’ And they searched for a beautiful girl throughout all the lands of Israel, and found Abishag from Shunam, and brought her to the king. And she was indeed beautiful, and she cared for the king and served him. But the king knew her not.”

Quai Du Rosaire

The poem plays throughout on the identity of Bruges as “Bruges-la-Morte,” a famous and thriving medieval city that in its wane—owing in part to the loss of its natural harbor—became a symbol of mutability and transience.

Tombs of the Hetaerae

Courtesans or concubines in ancient Greece.

Roman Campagna

The Appian Way, ancient high road that runs through the Roman countryside to lower Italy and eventually enters the Pontine Marshes (hence, perhaps, the obscure ins Fieber of line 3). The ruins of the magnificent Thermae, or baths, of Caracalla are the last important building it passes before it leaves the city, and tombs line its passage through the countryside.

Night Drive

A large park (literally, “Summer Garden”) that belonged to the czars.

San Marco

Literally, a four-in-hand, or quadriga. The reference is almost certainly to the four bronze horses of San Marco, treasures of antiquity that stand over the central porch of the west front of St. Mark’s. They were brought to Venice from Constantinople in 1204, as part of the plunder when that city was taken in the Fourth Crusade.

The Lute

Most commentators suggest Tullia d’Aragona, a famous courtesan (as well as poet and musician) of sixteenth-century Italy. But a still more famous Tullia is Cicero’s daughter, whose body, according to legend, was found after fifteen hundred years in a monument along the Appian Way, with a lamp still burning there, before contact with the air turned both to dust. (Donne alludes to the legend, and to Tullia by name, in one of his epithalamiums.) The name should probably be allowed its mystery. It assumes an intimacy and a lived dimension that exclude us; as such it underscores the lute’s inaccessibility, both as historical artifact and as Rilkean “thing.”

The Flamingos

A Greek courtesan famed for her beauty; she is supposed to have modeled for the sculptor Praxiteles.

The First Elegy

An Italian noblewoman (1523–54) who fell in love with Count Collatino di Collalto at the age of twenty-six and was deserted by him three years later. She responded by recording the story of their love and her experience of solitude and loss in a series of two hundred sonnets.

A famous church in Venice, which Rilke visited twice in 1911. The reference is to one of the commemorative tablets on the church walls—it isn’t known which one, though there has been much speculation.

An obscure figure of Greek myth. Several legends refer to him, always in connection with music, early death, and his relation to Apollo—either as kin (brother, son) or as slain, would-be rival. Some commentaries on “The First Elegy” cite stories in which the void left by Linos’s death was so sudden and severe that its trembling amazement was called music. Others make reference to the ritual lament for Linos, supposedly related to music’s origin because those who were numbed by his death were revived by the song of Orpheus. Whatever Rilke’s sources (and they are fragmentary at best), he conflates the cosmological and the psychological to construct his own elliptical myth of grief: in the beginning full space nurturing an “almost divine” youth; then fullness transformed into emptiness (the void is not originary here; it comes into being as the absence of presence) when the youth inexplicably “steps out of it,” “leaves,” “is gone” (the word “death” is studiously avoided); then the penetration (equally unexplained) into this absence—characterized not as a realm of lament but as shock petrifying into rigidity, numbness, an almost Golgotha-like aridity of feeling—by a music that is ambiguously both “first” and “daring,” “adventurous” (the music is already there; no Orphic maker or source is indicated); and with that the desert spell is broken, the void comes alive—not with music per se but with “vibrations,” phenomena prior to melodies heard or feelings felt.

The Second Elegy

A figure from the apocryphal Book of Tobit. Ordered by his dying father to travel from Nineveh to Media to retrieve a sum of money being held there by another man, Tobias looks for someone who knows the way and encounters a youth his own age who is the archangel Raphael in disguise. The angel agrees to accompany him, “and so the two went forth, and the young man’s dog went with them.”

Ancient Greek marble tombstones or funerary plaques, often carved with scenes of intimate everyday interaction.

The Fourth Elegy

Rilke’s cousin, Egon von Rilke (1873–80), to whose memory Sonnet 2.8 of the Sonnets to Orpheus is dedicated.

The Fifth Elegy

Frau Hertha Koenig was a lyricist who in December 1914 had purchased, perhaps at Rilke’s suggestion, Picasso’s 1905 painting La famille des saltimbanques. Rilke subsequently wrote to her asking permission to reside in her Munich apartment while she was away on her country vacation. She granted his request, and he spent the summer and early fall of 1915 living beside “the great Picasso.” The human figures who stand quietly, almost abstractedly in Picasso’s painting mingle in Rilke’s imagination with a troupe of real-life acrobats he observed in Paris, and about whom he wrote a long account in a notebook entry of 1907.

This passage is usually glossed along the following lines: Rilke, perceiving the standing figures in the Picasso Saltimbanques as forming a large D, puns on this visual peculiarity by coining the word Dastehen (roughly, “standing-thereness,” and strongly echoing Dasein—“existence,” “being-thereness”) to register the quality of the acrobats’ presence. Hence the translator’s challenge is to find an equivalent word that begins with a capital D. But this line of thought may be fundamentally in error. The elegy visualizes a family of itinerant acrobats performing in the outlying regions of the city before passersby who randomly gather and disperse. The large initial letter of their Dastehen—barely there, only a moment erect and on show, before “even the strongest” are rolled and crumpled again—likely refers to the figure they construct in one of their feats of acrobatic balancing (later in the elegy Rilke will employ the metaphor of a swiftly erected and deconstructed tree). The initial letter they form would thus be like those in the grotesque alphabets of entwined bodies so popular with late medieval engravers.

The reference is to August II, king of Poland (1670–1733). He was notorious for his feats of strength, his drinking bouts, and his sexual prowess. According to legend he fathered more than a hundred children.

An abbreviation for Subrisio Saltatoris—“acrobat’s smile.” The passage envisions an apothecary’s shelf with small labeled vials on it.

The Sixth Elegy

The site of the Temple of Amon in southern Egypt, which Rilke visited in 1911. The temple’s stone pillars depict battle scenes with the pharaoh-generals in their conquering chariots.

The Eighth Elegy

The Etruscans depicted the soul as a bird on the walls of their sarcophagus chambers. The lids of the sarcophagi themselves were often sculpted representations of the dead person lying in repose.

The Tenth Elegy

Pschent is a form of the ancient Egyptian word for the double crown worn by the pharaohs to signify the union of Upper and Lower Egypt. But the turn-of-the-century Egyptologists also used the term to designate the headcloth over which the crown was worn. Before the restoration of the Sphinx in 1925, an actual owl supposedly nested at the headcloth’s edge.

First Part

6

Herbs, supposedly with the power to summon the dead.

10

The ancient stone coffins are often used as troughs or basins in Italian towns and the surrounding countryside; see Rilke’s “Roman Sarcophagi” in New Poems (1907).

“The second stanza refers to the graves in the famous old cemetery of the Alyscamps near Arles, which are also mentioned in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge.”—Rilke’s handwritten note. The latter passage has Malte imagining the prodigal son as a solitary young shepherd standing “in the spirit-populated shadows of the Alyscamps, his gaze following the flight of a dragonfly among the tombs that stand open like the graves of the resurrected.”

20

The episode with the white horse occurred in May 1900 during Rilke’s second Russian trip with Lou Andreas-Salomé. Writing her in May 1922 about the Elegies and Sonnets, he marvels: “And imagine,… I wrote, made, the horse, you remember, that free happy white horse with the hobble on his foreleg who once, at approach of evening, came galloping over toward us so joyously on a Volga meadow—… I made him, as an ex voto for Orpheus!—What is time?—When is Now?—Across so many years he leapt, with his total happiness, into my wide-open feeling.”

21

“This little Spring song seems to me, as it were, an ‘interpretation’ of a remarkable, dancing music I once heard sung by the convent children at morning Mass in the little cloister church at Ronda (in southern Spain). The children, always to this dance rhythm, sang a text I didn’t know, accompanied by triangle and tambourine.” —One of only two notes (the other to Sonnet 2.11) that Rilke appended to the published text of the Sonnets.

Second Part

3

A large stag, with sixteen points or branches on its antlers.

8

“The lamb (in medieval paintings) which speaks only by means of a scroll with an inscription on it.” —Rilke’s handwritten note.

The poet’s cousin, who died while still a child. He is also commemorated in “The Fourth Elegy” and The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge.

11

“Refers to the way in which, according to an ancient hunting custom in certain regions of Karst, the strangely pale grotto doves are killed. Hunters carefully lower large pieces of cloth into the caverns and then suddenly shake them in a special way. The doves, startled out of their subterranean abodes, are shot during their terrified escape.” —Rilke’s note.

A region along the Dalmatian coast known for its limestone caverns.

12

A nymph pursued by Apollo and transformed into a laurel tree.

22

A site of ancient ruins in Egypt, which Rilke visited in early 1911: “This inconceivable temple-world of Karnak, at which, on the very first evening, and again yesterday, in the moon just starting to wane, I gazed, gazed, gazed,—my God, one gathers oneself, looks with all one’s power of belief through both totally focused eyes—and yet it begins beyond them, stretches everywhere far beyond them (only a god can command such a field of view)—and there stands a lotus-bud column, solitary, surviving, and one cannot grasp it, so purely does it stand there, out beyond one’s life…” (letter to Clara Rilke, January 18, 1911).

27

In Gnostic tradition, a lower deity who created the world of time.

Turning

Rudolf Kassner (1873–1959), Austrian writer and cultural philosopher and Rilke’s close friend (the eighth Duino elegy is dedicated to him). The epigraph is one of Kassner’s “Sayings of the Yogi” (1911), altered by Rilke’s strong misremembering of it. Its actual wording is: “He who wants to proceed from inner intensity [Innigkeit] to greatness must sacrifice himself.”

 

In a selection of unpublished poems Rilke copied out for Katharina Kippenberg in June 1926, this poem bears the dedication “from M’s belongings,” along with the postscript “Written on the evening before the Orpheus sonnets.”

Antistrophes

Rilke originally conceived this poem as the fifth of the Duino Elegies; he replaced it with the “Saltimbanques,” the last of the elegies to be composed. (It was written on February 14, five days after “Antistrophes” was completed.)

 

Epitaph composed by Rilke and included in his last will and testament. It is inscribed on his tombstone in the churchyard at Raron, Switzerland.

Elegy

One of the great modern Russian poets. Without ever meeting, she and Rilke carried on a passionate correspondence (which she initiated) during the spring and summer of 1926. Her long poem “Novogodnee,” written in early January 1927, addresses a loved Rilke with wild directness, as in a phantasmic refusal to grieve.

Probably a stop on Rilke’s trip to Egypt in 1911. What he “saw” there remains obscure, as does the elliptical formulation of a renunciation or self-withholding in the poem’s next line. Something of what Rilke has in mind may be illuminated by a passage from a letter to Katharina Kippenberg of May 28, 1924: “[Instead of picking flowers from my garden and sending them to you for your birthday on a journey they could never survive,] I will offer them in the manner of the sacrificers on the Egyptian reliefs, who dedicated and presented their flowers to the gods not by picking them, but by holding their hands for a time quietly and intently around the living, growing stems.”

 

[Renunciation.… this]: These four lines (in brackets here) are canceled in the pocketbook.