“We could easily be made to believe that nothing happened, and yet we have changed, as a house that a guest has entered changes.”1
Like many students of German literature, I sailed through college with a passing understanding of Rainer Maria Rilke’s work. More than a dozen years of post-college adventures and foreign travels followed, until I finally landed in Los Angeles where I encountered these poems in a close, dusty bookstore, by sheer happenstance.
I didn’t quite believe that Rilke had really written so much in French, so I bought the hefty volume, The Complete French Poems.2 I read enough of it to learn that, yes, Rilke had written eight or nine series of poems and fragments (about 400 in all) in French shortly before he died. Before I could get very far, life intervened and the book lay half-forgotten among the others on my shelves, all of which tumbled to the floor a few months later, January 1994, during the Northridge earthquake. Luckily, I was living a few suburbs away from the epicenter, so, for me, results of the shaking were no worse than kitchen cupboards being emptied, a few dishes broken, and a living room floor littered with books. Exhausted from the shock and its aftermath, I sat down and opened Rilke’s French poems quite at random.
I was looking for comfort in the musical words of the master I remembered from college; I wanted desperately to nourish myself with words, learn something by heart that would affirm and soften my inner state. Instead, I was dismayed to find that the translation conferred little of Rilke’s melancholic charm and depth. Even more surprising was the discovery that I was holding in my hands the only existing English translation of these poems to date. And, it was a book that hadn’t even been compiled until 1979, more than five decades after Rilke’s death!
My curiosity was stirred. After all, I had just spent four uninterrupted years completely immersed in the French language while living in France and Casablanca. It was clear to me, when I compared the original to the translation, that these poems had not yet found the fullness of their expression in English. I set the book aside for further study, and over the next weeks and months, tentatively used a light pencil to change a word here and there.
Slowly the poems grew on me, and, with the encouragement of friends, I continued to re-translate them. It took years before I joined the American Literary Translators’ Association and actually considered myself a translator. As a non-academic, I struggled to find my way through the translation process without the anchor or constraint of theory and background knowledge.
The process of taking the poems apart and putting them back together in my native English felt unfamiliar and difficult. But the poems kept pulling on me, and I craved guidance from the translators I loved to read. I decided to reach out. I wrote to Robert Bly and Coleman Barks asking them to direct me toward books, literary clubs, someone, anyone who could help. To my utter amazement, both men wrote back. A hand-typed letter on an old-fashioned half sheet of stationery bore a short message from Robert Bly, referring me to his excellent pamphlet, The Eight Stages of Translation,3 which served as my only direct instruction on how to think about a poem while attempting to translate it.
From Coleman Barks came a postcard: “I’m retired now, but I certainly share your enthusiasm for Rilke. Good luck.”
Later I wrote to Franz Wright, whose collection of translations, The Unknown Rilke4—far and away the best Rilke translations I have experienced—inspires me still. He had the humility to tell me that he’d been driven half-mad while translating Rilke, which, of course, had the effect on me of great encouragement. I will be forever grateful to these three poet-translators for their open-hearted responses to my efforts.
This book includes five chapters: “Roses,” “Windows,” “Affectionate Tribute to France,” “Valaisian Quatrains,” and “Orchards.” Rilke published these as separate books of poems, in some cases posthumously. There are a few exceptions to and repetitions in the way the poems are grouped together. I based my decisions on A. Poulin’s book, with much gratitude for his pioneering efforts. The interested reader should refer to his introduction in The Complete French Poems for careful analysis and justification of the chapters and their chronology. I have included almost all the poems in each of the series, leaving out those poems I felt did not fit with the series due to the style or subject matter.
After two decades, I have not yet completed this project: there are almost two hundred French poems I have not included in this book. I am a bit chagrined about the amount of time it has taken me. But Rilke himself justifies the slowness of the creative process, exhorting the artist to avoid guilt and pressure, to embrace unencumbered time, even fallow periods and apparent indolence to let the work rest and mature. All of these poems have become long-term guests in my house, and even when I am not interacting with them directly, they are acting on me.
1. Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, trans. Stephen Mitchell (Boston: Shambala, 1993), 93–94.
2. Rainer Maria Rilke, Complete French Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. A. Poulin Jr. (Saint Paul: Graywolf, 1979).
3. Robert Bly, The Eight Stages of Translation (Saint Paul: Ally, 1991).
4. Rainer Maria Rilke, The Unknown Rilke: Expanded Edition, trans. Franz Wright (Oberlin: Oberlin College Press, 1990).