How can it be explained that a mature poet, who at that time of his life had an unexcelled power over his native language, would give up his own perfected instrument to try another?7
Perhaps his personal breakthrough and widespread acclaim caused something inside Rilke’s being to relax, because it was then that he began to write seriously in French. The switch was quite abrupt, like a visual artist leaving behind the oil paints to take up watercolors. Rilke grew more and more outspoken in his enthusiasm for the French language, especially following encouragement by French poets André Gide and Paul Valéry. Biographer Donald Prater writes that “he compared French with ‘a beautiful vine ripened over the centuries’ and cultivated according to well-defined laws: a language with a clarity and sureness which his own was far from having achieved.”8
Translator Willis Barnstone says that, once translated, a poem becomes an orphan stripped of its history. If that’s true, the poems in this book are doubly orphaned because Rilke wrote in his second language while ignoring the heavy historical context of centuries of French literary tradition.
There are at least two instances where Rilke spoke directly about why he switched to French late in his life. Following the political turmoil of WWI, he wrote: “How very much I hate this people [the Germans] . . . Nobody will ever be able to claim that I write in their language!”9
Second, he considered a handful of French words uniquely beautiful by their untranslatable nature, including “orchard,” and “palm.” In the title poem of his series, “Orchards” [Vergers], he begins this way:
Perhaps, dear borrowed language,
I’ve been emboldened to use you because
of the rustic word whose unique domain
has taunted me forever: Verger.
In addition, we can imagine the healing effect on Rilke of the rolling hills, vineyards and hospitality of the Valais. He’d completed his greatest works at Muzot, his first real home, a place of refuge where he was to live out his remaining years in spite of a life-long habit of restlessness.
This French-speaking region of Switzerland seemed refreshingly untouched by the war. He was so enamored of the place that he even changed his citizenship. He planted roses, he walked the lanes through the vineyards, he watched and wrote about the wind and sky.
I suspect there may be one more partial answer to the question, “Why French?”: Rilke’s relationship to a woman named Elisabeth Dorothée Kossowska, known by the nicknames Baladine, Merline, or Mouky. Like Rilke, she had a Germanic background and for political and philosophical reasons that closely aligned with Rilke’s, came to reject that culture. Their passionate exchange of letters in French (published in Zürich in 1954) filled the intervals between their meetings and would last until the end of his life.
Some have claimed that French, for Rilke, was a mere game or language exercise, but I don’t believe it, given the quality of the poems. Rilke’s French was good. He rarely made errors, and like any poet or literary figure, puts his mark on the language and expands it, adds to it his own flavor. Nor does his French sound or feel like German, though some critics disagree. He was not unduly influenced by any particular French author, in spite of his close relationship with Paul Valéry whose poems he translated at the time he was producing his French poems. He was praised by Valéry, André Gide, and Jean Cocteau. Liselotte Dieckmann writes: “A bold originality characterizes Rilke’s poems; he shows a mastery of the adopted language which he uses freely as an instrument of genuine poetic expression.”10
Dieckmann also says this: “The poet was forced, by the nature of his relationship to the new language, to write simple poetry; and at the same time, the trend towards simplicity appears as the natural relief after the overwhelming task which the Elegies had put before him. A feeling of happy relaxation goes through the French poems; . . . The French language, besides being a new instrument for the poet, has the advantage over the German language of offering a simplicity of style as well as of verse form without becoming trite or overly plain.”11
This corresponds with what I persistently felt as I translated the French poems. I sensed no literary baggage; there was a light feeling to them, even when the subject was melancholy, even gloomy.
Lastly, we should perhaps be asking whether the question “Why French?” really matters. Americans, especially writers and linguists, who have spent time in Europe, know that competency in other languages is not unusual there.
During an exchange of letters between Rilke and Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva, she writes: “Dear Rainer, Goethe says somewhere that one cannot achieve anything of significance in a foreign language—and that has always rung false to me . . . Writing poetry is in itself translating from the mother tongue into another, whether French or German should make no difference . . .”12
7. Liselotte Dieckmann, “Rainer Maria Rilke’s French Poems,” Modern Language Quarterly 12 (1951) 321.
8. Donald Prater, A Ringing Glass (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 363.
9. Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Life, trans. Ulrich Baer (New York: Random House, 2005), xix.
10. Dieckmann, “Rainer Maria Rilke’s French Poems,” 321.
11. Ibid., 328.
12. Art Beck, “Essay: How Not to Review a Translation,” Your Impossible Voice, http://www.yourimpossiblevoice.com/essay-not-review-translation.