The Work of Rainer Maria Rilke: Selected "New Poems" in Translation A chapbook translated by Alice Derry "Alice Derry's renditions of Rilke's short but difficult New Poems have an ease that comes only from living with the originals for a long time and letting them blossom from within. While many translators of Rilke attempt to soar above the clouds, Derry chooses to walk firmly on the earth observing Rilke's beloved 'things.' Most impressively, these translations manage to capture the tone of controlled urgency that is unmistakably Rilke." Gary Miranda, author of Grace Period and translator of Rilke's Duino Elegies Printed on recycled, acid-free paper in a limited first edition. String-bound, 44 pgs.      $10.00       ISBN  1-929355-10-6 We gladly accept Visa and MasterCard via phone, fax, or email. From the Introduction: Rilke. Begun where so much good began for me, with Lisel Mueller. The late 70's. "But I don't want to write another critical paper," I whined as we began my second semester at Goddard College together. I had already written a critical masters thesis and wanted this degree so I could finally give myself permission to write poems. "What about translation?" she asked. "You've got German. A project in translation could combine poetry and research. What about Rilke?" Another poet I hadn't heard of. I rushed in, she steering me rightly into New Poems, which at that time hadn't been widely translated, and I used Leishman to guide me, teaching myself the true meaning of iambic pentameter along the way. Even as I cringed at some of Leishman's renditions, I learned an enormous respect for him. I found I loved translation, hovering in the no man's land between two languages, so aware of the gifts of each, so in love with each expression, I couldn't see the leap. And then leaping. Lisel helped enormously. I have in the file a card she wrote, "Sat. a.m. The word 'embedded' just came to me for the 'lyre-hand/Rosenranken' lines." Translation depends on that concentration: days spent finding the word. I remember, too, the long sunny afternoons of that Illinois fall lying in the deep white shag rug I had at the time, reading the Elegies, Rilke on one side of the page, Poulin on the other, just to make sure I was getting the more difficult passages, realizing German was one of the most beautiful languages and that certain parts of these poems would be with me always. For me, Rilke's the great poet of out-of-the-body-travel. I value him for taking on what so complicates human existence, the soul. He sifts mystery as he examines the world, and he never lets go of that grounding steadily, head on, at face value.  His poems approach the difficulties of living in the world when one must continually be aware of it, must address oneself in it, must make a way rather than just be, as plants and other animals seem to do. Critic Nicole Krauss writes in the Boston Review, "They (the Elegies) are, paradoxically, about the difficulties of living in the world, even as 'the world exists nowhere but within us'. . . ."  In his sensitive introduction to Stephen Mitchell's translations, Robert Hass writes, "And he knows how immensely difficult it is for us . . . to be anything other than strangers to our own existence."  That knowledge didn't stop Rilke from a constant and rich exploration.  Even when I disagree with him, I love walking the terrain.  Unfortunately for those who don't read German, and heartbreaking for the translator who does, Rilke often transports the reader by sound alone. Just in the music of his lines, I feel sure of discovery.  Perhaps he didn't make the great leap Yeats did from romantic to modernist, but he got close. The New Poems, the Elegies, and the Sonnets show a poet who understood the modern temperament. George Steiner's After Babel was my translation guide. His four steps which only the translator can fill in with details from the two languages and the work at hand C seem the essential ones. First, says Steiner, the act of translation means you care so much about a piece of work you must bring it over, bring it across the thousands of miles of cultural difference, history, and the way a group of people has put words together. You must fall in love with it, trust it to become what you think it can. Secondly, you must be willing to break and enter, bring the translation home, across taboos and borders, without despoiling it. Third, the piece must enrich the new tongue, not violate it. The receiving language itself will become new, a different language with more possibility. Finally, something must be given back to the original. It must receive a new identity and be read in a new, fresh way. Its genius must be reaffirmed. Rilke. I'm glad I didn't have to know the man. Raised in the pressure cooker of the self-imposed, snobby German ghetto of Prague; caught between his romantic and psychologically delicate mother who wanted a girl and forced him into skirts and ribbons, and his father who sent him to military school; caught between his birth (1875) and death (1926) dates, the last gasp of the 19th century and the gruesome reality that was World War I; he was a rolling stone, looking constantly for the place he could settle down and the person he could be. Instead he wrote. Even if his life didn't show it at every turn, one feels the psychological undercurrent in most of the poems: his difficulty sustaining a solid relationship with a woman, except perhaps through letters. Since I want my own life in some way to bear witness to the day-to-day domesticity most women crave and children require in order to grow whole, I have a hard time forgiving him for deserting his wife Clara when their daughter Ruth was only a year old. Sometimes I don't want to give him my breath. On the other hand, my great-aunt Ellen lived almost exactly the same life span as Rilke most of it in Germany where she'd gone to marry. When I think of what Germany dealt out to her, I soften my feelings toward the man I've chosen to bring home. After I translated "Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes" for my master's paper, I knew I wanted to try all the long, narrative blank verse poems which form a chunk at the end of the first section of New Poems. I loved the long lines and the stories, often about women. My own poems show why. Then I had to try "Leda," another Greek woman, and that led me to the two "Apollo" poems. They open the two sections. Everyone's done them; I wanted to try. With their perfect sonnet forms and their musical rhymes, they are impossible, of course. "The Gazelle," "The Bowl of Roses," and "Rose Spirit" interested me because I felt Rilke had captured the essence of roses and gazelles so well, two beings I too have stared long and hard at in my case, the white-tail deer. Despite critics' claims that he never overcame romanticism, Rilke describes these two accurately, even if the descriptions go beyond the physical. Spend some time with the creatures if you don't believe me. I'm not a Rilke scholar. I'm a poet who loves his language, who wanted to bring his poems over, that task, like the writing of a good poem itself, in reality too difficult. Language isn't really up to experience; one language just isn't up to another.  Bent over Rilke, how many times have I said of this flexible, rich mother lode Shakespeare bequeathed to us, "There just isn't any way to say that in English"? "He's the best," I say to friends who don't read German. "I don't see it," they tell me, understandably. So I want to give these, even if they still can't see it. They're what I have. A sample poem (in German and in translation): Früher Apollo Wie manches Mal durch das noch unbelaubte Gezweig ein Morgen durchsieht, der schon ganz so ist in seinem Haupte nichts, was verhindern könnte, daß der Glanz aller Gedichte uns fast tödlich träfe; denn noch kein Schatten ist in seinem Schaun, zu kühl für Lorbeer sind noch seine Schläfe, und später erst wird aus den Augenbraun hochstämmig sich der Rosengarten heben, aus welchem Blätter, einzeln, ausgelöst hintreiben werden auf des Mundes Beben, der jetzt noch still ist, niegebraucht und blinkend und nur mit seinem Lächeln etwas trinkend als würde ihm sein Singen eingefloßt. Early Apollo As now and then through branches leafless still, a morning already deep in its spring shines through: so there is nothing in his mind preventing the gleam of all poetry from striking us a mortal blow.  No shadow touches his gaze yet, his temples are still indifferent to crowns of laurel, and only later from his brow the garden of long-stemmed roses will lift itself, from which the petals, one by one released, will push against his mouth's trembling. His mouth is quiet now, not-used and shining and just drinking a little with his smile, as if his song were silently infused.