The Book of Images by Rainer Maria Rilke
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Introduction
The First Book, Part One
Eingang / Entrance
Aus Einem April / From an April
Zwei Gedichte Zu Hans Thomas Sechzigstem Geburtstage / Two Poems to Hans Thomas on his Sixtieth Birthday
Mondnacht / Moonlight
Ritter / Knight
Mädchenmelancholie / Girl’s Melancholy
Von Den Mädchen / Girls
I / I
II / II
Das Lied Der Bildsäule / The Song of the Statue
Der Wahnsinn / Madness*
Die Liebende / Woman in Love*
Die Braut / The Bride
Die Stille / The Silence
Musik / Music
Die Engel / The Angels
Der Schutzengel / The Guardian Angel
Martyrinnen / Martyrs
Die Heilige / The Saint*
Kindheit / Childhood*
Aus Einer Kindheit / From a Childhood
Der Knabe / The Boy*
Die Konfirmanden / The Confirmed*
Das Abendmahl / The Last Supper*
The First Book, Part Two
Initiale / Initial
Zum Einschlafen Zu Sagen / To Say Before Going to Sleep
Menschen Bei Nacht / Human Beings at Night
Der Nachbar / The Neighbor*
Pont Du Carrousel / Pont Du Carrousel*
Der Einsame / The Solitary*
Die Aschanti / The Ashanti*
Der Letzte / The Last of his Line
Bangnis / Apprehension
Klage / Lament
Einsamkeit / Solitude*
Herbsttag / Autumn Day*
Erinnerung / Memory*
Ende Des Herbstes / End of Autumn*
Herbst / Autumn*
Am Rande Der Nacht / On the Edge of Night
Gebet / Prayer
Fortschritt / Progress
Vorgefühl / Presentiment*
Sturm / Storm*
Abend in Skåne / Evening in Skåne*
Abend / Evening*
Ernste Stunde / Solemn Hour
Strophen / Strophes
The Second Book, Part One
Initiale / Initial
Verkündigung / Annunciation
Die Heiligen Drei Könige / The Three Holy Kings
In Der Certosa / In the Certosa
Das Jüngste Gericht / The Last Judgment
Karl Der Zwölfte Von Schweden Reitet in Der Ukraine / Charles the Twelfth of Sweden Rides in the Ukraine
Der Sohn / The Son
Die Zaren / The Tsars*
I / I
II / II
III / III
IV / IV
V / V
VI / VI
Der Sänger Singt Vor Einem Fürstenkind / The Singer Sings Before a Child of Princes
Die Aus Dem Hause Colonna / Those of the House of Colonna*
The Second Book, Part Two
Fragmente Aus Verlorenen Tagen / Fragments From Lost Days
Die Stimmen / The Voices: Nine Leaves with a Title Leaf*
Titelblatt / Title Leaf
Das Lied Des Bettlers / The Song of the Beggar
Das Lied Des Blinden / The Song of the Blind Man
Das Lied Des Trinkers / The Song of the Drunkard
Das Lied Des Selbstmörders / The Song of the Suicide
Das Lied Der Witwe / The Song of the Widow
Das Lied Des Idioten / The Song of the Idiot
Das Lied Der Waise / The Song of the Orphan Girl
Das Lied Des Zwerges / The Song of the Dwarf
Das Lied Des Aussätzigen / The Song of the Leper
Von Den Fontänen / About Fountains
Der Lesende / The Man Reading
Der Schauende / The Man Watching
Aus Einer Sturmnacht / From a Stormy Night
Titelblatt / Title Leaf
1 / 1
2 / 2
3 / 3
4 / 4
5 / 5
6 / 6
7 / 7
8 / 8
Die Blinde / The Blind Woman
Requiem / Requiem
Schluszstück / Closing Piece
Notes
Also by Edward Snow
Copyright
*First appeared in the 1906 edition of Das Buch der Bilder.
INTRODUCTION
Readers of Rilke in English are probably both more and less familiar with The Book of Images (Das Buck der Bilder) than they suppose. The volume contains a startling number of Rilke’s most famous poems. “Autumn,” “Lament,” “The Neighbor,” “Entrance,” “Evening,” “Childhood,” “Autumn Day”: these are the poems through which many readers first encounter Rilke, and become mesmerized by his work. They are also the poems that tend to epitomize what it means to characterize something—a mood, a stance, a cadence, a quality of voice, a way of looking—as “Rilkean.” Indeed, it could be claimed that if The Book of Images were the only work we had, the Rilke we know would still exist. The poet of memory, of childhood, of leave-taking and looking-back; the poet of night and its vastnesses; the poet of human separations; the poet of thresholds and silences, of landscapes charged with remoteness and expectancy; the poet—especially—of solitude, in its endless inflections: all are to be found here, in poems as carefully proposed as anything Rilke ever wrote.
Yet taken as a whole, The Book of Images probably remains the least familiar of Rilke’s major works. The volume has never been translated in its entirety into English. There are no book-length studies of it. Treatments of Rilke’s oeuvre rarely accord it a chapter of its own. Chronologies often misplace it. Many of its most extraordinary poems—“Those of the House of Colonna,” “About Fountains,” and “Fragments from Lost Days,” for instance—remain virtually unmentioned in literature on Rilke.
Part of the reason for this neglect must have to do with the volume’s scattered, hybrid quality, which makes generalizing about it so difficult. Indeed, The Book of Images can seem almost studied in its variousness. Callow jugendstil pieces about young maidens and abandoned brides coexist with deftly poised lyrics that seek a complex relation with otherness and the outside world. And all kinds of poems are present. Short lyrics, dialogues, interior monologues, poems in other voices, quasi-ballads, narrative excursions into myth and history, religious poems (serious and wry), psychological portraits, a long requiem, three different poem cycles, and odd stream-of-consciousness pieces (“About Fountains,” “Fragments from Lost Days”) fill out the four sections of The Book of Images.
Such heterogeneity mirrors the circumstances in which the volume was composed. Most of Rilke’s great works came into being rapidly, in short, creative bursts: twenty-six days in 1899 for the first section of The Book of Hours, eight days each in 1901 and 1903 for the last two sections, for a total of one hundred and thirty-five poems; most of the New Poems in successive summers of 1906 and 1907; all fifty-five of the Sonnets to Orpheus and six of the ten Duino Elegies in a single February of 1922. But The Book of Images evolved gradually, over a seven-year period (June 1899 to August 1906) that spans experiences which mark the great transition in Rilke’s early life: his complicated relationship with Lou Andreas-Salomé, their two trips to Russia together, and their gradual estrangement; his stay at Worpswede, an artists’ colony near Bremen where he met Clara Westhoff and Paul
Amid all this eventfulness, The Book of Images appeared twice, in very different versions. A first edition was published in July 1902 (Rilke was twenty-six at the time), and contained forty-five poems written between 1898 and 1901, the majority of them taken from the diaries Rilke kept at Berlin-Schmargendorfer and Worpswede. A second edition (the one translated here) appeared four years later, in December 1906, greatly altering and expanding the first. In it Rilke mixed in thirty-seven new poems, changed the order of the original sequence, deleted one poem and the final strophe of a second, gave names to untitled pieces, spliced separate poems together (“Girls,” “The Son,” “Charles the Twelfth of Sweden Rides in the Ukraine”), and divided the whole into two books, each with two parts.
In the period of revision between the two editions, Rilke was at work on other projects as well, putting old concerns behind him and feeling his way into new ones. The third and final section of The Book of Hours was written in 1903, and the completed volume was published in 1905. A second edition of the popular Stories of God (first published in 1900) appeared in 1904. The Lay of the Love and Death of Cornet Christopher Rilke, written in 1899 and a favorite whenever Rilke gave readings, was published in its final form in 1906. A monograph on Worpswede, in which concerns with landscape and painting produce intense visual description, appeared in 1903, along with the first edition of Rilke’s book on Rodin, so crucial to the aesthetic of the New Poems. The New Poems themselves were begun during this period (some thirty existed by the time Rilke wrote “The Voices,” the last piece composed for The Book of Images), and The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, which would not be published until 1910, had by 1906 become a major preoccupation.
It is no wonder, then, that The Book of Images should make such a varied impression. In a very real sense the volume spans whole phases of Rilke’s career, and can be felt to trace their arc: reaching back to the art-nouveau mannerisms of the earliest poems, containing in its interstices the spirituality of The Book of Hours, overlapping the first of the ego-effacing New Poems, and pointing beyond them (in such poems as “Human Beings at Night,” “The Ashanti,” “Pont du Carrousel,” “The Neighbor,” and especially “The Voices”) to The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, with its feelings about the city’s estranging power and the unsettling presence there of God’s “maimed ones.” Yet at the same time The Book of Images seems without any agenda or unifying vision of its own (in this it differs radically from the works that surround it): its four-part structure seems arbitrarily imposed, and only emphasizes the volume as a sort of catchall, where various experiments in style, genre, subject, and voice find a place.
Not that this absence of agenda should necessarily be regretted. It makes for perhaps the most genuinely open of Rilke’s works. Even the dozen or so awkward poems in The Book of Images—“Girls,” “The Singer Sings Before a Child of Princes,” and “Requiem,” for example—seem revealing of Rilke the man, the young poet, in ways his earlier or later work seldom allows. Often one has the sense of Rilke writing his way into or through a poem, finding a feeling, an image, a situation, and following it wherever it leads him, not refining out what is weakest in the finished work but leaving it impure. The technique (if we can call it that) leaves Rilke painfully exposed: when nothing “comes” the result can be a kind of overwrought posturing, as in the puerile sentimentality of “Girl’s Melancholy” or the sometimes effete inventiveness of “From a Stormy Night.” But when the initial impulse perseveres, and against expectation finds its way into something real and unforced, the effect can be extremely moving—as in “The Blind Woman,” where at some point amid the verbal thrashing-about one begins to feel the quietly evolving strength of the old woman’s own confident voice. That evolution seems to take place not only in the speaker but in the poem’s own texture, as it works through sentimentality and overdramatization toward some special place beyond. Several of the poems in The Book of Images “evolve” this way, beginning with scant promise yet coming to a haunting close. “The Son,” “About Fountains,” “Martyrs,” “The Last Judgment,” the final section of “The Tsars,” the cycle “From a Stormy Night,” perhaps even “The Saint” and (at the very last moment) “The Three Holy Kings”: these poems can seem variously awkward, forced, tedious, or obscure, yet they all reach beautifully voiced conclusions.
In the most brilliant of the poems in The Book of Images, however, Rilke is uncannily confident from the first. The many great lyrics in the volume’s first half seem blessed with perfect pitch. The impulse that shapes their cadences seems to come from a place so deep and so exposed that there is a complete break with the sheltered ego-lyrics of the early work. When one turns from The Book of Hours to the best of these poems, the change in voice is dramatic. It is as if there has been “a ripening in silence,” to adapt a phrase from “Entrance.” The cloistered persona, the discursive, quasi-religious manner of the former volume are cast away, and a poem like “Evening” suddenly stands free, addressing us with an immediacy and closeness not so much “spoken” as shaped from and invested with the qualities of voice:
Slowly the evening puts on the garments
held for it by a rim of ancient trees;
you watch: and the lands divide from you,
one going heavenward, one that falls;
and leave you, to neither quite belonging,
not quite so dark as the house sunk in silence,
not quite so surely pledging the eternal
as that which grows star each night and climbs—
and leave you (inexpressibly to untangle)
your life afraid and huge and ripening,
so that it, now bound in and now embracing,
grows alternately stone in you and star.
Nothing in the early work prepares us for this stately, unforced solemnity, so assured in relation to the tangle of emotions it expresses. And it is as beautifully crafted as anything in the New Poems. The only difference is that while the most radical of the New Poems exploit syntax and semantic density to achieve their version of sculptural “thingness,”1 “Evening” works in the vocal register. Its focus may be visual, specific, oriented outward, but timing and cadence are its métier. It shapes voice, and this as much as anything else is what gives the poem its anti-impressionistic feeling.
* * *
Rilke chose to call this volume of poems Das Buch der Bilder, which can mean either a book of pictures or a book of images. I have translated it as “The Book of Images” in order not to trivialize the key term Bild, whose dualities are crucial to the poems. The word can designate a picture, a portrait, or any other form of pictorial representation (sculptural, architectural), and thus suggests a strong “belonging” to the visual world. But it can also designate an image that works as a metaphor—a figurative entity pointing to realities beyond or behind it. Bilder in this sense can populate the visual realm with traces, invisible connections, imaginings, remembrances, intimations of things lost or unrealized, waiting to be recalled or brought (back) to life.
The poems knowingly exploit these complications. The word first appears in “Girls I,” which asserts that girls, unlike others (who must travel long paths to reach “the dark poets”), “don’t ask/what bridge leads to images (Bildern).” Here the “image” connotes a desired place, a way of seeing or relating to life that requires (at least for “others”) a crossing-over. But only two poems later, i
The contradictions multiply in “Those of the House of Colonna,” where three different uses of Bild are played against one another. The poem opens as the speaker views, with a mixture of admiration and envy, portraits of the noblemen of a great Italian family: “Your face is so filled with gazing, / because for you the world was picture and picture (Bild und Bild).” The implication is that for these Renaissance princes, with their pragmatic, world-oriented realism, the world was what it looked like: “out of armor, flags, ripe fruit, and women / welled for you that great confidence/that everything is and counts.” But there is an irony: these men of action “stand now so motionless / in portraits (Bildern),” displayed forever in images that are both unnatural poses and true pictures of their self-fashioned, disciplined manhood. And that irony yields to another, as the speaker (himself a grown man) suddenly questions them about their forgotten or erased childhood, which he proceeds to recall for them in fond detail, as a time when imagination transformed or was enthralled by everything seen, when windows opened like doors upon distances, and when images engendered life in secluded places: “Back then the altar, with its painting (Bilde) /on which Mary gave birth, was tucked away / in the solitary side aisle.” It is as if the “actual” portraits become a bridge into the realm they signify as lost forever. At the end of the poem, the speaker, having crossed that bridge, remains in the imagined “back then,” still viewing the adult figures in the portraits but addressing them—with a new perspective—as “boys.”
It would be an adventure to trace the exfoliations of Bild throughout the poems, especially as the word becomes involved with other terms of similar complexity and weight—“voice” (Stimme), for instance, which often seems a strange ontological category bearing little relation to its ordinary-language meanings. One of the pleasures of the volume can be exploring its “secret architecture” (to use Baudelaire’s phrase), where motifs combine and recombine in intricate relations. Hand and face, for instance, are juxtaposed in the final lines of “From a Childhood” and “Those of the House of Colonna”; become a central opposition in “Prayer”; and intertwine with subtle polarities of red and white in “The Tsars” and “In the Certosa.” Obviously there are nascent themes here. The play of images is a way of thinking, and even this small cluster of motifs yields paradoxes of life viewed and grasped, possessed and relinquished, lived and imagined, sacrificed and transcended, undergone and belatedly understood. But to distill from such paradoxes (which are already deductions from sensuous particulars) a set of concerns that might give the book coherence would in the end only diminish its scope, and betray the tacit dimension where images leave their meanings. Rilke himself once expressed aversion to such resolution (it was during the period when he was working on these poems), and his words might almost be those of The Book of Images itself: