TRANSCENDENTAL VERSE

Press, Volume LXXIII, Issue 22004, 30 January 1937, Page 15

TRANSCENDENTAL VERSE

Sonnets to Orpheus. By Rainer Maria Kilke. The German text, with an English translation, and notes by J. B. Leishman. The Hogarth Press. 188 pp. (8/6 net.)

Rilke’s “Poems” and “Requiem and Other Poems” have already been translated. It will be remembered that the poet was profoundly disturbed by war and that he believed that he would never write again. In February, 1922, there came to him a fit of creative energy in which release was granted from all his repressions, and he furiously completed his eight elegies within three weeks. In the same short time he was driven to write the 55 sonnets of the present collection. Rilke declared that the poems rose up and imposed themselves upon him; “They are perhaps the most mysterious, most enigmatic, dictation I have ever endured or performed.” The impulse came from a letter written to the poet by a woman whose young daughter had just died. The girl was a creature of noble simplicity and beauty, and, , as her graces and faculties were sharpened by the onset of death, the mother had caught a glimpse of the soul struggling to fulfil itself and of the transformation that a human being may undergo between life and death. Something of the mother’s exaltation of grief was communicated to Jlilke at a time when he was more than usually sensitive, and when he was, if ever the expression is literally true, inspired. The 55 sonnets cover an emotional artist’s reflections and impressions about mortality and immortality. “Without a knowledge of certain assumptions,” Rilke wrote to a friend, “and some information about my attitude to love and death, much in these poems may be hard to comprehend.” This is a mild observation; not one line is easy to understand, and very few are comprehensible without thought and a second or third reading. Mr Leishman’s introduction is essential, and his notes should be read before the poems. This is an unsatisfactory approach; but it is indispensable, and it is more than worth the trouble. At a glance, it can be seen how close is Mr Leishman’s rendering to the original in rhythm, rhyme, and arrangement.' This equivalence of form has proved to be more just to Rilke than a more exact translation which would have lost some qualities of poetic form. The poet’s thought, as his method of composition suggests, is highly intuitive. To him all natural phenomena, life, death, work, mechanism, institutions, flowers, philosophy, are part of one cosmic movement tending to complete fulfilment. This is no new idea; but Rilke’s emphasis of. his belief is in his language, which, by symbol and myth and

fancy, strains, more tensely than many readers will appreciate, to apprehend human mysteries which, in the phrase of his editor, are on the “dawn of consciousness.” The reviewer can do no more than announce that Rilke’s representation of his view of life will not be completely satisfactory to any reader, but that it will be more or less illuminating according as the reader is prepared to subject hihiself, imaginatively and emotionally, to the suggestions of Rilke’s language. The most unresponsive will, now and then, take fire from a phrase or idea that starts from a poem otherwise difficult and obscure. The title “Sonnets to Orpheus” is symbolic; Orpheus is the ideal poet, at home in this world and the next, linking mortal and immortal, past and present.