Victoria Moul reviews Rainer Maria Rilke, Change Your Life. Essential Poems, selected, translated and introduced by Martyn Crucefix (Pushkin Press Classics, 2024).
This Penguin-sized paperback from Pushkin Classics has a surprisingly glossy, even slightly “self-help” feel, with its headline slogan (Change Your Life) and a cover endorsement by Philip Pullman (“For me, the greatest poetry of the 20th century”). Why we should care particularly what Pullman thinks about 20th century poetry is not obvious, but even if Pullman is not your thing, don’t let that put you off, because this is a fantastic translation. I spend a lot of my time writing about the translation of poetry and this is by far the best book of verse in translation I’ve read this year. Its greatest achievement is simple to identify, though extremely hard to do well: Crucefix’s translations are, almost without exception, real poems in English.
Rilke is probably the best-known twentieth-century German poet and I expect most readers of The Friday Poem will know something of his work, by reputation if not in greater detail. Rilke’s poetry was and remains hugely popular, but he has also always been a “poet’s poet”, a touchstone writer across Europe. If you enjoy English poetry by authors as disparate as, say, W. B. Yeats, W. H. Auden, Keith Douglas and James Tate, you will see the connections between Rilke’s mature style and their own. There are plenty of editions and translations to choose from, but if you’re a complete beginner – perhaps you’ve always meant to get to grips with him – I can’t imagine a better starting point than this one.
Crucefix’s translations are, almost without exception, real poems in English
If on the other hand you already know Rilke moderately well – perhaps you have a few favourite poems but aren’t an expert – you’re likely to find new poems here, and above all a new sense of the shape of Rilke’s achievement overall. The editions I’ve owned in the past had a smaller selection which was heavier on the most famous collections – the New Poems of 1907 and 1908 which contain probably the best-known stand-alone lyrics, like ‘The Panther’ and ‘Archaic Torso of Apollo’, and then the remarkable later work of the Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus. Crucefix’s book gave me a much clearer sense of how these two phases are linked to each other, and the kinds of poetry Rilke was writing before, between and after them. As I live in France and read a lot of French poetry, I was particularly fascinated by the selection of poems at the end translated not from German but from French. I have to admit that I didn’t even know that Rilke wrote in French at the end of his life, but these poems do indeed, in Crucefix’s translations, feel not just French but specifically 1920s French.
They are, in one sense, simple lyrics about the natural world, but the way that their simplicity borders upon strangeness and their natural descriptions border upon the surreal seems to echo French poets of the period like Robert Desnos, Paul Éluard and Pierre Reverdy:
Country that sings while labouring,
a land content in its own work;
while the waters go on with their singing,
the vines forge link on link.
Hushed land, for the song of the waters
is simply excess of silence—
the silence that falls between words
as, rhythmically, they advance.
(The Valaisan Quatrains, 28)
Here’s the original poem:
Pays qui chante en travaillant,
pays heureux qui travaille;
pendant que les eaux continuent leur chant,
la vigne fait maille pour maille.
Pays qui se tait, car le chant des eaux
n’est qu’un excès de silence,
de ce silence entres les mots
qui, en rythmes, avancent.
I’ve chosen this poem to look at closely because it’s one of the shortest in the book, and demonstrates at a small scale several of Crucefix’s characteristic techniques. I’m conscious, too, that British readers of The Friday Poem may be slightly more likely to have a bit of French than German. If you do have some French, you’ll notice that the original poem is in lines of slightly different lengths but follows a strict rhyme scheme (ABAB, CDCD).
Rilke uses full rhymes of this type in most (not all) of his poetry, in a variety of metrical schemes. One of the greatest strengths of Crucefix’s translations is his use of this same technique. Despite the considerable challenges, his translations all use rhyme in a way that in general reflects, though does not precisely reproduce, the original. This is a very delicate thing to get right: forced or awkward rhymes immediately sound clunky; on the other hand, a translation with little or no rhyme would remove entirely one of the most obvious (and memorable) features of Rilke’s music. In this poem, for instance, he has retained the ABAB pattern, but if you listen closely you notice that the A rhymes (‘labouring’, ‘singing’) don’t rhyme on the stressed syllable (in English we would say labouring, singing). Instead, the repetition of ‘ing’ serves as the rhyme echo. The B rhymes are more of an alliterative chime than a rhyme (‘work’, ‘link’), but one that keeps two important words (‘travaille’, ‘maille’) in their emphatic final position. In the second stanza, the C rhyme words in Crucefix’s version don’t rhyme, but they do alliterate (‘waters’, ‘words’), and again keep these key terms in their place. In addition, ‘words’ picks up ‘works’ from the previous stanza. Finally, the D rhymes (‘eaux’ and ‘mots’ in French) are represented by the partial rhyme of ‘silence’ and ‘advance’. As a result, we have a translation which manages to preserve the meaning (this is a close translation) at the same time as much of the significant word order, the atmosphere and the musical shape of the original. The result is musical and memorable but also slightly strange: Crucefix’s translations are almost always successful poems in English – and poems, moreover, of recognisably the same kind and shape as the originals – but we never completely lose sight of the act of translation, like looking at a reflection.
We find the same delicacy applied to the German poems, including the most famous of Rilke’s lyrics. This is Crucefix’s translation of ‘Herbsttag’ (‘Autumn Day’), one of my favourites. (I’ve put the German below for those of you who read it.)
Lord: it is time. The summer was very long.
Lay your shadows across the sundials,
and let the winds blow free across the fields.
Instruct the last of the fruits to ripen:
give them two more days of this southerly clime,
and urge them on towards perfection,
chase the last sweetness into the heavy wine.
No time now to build for those left homeless.
Who remains alone now will find no relief,
but will watch and read and write long letters,
and roam here and there on the windswept streets,
restlessly, while the leaves are cast adrift.
Herr: es ist Zeit. Der Sommer war sehr groß.
Leg deinen Schatten auf die Sonnenuhren,
und auf den Fluren lass die Winde los.
Befiehl den letzten Früchten voll zu sein;
gib ihnen noch zwei südlichere Tage,
dränge sie zur Vollendung hin und jage
die letzte Süße in den schweren Wein.
Wer jetzt kein Haus hat, baut sich keines mehr.
Wer jetzt allein ist, wird es lange bleiben,
wird wachen, lesen, lange Briefe schreiben
und wird in den Alleen hin und her
unruhig wandern, wenn die Blätter treiben.
Rilke’s verse is exceptionally satisfying to hear and say, and the rhythms of German poetry are more like those of English than French is, so it’s worth sounding out (or listening to a recording) even if you have little knowledge of the language. In this poem, Crucefix uses a particularly large proportion of partial rhymes, and no full ones: in that sense, it’s one of the translations that’s farthest from the original. But these half-rhymes, assonances and alliterations are beautifully judged. They help to create the melancholy atmosphere, suggesting pleasures just out of reach.
A large proportion of Rilke’s most famous poems, both from the New Poems and the Sonnets to Orpheus, are lyrics of this sort of length, and it’s work of this kind with which he’s probably most associated. The majority of my favourite translations are of these shorter pieces. But Crucefix also deals well with poems in a longer form, both the earlier verse sequences and the challenging density of the Duino Elegies, of which he prints a mixture of complete translations (1, 2, 5, 6, 9 and 10) and extracts (3, 4, 7 and 8). Brief quotations seem particularly unfair when it comes to longer work of this kind, but here’s a taste of the subtler music of the Second Elegy, on angels – one of Rilke’s favourite and recurring subjects:
Perfection’s firsts, creation’s pampered favourites,
the peaks and summits we look to, where they
redden in the first touch of the created world—
spilt pollen of flowering Godhead, knots of light,
passageways, stairs, thrones, spaces of life,
the blazoned shields of bliss, tumults of ecstasy
and as suddenly, solely—mirrors, scooping
up that flood of beauty that pours from them
and redirecting it back into themselves.
There’s no real weak link in the book, but I would have relished a bit more in the introduction. The passages sketching Rilke’s life and work are elegant and memorable, an excellent potted biography providing just enough orientation for a new reader (and there’s a well-judged two pages of ‘further reading’ if you want to follow up). Rilke has generally been thought of as a ‘pure’ poet, characterised by the musical beauty of his style and the wisdom of his observations of the world. Crucefix argues that his poetry is more dynamic than this suggests, urging us not merely to appreciate but to respond, to change – the Change your Life of the title (itself a paraphrase of the end of the ‘Archaic Torso of Apollo’: “because there is no place / that does not see you. You must change your life.”). This was an interesting distinction and challenged my own assumptions about the poet. I would like to have heard more here.
I wished there were more of this wonderful book
Perhaps I was influenced by having, as it were, a professional interest as a translator myself, but I would also like to have read a bit more about the art of translation, since these translations are so exceptionally good. Instead, the very brief ‘Translator’s Note’ refers us for longer comment to the remarks Crucefix made on the topic in his earlier edition of the Sonnets to Orpheus (Enitharmon Press, 2012), which he summarises here in a single sentence: “my goal [is] to emulate the ‘felt shapeliness and musicality’ of Rilke’s poems with as little sacrifice as possible of their meaning or, more precisely, their semantic and emotional impact.” This is touchingly modest, and I recognise the author’s reluctance to be seen to repeat himself, but all the same I would have been glad of more detail, even if it meant reprinting the previous essay. Most readers, especially of a book like this aimed at a general audience, will not have the earlier edition to hand.
But these minor complaints are really just ways of saying I wished there were more of this wonderful book. Whether you know and love Rilke already, or are new to him, do get hold of a copy!
Victoria Moul is a poet, translator and scholar living in Paris. Recent publications include A Literary History of Latin and English Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 2022) and (with John Talbot) C. H. Sisson Reconsidered (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023). Recent poems, reviews and verse translations have appeared in the TLS, The Dark Horse, Amethyst Review, Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal, Bad Lilies, Modern Poetry in Translation, Ancient Exchanges and the anthology Outer Space (CUP, 2022). She writes about poetry and translation at Horace & friends.
