POEMS TO NIGHT
Rainer Maria Rilke
Edited, Translated and with an Introduction by Will Stone
PUSHKIN PRESS
LONDON
I believe in Night…
rilke
(from The Book of Monkish Life, 1899)
CONTENTS
Title Page
Epigraph
List of Poems
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Poems to Night
Poems to Night: Drafts
Further Poems and Sketches around the Theme of Night
Biographical Notes
About the Publisher
Copyright
LIST OF POEMS
Poems to Night
The Siblings
When your face consumes me
Once I took into my hands
From face to face
Look, angels sense through space
Did I not breathe out of midnights
So, now it will be the angel
Away, I asked you finally to taste my smile
Strong, silent, candelabra placed
Out of this cloud, see: the one that so wildly obscures
Why must one go out and take alien things
But for myself, when I find myself back in the cities’
Straining so hard against the powerful night
Overflowing skies of squandered stars
Where I once was, or am: there you are treading
Thoughts of night, raised from intuited experience
Often I gazed at you in wonder. I stood at the window begun yesterday
I want to hold out. Act. Go over
Ah, from an angel’s touch falls
Is pain – as soon as the ploughshare
You who super-elevates me with this
Lifting one’s eyes from the book, from the close and countable lines
Poems to Night: Drafts
Isn’t there a smile? See, what is there
Turned upwards to the nourishing one
Why does the day persuade us
(To the Angel)
How did I hold out this face, that its feeling
When I feed on your face this way
Only now, at the nocturnal hour, am I without fear
Further Poems and Sketches around the Theme of Night
Now the red barberries are already ripening
From a Stormy Night
Night of the Spring Equinox
Stars Behind Olives
Nocturnal Walk
Urban Summer Night
Moonlit Night
Like the evening wind
At night I wish to converse with the angel
Night Sky and Falling Star
Love the angel is space
From the Periphery: Night
Strong star, without need of support
What reaches us with the starlight
Earlier, how often, we stayed, star in star
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to acknowledge the generous assistance of Brigitte Duvillard, Director of the Fondation Rilke in Sierre, who arranged a residence at the Villa Ruffieux in the Château Mercier above Sierre during June/July 2019, to enable me to work on these translations. I should also like to express my gratitude to writer and critic Bruce Mueller in San Francisco for his valuable contributions around Rilke’s biographical details, travel itineraries and publishing history. Lastly, I must give fulsome thanks to Linden Lawson, friend and editor, whose suggestions and editorial input have proved invaluable and have served to maintain this translator’s foothold at precarious moments on the path.
*
These translations were realized with the assistance of the Fondation Rilke, Sierre, Switzerland.
INTRODUCTION
At the end of 1916, Rainer Maria Rilke presented the writer Rudolf Kassner, his friend and confidant, with a notebook containing twenty-two poems which bore the title Gedichte an die Nacht (Poems to Night). These poems, linked by the recurring theme of night, were copied out in Rilke’s hallmark meticulous hand. Ernst Zinn, compiler of Rilke’s Sämtliche Werke (Collected Works) [Insel 1992], tells us in his notes that the Poems to Night were written between January 1913 and February 1914. What makes them significant is that they were created at the same time as Rilke’s most renowned work, the Duineser Elegien (Duino Elegies), whose eighth elegy Rilke dedicated to Kassner, and reveal correspondences to its genesis as well as anticipating its structure and ushering in new psychic and linguistic territories. In fact, Rilke had originally considered adding the night poems to form a second section of the Elegies.
Themes and ideas which run through the Elegies are also to be found in the Poems to Night; yet unlike the Elegies they are more actively hermetic, as if enfolding into themselves and thus demanding of the reader an even greater concentration. The Poems to Night possess the aura of a clandestine text, and resist any assured interpretation. Despite their centrality to Rilke’s spiritual trajectory, their transcendental disguise, that cosmological searching for the self, has ensured they have remained at the outer margins of his oeuvre, where the poetry-reading public rarely travel. Having said that, a good number of the Poems to Night have been translated over previous decades by a range of translators, especially the poem sometimes known as “The Great Night”, which begins with the line, “Often I gazed at you in wonder”. However, the twenty-two poems have never appeared in English before in their entirety, as they were transcribed for Kassner, but only as odd poems or at best in modest groupings in selections of Rilke’s poems. Thus they have never been read as a sequence from beginning to end contained in one volume, nor have a number of ancillary poems and fragments by Rilke on the subject of night dating from different periods been assembled as here, in a supplementary section.
The Duino Elegies were conceived and initiated at Castle Duino on the Adriatic coast north-west of Trieste, where Rilke was a guest of Princess Marie of Thurn und Taxis. The first two elegies were composed early in 1912, and through 1913 Rilke laboured on the material which would become the third, sixth and tenth elegies. The first of the Poems to Night were composed in Spain in January and February 1913, but most were written later that same year. It is no surprise to learn that in the autumn of 1913 Rilke was completing the third elegy, which he had begun in 1912 and which shares motifs and elements with the Poems to Night and occupies the same nocturnal realm. After the third elegy Rilke struggled to maintain his creative momentum, a state of stasis that was greatly exacerbated in autumn 1914 by the ensuing conflict in Europe. However, care must be taken not to oversimplify the correlation with the Elegies and to see things that may in fact not be there, for although the meaning of night in the Poems to Night appears sometimes to echo that of the angel in the Elegies, at other times in the poems it seems to suggest an altogether different
