Australian Geoffrey Lehmann’s new translations of the poems of Rainer Maria Rilke
POEM
Fifty Poems: Rainer Maria Rilke
Translated by: Geoffrey Lehmann
New York Book Review, $29.99
This book is a masterpiece, and it is made from someone else’s masterpieces. This is a translation by the octogenarian Australian poet Geoffrey Lehmann of a group of poems by Rilke, who is by common consent one of the greatest poets of the high modern period, a figure in German poetry whom we might rank alongside Yeats in grandeur, formal intensity and scope.
We know Rilke primarily from his grandeur. Duino Laments and personal mysticism Sonnets to OrpheusA series of poems written in highly charged free verse, easily assimilated into English by adjusting the expressions according to taste. What we tend not to know, or wrongly assimilate into free verse, are Rilke’s “thing poems”, his “thing poems”. Dingedichte, It was composed in the early 20th century. Now Geoffrey Lehmann has translated these using a strict form that copies Rilke’s nine-syllable verse. The result is miraculous. We feel that we are reading a great poet without any diminution in our formal power.
Listen to how this works for a moment:
If you’re homeless, you can’t find a house.
Alone, you will be alone,
And I’ll wake up and read and write long letters,
and wander through the empty streets,
leaves fluttering restlessly here and there.
The formal brilliance of this is remarkable. We feel as if we are in a magical world where an early 20th-century poem emerges with nothing but technical wizardry, serving Lehmann’s belief that the poetic form will effect this extraordinary transformation. No one would believe the initiative to which Lehmann has committed himself, but it is working. We believe that this is Rilke, and the point is that you can recognize them by their fruits.
The preoccupations of poems may have their own expressive interest, as in a version of Seamus Heaney, and yes, in this form (which is the neglect of form) there will be the inner interest of a great writer who displays his themes, but not with this breathtaking deployment of the soul that comes with rhythm and rhyme.
Rainer Maria Rilke’s Elegies has been described as “the greatest poem of the 20th century.”Credit: Getty Images
We get biblical motifs, a young man staring into his face, his orderliness and ability to push through pain. There is an incomprehensibility in a crucifixion poem describing the cry of renunciation of “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani” and the butcher boy hoping for a demonstration. There are several poems that make the Pieta primarily a landscape for Mary Magdalene. The poet has a feeling for the sensuous figure of Jesus.
