Rilke has been with me since childhood. A school trip took me to Vienna to stay in a boarding school housed in a vast imposing building that once had garrisoned the Emperor Franz Joseph's officers. The Austrian pupils with whom we were billeted were two years older than us, culturally sophisticated and eager to show us around Vienna. We toured palaces and art galleries and walked in the Vienna Woods. We visited the houses where Beethoven and Mozart had lodged – decades later I was overjoyed to find a CD of Andreas Schiff playing a selection of Mozart piano sonatas on the same piano that I had seen as a teenager. I went to my first opera, Verdi’s Don Carlos. I was also homesick and my Austrian friend comforted me with Rilke, two slim volumes of his verse that alas, I no longer have.
Rilke: Between Roots Selected Poems rendered from the German by Rika Lesser (Lockert Library of Poetry in Translation, Princeton University Press, 1989) is now sadly out of print. I don’t know where or why I bought it, probably in the years of my return to poetry and in particular, to Rilke. It’s beautiful. In it Lesser translates a selection of Rilke work dating from 1904 to 1926.
The volume begins with Orpheus. Eurydidice. Hermes. The poem tells of Orpheus’s return from the underworld, Eurydice and Hermes walking behind him – and he may not look back:
While sight ran before him like a dog,
turned back, again and again stood
distant and waiting at the path’s next turn –
Orpheus. Eurydidice. Hermes
Lesser includes poems on some of Rilke’s favourite themes: Orpheus, roses, tears, but also an untitled poem Rilke wrote when he was dying a slow painful death from leukaemia:
Come, you last thing I recognise,
Unendurable pain in the body’s web:
Just as I burned in spirit, see, I burn
in you; the wood has long resisted
joining its voices to your flame
but now I feel you and burn in you
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