Rainer Maria Rilke

Rainer Maria Rilke (4 December, 1875 – 29 December, 1926) is generally considered the German language's greatest 20th century poet. His haunting images tend to focus on the problems of Christianity in an age of disbelief, solitude, and profound anxiety, themes that sometimes place him in the school of modernist poets.

He wrote in both verse and a highly lyrical prose. His two most famous verse pieces are the Sonnets to Orpheus and the Duino Elegies; his two most famous prose pieces are the Letters to a Young Poet and the semi-autobiographical Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. He also wrote more than 400 poems in French, dedicated to his homeland of choice, the canton of Valais in Switzerland.

Rainer Maria Rilke in a portrait by Paula Modersohn-Becker

Life

1875-1896

He was born René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke in Prague, Austria-Hungary. His childhood and youth in Prague were not very happy. His father, Josef Rilke (1838-1906), became a railway official after an unsuccessful military career. His mother, Sophie ("Phia") Entz (1851-1931), came from a well-to-do Prague manufacturing family, the Entz-Kinzelbergers, who lived in a palace on the Herrengasse 8, where Rene also spent much of his early years. The parents' marriage fell apart in 1884. The relationship between Phia and her only son was encumbered by her prolongued mourning for her elder daughter, after which she forced René into his sister's role, including dressing him in girl's clothing when he was young.[1]

His parents pressured the poetically and artistically gifted youth into entering a military academy, which he attended from 1886 until 1891, when he left due to illness. From 1892 to 1895 he was tutored for the university entrance exam, which he passed in 1895. In 1895 and 1896, he studied literature, art history, and philosophy in Prague and Munich.

1897-1902

In 1897 in Munich, Rainer Maria Rilke met and fell in love with the widely traveled intellectual and lady of letters Lou Andreas-Salome (1861-1937). (Rilke changed his first name from "René" to Rainer at Andreas-Salome's urging.) His intensive relationship with this married woman, with whom he undertook two extensive trips to Russia, lasted until 1900. But even after their separation, Lou continued to be Rilke's most important confidante until the end of his life. Because she had trained from 1912 to 1913 as a psychoanalyst with Sigmund Freud, she shared her knowledge of psychoanalysis with Rilke.

In 1898, Rilke undertook a journey lasting several weeks to Italy. In 1899, he travelled to Moscow, where he met the novelist Leo Tolstoy. Between May and August 1900, a second journey to Russia, accompanied only by Lou, again took him to Moscow and St. Petersburg.

In autumn 1900, Rilke stayed in Worpswede, where he got to know the sculptress Clara Westhoff (1878-1954), whom he married the following spring. Their daughter Ruth (1901-1972) was born in December 1901. However, Rilke was not one for a middle-class family life; in the summer of 1902, Rilke left home and travelled to Paris to write a monograph on the sculptor Auguste Rodin (1840-1917). Still, the relationship between Rilke and Clara Westhoff continued for the rest of his life.

1902-1910

At first, Rilke had a difficult time in Paris, an experience that he called on in the first part of his only novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. At the same time, his encounter with modernism was very stimulating: Rilke became deeply involved in the sculpture of Rodin, and then with the work of Paul Cezanne. Rodin taught him the value of objective observation, which led to Rilke's Dinggedichten ("thing-poems"), a famous example of this is "Der Panther" ("The Panther"). During these years, Paris increasingly became the writer's main residence.

The most important works of the Paris period were Neue Gedichte (New Poems) (1907), Der Neuen Gedichte Anderer Teil (Another Part of the New Poems) (1908), the two "Requiem" poems (1909), and the novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, started in 1904 and completed in January 1910.

1910-1919

Between October 1911 and May 1912, Rilke stayed at the Castle Duino, near Trieste, home of Countess Marie of Thurn and Taxis. There, in 1912, he began the poem cycle called the Duino Elegies, which would remain unfinished for a decade due to a long-lasting creative crisis.

The outbreak of World War I surprised Rilke during a stay in Germany. He was unable to return to Paris, where his property was confiscated and auctioned. He spent the greater part of the war in Munich. From 1914 to 1916 he had a turbulent affair with the painter Lou Albert-Lasard.

Rilke was called up at the beginning of 1916, and he had to undertake basic training in Vienna. Influential friends interceded on his behalf, and he was transferred to the War Records Office and discharged from the military on June 9, 1916. He spent the subsequent time once again in Munich, interrupted by a stay on Hertha Koenig's Gut Bockel in Westphalia. The traumatic experience of military service, a reminder of the horrors of the military academy, almost completely silenced him as a poet.

1919-1926

On June 11, 1919, Rilke traveled from Munich to Switzerland. The outward motive was an invitation to lecture in Zurich, but the real reason was the wish to escape the post-war chaos and take up once again his work on the Duino Elegies. The search for a suitable and affordable place to live proved to be very difficult. Among other places, Rilke lived in Soglio, Locarno, and Berg am Irchel. Only in the summer of 1921 was he able to find a permanent residence in the Chateau de Muzot, close to Sierre in Valais. In May 1922, Rilke's patron Werner Reinhart purchased the building so that Rilke could live there rent-free.

In an intense creative period, Rilke completed the Duino Elegies within several weeks in February 1922. Before and after, he wrote both parts of the poem cycle The Sonnets to Orpheus. Both are among the high points of Rilke's work.

From 1923 on, Rilke increasingly had to struggle with health problems that necessitated many long stays at a sanatorium in Territet, near Montreux, on Lake Geneva. His long stay in Paris between January and August 1925 was an attempt to escape his illness through a change in location and living conditions. Despite this, numerous important individual poems appeared in the years 1923-1926 (including "Gong" and "Mausoleum"), as well as a comprehensive lyrical work in French.

Only shortly before his death was Rilke's illness diagnosed as leukemia. The poet died on 29 December 1926 in the Valmont Sanatorium in Switzerland, and was laid to rest on 2 January 1927 in the Raron cemetery to the west of Visp. He chose his own epitaph:

Rose, oh reiner Widerspruch, Lust,
Niemandes Schlaf zu sein unter soviel
Lidern.

Rose, oh pure contradiction, joy
of being No-one's sleep, under so
many lids.

Rilke's influence

• Rilke's poetry highly influenced the life and writings of Etty Hillesum.

• The Rilke Project involves contemporary pop artists and actors (including Xavier Naidoo, BAP, Jürgen Prochnow, and Katja Riemann) interpreting Rilke's texts to make Rilke accessible to new generations.

• The indie rock band Rainer Maria takes its name from Rilke, and at least some of their merchandise bears the poet's image.

• In the 1993 movie "Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit," actress Whoopi Goldberg makes a reference to Rilke's book, Letters to a Young Poet.

• Rilke has also been celebrated in Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow and William Gaddis' voluminous novel The Recognitions. A Rilke translation inspired "Lost in Translation", a celebrated 1974 poem by James Merrill.

• J.D. Salinger alludes to Rilke in various works, including Franny and Zooey.

• Wim Wenders cites Rilke as the inspiration behind his angels in Wings of Desire.

Selection of works

Complete works

• Rainer Maria Rilke, Sämtliche Werke in 12 Bänden (Complete Works in 12 Volumes), published by Rilke Archive in association with Ruth Sieber-Rilke, supplied by Ernst Zinn. Frankfurt am Main. 1976.
• Rainer Maria Rilke, Werke (Works). Edition in four volumes with commentary and supplementary volume, published by Manfred Engel, Ulrich Fülleborn, Dorothea Lauterbach, Horst Nalewski and August Stahl. Frankfurt am Main and Leipzig 1996 and 2003.

Volumes of poetry

• Leben und Lieder (1894)
• Larenopfer (1895)
• Traumgekrönt (1897)
• Advent (1898)
• Mir zur Feier (1909)
• Das Stunden-Buch
  • Das Buch vom mönchischen Leben (1899)
  • Das Buch von der Pilgerschaft (1901)
  • Das Buch von der Armut und vom Tode (1903)
• Das Buch der Bilder (4 Teile, 1902-1906)
• Neue Gedichte (1907)
• Der neuen Gedichte anderer Teil (1908)
• Requiem (1908)
• Das Marien-Leben (1912)
• Duineser Elegien (1912/1922)
• Die Sonette an Orpheus (1922)
• Vergers (1926)
• Les Quatrains Valaisans (1926)
• Les Roses (1927)
• Les Fenêtres (1927)

Prose

• Geschichten vom Lieben Gott (Novel, 1900)
• Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (Novel, 1910)

Letters

• The most important collections are:
  • Gesammelte Briefe in sechs Bänden (Collected Letters in Six Volumes), published by Ruth Sieber-Rilke and Carl Sieber. Leipzig 1936-1939.
  • Briefe (Letters), published by the Rilke Archive in Weimar. Two volumes, Wiesbaden 1950 (Reprinted 1987 in single volume).
  • Briefe in Zwei Bänden (Letters in Two Volumes), published by Horst Nalewski. Frankfurt and Leipzig 1991.

Translations

• Selections:
  • Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, ed. and trans. Robert Bly, New York 1981.
  • The Essential Rilke, ed. and trans. Galway Kinnell and Hannah Liebmann, Hopewell, NJ 1999.
  • Two Prague Stories, trans. Isabel Cole, Vitalis, Český Těšín 2002.
  • Pictures of God: Rilke's Religious Poetry, ed. and trans. Annemarie S. Kidder, Livonia, MI 2005.

• Individual Works:
  • Larenopfer, trans. and commented by Alfred de Zayas, bi-lingual edition with original drawings by Martin Andrysek, Red Hen Press, Los Angeles, 2005.
  • The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, trans. Stephen Mitchell, New York 1983.
  • The Book of Hours: Prayers to a Lowly God, trans. Annemarie S. Kidder, Evanston, 2001.

Books on Rilke

• Biography:
  • Ralph Freedman, Life of a Poet: Rainer Maria Rilke, New York 1996.
  • Paul Torgersen, Dear Friend: Rainer Maria Rilke and Paula Modersohn-Becker, Northwestern University Press, 1998.

• Studies:
  • A Companion to the Works of Rainer Maria Rilke, ed. Erika A and Michael M. Metzger, Rochester 2001.
  • Rilke Handbuch: Leben - Werk - Wirkung, ed. Manfred Engel and Dorothea Lauterbach, Stuttgart and Weimar 2004.

See also

• List of Austrians
• List of Austrian writers

External links

• International Rilke Association
• http://www.rilke.de
• English translations of selected poems
• Die Gedichte von Rainer Maria Rilke
• Duineser Elegien
• Rilke's German language sonnets
• Rilke's translations of sonnets
• Works by Rainer Maria Rilke. Project Gutenberg
  • Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge, available for free via Project Gutenberg (in German)
• bio and quotes
• Audio discussion of seven of the "New Poems"
• The Big Three: Rilke's correspondence with Tsvetayeva and Pasternak
• Chinese translation of Rilke

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