Prayers of a Young Poet

By Rainer Maria Rilke and Mark S. Burrows

Rilke wrote these poems in 1899 after returning to Germany from his first trip to Russia, calling them simply "the prayers." They reflect the intensity of his experience of the East, voicing his fascination with Orthodox churches and monasteries. The icons, so different than the religious art he encountered on an earlier trip to Italy, seemed to him like flames glowing in dark spaces. These luminous prayers gesture as verbal icons, their images illumining a way in the darkness for seekers of the sacred. As he here writes:

I love the dark hours of my being,

for they deepen my senses . . .

From them I've come to know that I have room

for a second life, timeless and wide.

"How perfect that Mark Burrows is as fine a scholar as he is a poet. His understanding of 'the young poet' is subtle and rare; his knowledge of Rilke's language and intentions is rich and deep. It is incredible that it's taken so long to have these prayers in a single song as they were intended, but every line in this exquisite collection rewards the wait."

—Dr. Stephanie Dowrick, author of Seeking the Sacred and In the Company of Rilke

• Language: English
• Publisher: Paraclete Press
• Release date: Oct 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9781612612911

Rainer Maria Rilke

Rainer Maria Rilke has been called one of the most lyrically intense poets of the German language. He was born in Prague and traveled extensively throughout Europe but felt the greatest affinity to Switzerland, whose landscapes inspired many of his works

Book preview

PRAYERS OF A YOUNG POET

PRAYERS OF A YOUNG POET

rainer maria rilke

translated and introduced by

mark s. burrows

2013 First Printing

Prayers of a Young Poet

Copyright © 2013 Introduction, Afterword, and English translation by Mark S. Burrows

ISBN 978-1-61261-076-4

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Rilke, Rainer Maria, 1875-1926.

[Prayers. English. Selections]

Prayers of a young poet / Rainer Maria Rilke ; translated and introduced by Mark S. Burrows.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-1-61261-076-4 (hc jacket)

1. Prayer—Poetry. I. Burrows, Mark S., 1955- II. Title.

PT2635.I65A2 2012b

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in an electronic retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Published by Paraclete Press

Brewster, Massachusetts

www.paracletepress.com

Printed in the United States of America

FOR

MY FAMILY AND FRIENDS,

IN GRATITUDE FOR THEIR ABIDING.

Jetzt heilt es leise unter uns.

RAINER MARIA RILKE

Contents

Preface

Introduction

The Prayers

Afterword

On Reading and Translating Rilke

Endnotes

Preface

RILKE’S POEMS came to me long before I had any business reading them. They wooed me from the start with the flowing music of their lines. I found myself fascinated and puzzled by the sudden twists and turns of their diction, and by the abundance of feeling they conveyed. They exemplified for me Gaston Bachelard’s observation that art is an increase of life, a sort of competition of surprises that stimulates our consciousness and keeps it from becoming somnolent.¹

Even when I had little idea what Rilke was after, I knew I wanted to follow these poems wherever they might lead. It was the kind of trust evoked by a blend of desire and delight: the desire that reaches beyond the certainties we know in our lives, and the delight that grips us when our awareness of ordinary things seems to be raised to a higher intensity of awareness. I knew I would keep his poems close by in years to come, hoping they would reveal their wisdom to me over time. I sensed that their presence would enrich my journey in ways I could then only dimly imagine.

I vividly recall coming upon Babette Deutsch’s translation of Rilke’s poems from The Book of Hours in a slender bilingual edition. I was then in high school and had only begun to study German, but I knew enough to admire her masterful attempt at rendering them with lyrical echoes to Rilke’s originals. I later encountered them in a college seminar on modern German poetry, reading them by this time primarily in German. They magnified my sense of the spiritual vitality of the world about me, pointing as they do to

… the wondrous play of powers

that passes obediently through things:

in the roots growing, vanishing in the trunks,

rising in the treetops like a resurrection.[23]²

And, as they lingered in my mind, they seemed to visit me like unexpected guests who arrive unbidden in the quiet of night—the soft evening hour / that makes all poets alike. [55]

This is as it should be. Poetry like Rilke’s, so profoundly marked by the vulnerabilities of yearning and the openings of uncertainty—by desire and fear—resists imposition. It comes in its own time, and by its own ways. In this as in most matters of the arts, delight rather than duty is the truest guide.

When I left college for graduate study in Tübingen, I expected that Rilke would be a poet treasured by my German peers. This was an unfounded expectation. Among the circle of friends I made at the university—among theology students and those studying Germanistik alike—few had any interest in Rilke, and most were bemused by mine. It was the late 70s, a politically fraught time in Germany, and Rilke’s voice seemed to offer little help in addressing the urgent questions of that generation—that is, those born in the decade following the Second World War.

But when I returned to the States several years later, I arrived to what seemed like a Rilke revival: new editions of his poetry in English found an eager readership among a generation of seekers. Letters to a Young Poet, in particular, had become a surprising bestseller. His writings met the hunger for spiritual experience that defined a generation come of age in the wake of the Vietnam War and Watergate. Translations by Robert Bly, Stephen Mitchell, Galway Kinnell, and others greeted the longings of these seekers, who had largely abandoned institutional religion. With Rilke, many refused to accept truths on the basis of tradition alone, desiring with the poet to live the questions. They found in his writings a validation of their yearning for spiritual experience. Rilke’s daring to believe everything that has not yet been said, [12] his relentless spiritual ambition, and the unbounded scope of his wide-open pondering [34] resonated with the yearnings of such readers. They found in the audacity of his voice a taste of the untamed wisdom, as Nietzsche called it, that they rarely heard from the appointed guardians of religion. Rilke became for them not only a guide but also a trusted companion on the way.

Since that time I have continued to share Rilke’s poetry with friends, colleagues, and students, relying on translations when they existed and making my own when they did not—or when extant versions seemed inadequate. What I discovered in the process was the way these renditions seemed to invite others to experience something of what I had found in Rilke. Before long, the work of translating became a steady activity alongside my academic research and writing in the fields of theology and mysticism. I would even say that translation came to occupy an essential part of my work just as it became an unavoidable dimension of my life.

In my work as a professor in several graduate schools of theology during the last twenty-five years, I have been struck by the widely varying responses to Rilke’s poetry. For those who are uncomfortable with ambiguity, who prefer the clear and certain truths of rational argument over the fantasies of poetry, such poems seem irrelevant, a nuisance if not an outright threat. Why should anyone bother with poetry that ponders darkness, after all? And what sense could one possibly make of a poet who declared his belief in nights, of all things? These are the good and optimistic persons whom William James describes as the once-born, those who embrace what he calls the religion of healthy-mindedness.³

Others are drawn to Rilke’s poems for the same reasons: they savor his writings for their refusals at closure, for the ways they tolerate difficulty and value not-knowing. They recognize, with Jeanette Winterson, that poetry is not a version of the facts, it is an entirely different way of seeing,⁴ and come expecting new visions. They delight in lingering over poems that are difficult to understand, whose language is elusive and strange, often startling and sometimes wild. With Rilke they too have some sense that God

no longer dwell[s] in the midst of [his] radiance

where all the ranks of the angel-dances,

the farthest ones, fade away from [God] like music. [18]

They bring to their reading an appetite for paradox that is central in Rilke, willing with him to imagine God as so dark that [their] little brightness / makes no sense along [God’s] seam. [28] They know, as Rilke puts it, that we have so many senses, / all in their different ways thirsting. [24]

Interestingly, the latter may be the leaders most needed in the religious communities of our day, many of which are in decline