Reading Rilke by William H. Gass Read Free Book Online Page B

has no objective location. Emotions could be measured and sited among the mountains of the heart, so when love died, it died of closeness and confinement, not from aging or duration.
Aren’t lovers
always arriving at the borders of each other,
although both promised breathing space, unimpeded hunting, home? 23
    But habits die hard; nothing utterly passes. Life patterns see to it that actions, attitudes, conditions, return—the painter, Baladine Klossowska, is replaced by the poet, Marina Tsvetaeva, for instance, and Rilke’s early connection with Russia reappears when Marina’s first letter arrives. His name, she said, was a poem in itself. That was a good start to an epistolary love affair similar to all the others except in acceleration. Marina drew him out and on. Into another elegy, one he named for her. How could she know that this was not a good omen?
    It was not time which did him in, for he had years ahead of him. It was not the women, for he eluded them. It was leukemia, the cancer that kills children, the cancer that claimed his daughter’s playmate Wera Knoop; an illness of the blood we know now is most often borne by our genes, and is therefore the death sent by our ancestors: the ragged core of a sweet apple to erupt—sore and swollen—in the poet’s mouth. It was indeed Rilke’s proper death (if there is any that’s proper), running likefire through his veins, just as he had written, ostensibly addressing God, “and if you set this mind of mine aflame, then on my blood I’ll carry you away.”
    Refusing narcotics in order to keep a clear head, the better to confront his illness, Rilke wrote letters to friends describing his agony, a few lines of verse too, no longer French, inscribed on flyleafs. He also composed his testament in which he begged his intimates, should his faculties be dimmed, to prevent any priestly intervention when his soul “moved into the open.”
    Symbolic hopes were held out against his sickness like talismans. A three-hundred-year-old goat willow, planted in the courtyard of the von Salis castle because the willow’s Latin name was Salix caprea , and hence a suitable emblem for the family, had miraculously restored itself by driving a new root down through its rotten trunk from an upper branch; and Rilke copied “The Willow of Salenegg” into the guest book of that house. Could he reroot too? That was in August. He would die at the year’s end. But his thought then would be of the pain that was passing like a filament through all the other aches and angers of his life. Rilke admonishes us not to confuse the illnesses of childhood, for instance, which were respites, even subterfuges, with those of dying. In a little notebook, he wrote his final lines:
Come on in now, you last of the pains I will admit,
incurable, into my body’s web.
As my spirit burns—see—I burn
in you; the wood no longer can deny
its agreement with the flame you’re flaming.
You burn me, but I inside your burning burn.
My present mildness, in your ferocity, will be
not of here but there, most hellishly.
I climbed this pyre, faggots piled to fearful heights,
convinced I’d never sacrifice
my soul’s uncounted sum to gain a future.
Am I still he who—unacknowledged—burns here?
I’ll not call my memories to burn nearby me.
O life—outside me—Oh to live you.
And I aflame. Known now to none. 24

TRANSREADING
    In a translation, one language, and one particular user of that language, reads another.
Mit gelben Birnen hänget
Und voll mit wilden Rosen
Das Land in den See,
    If I am reading Friedrich Hölderlin’s German in German, the language will be trying to understand itself. Out of the number of words which German offers, Hölderlin has chosen these, and I can let them ring in my head as if heard. “With yellow pears hangs / And full with wild roses / the land in the lake.” Easily said, less easily understood, because the order of the words is—well—wild as the roses are.
    These lines,