Sam Levy

            Geoffrey Lehmann’s recently translated collection of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poetry, titled Fifty Poems, has a delicacy of word choice and grace of language that make the reader take in the poems with bated breath, with a reverence for something written long ago, in a time and space very different from the here and now. At the same time, the collection has modern movement and is injected with a vitality that reveals a different dimension to Rilke’s work. Perhaps a little less formal than prior translations but with no loss of wistfulness, the poems take on a diversity of perspectives and tones while maintaining a consistent voice, using these points of view to muse on things like nature, philosophy, and religion. This voice feels like a whisper Rilke makes to himself while he observes the world, a quiet invitation to make character studies, to consider the cosmic, to ask oneself questions one might never have thought of.

             The contemplations found in these translations range in their focus, pursuing lines of existential questioning about the nature of humans, animals, and God. Quite often, Rilke’s poetry personifies archetypes, materials, and concepts in a way that allows the reader to consider his philosophical wonderings almost as if in a still-life painting. Colors and faces burst with information. Objects become sumptuous, textures become palpable. Rilke’s slow and deliberate observations of the exterior penetrate to interior states of being, especially when he takes on unexpected personas and perspectives. He considers the pinkness of a hydrangea, the life-long toiling of trees, the old and young faces to be found among a family on a narrow balcony.  As one verse says, “…everything in you leads to metaphor, / rose-petal sonnets, lyrics, more and more…”

            When pondering religion, these poems seem to seek to understand God, to know God intimately, but while having the limitation of looking from afar: “It’s strange, Jesus, not easy to explain / how you were ruined and I am ruined with you.” Even when Eve is portrayed, God is described as “someone she scarcely knew.” The sense of removal and inaccessibility found here is tinged with melancholy but also acceptance, with the peace of an embraced fate.

Some of Rilke’s musings are like scattered seeds of a search for answers to cosmic questions. The poems often zoom out to take on a stance of sweeping time, place, and significance: “There is no place / that does not see you. You must change your life.” These arresting lines cause arresting moments for the reader. Rilke has placed a mirror before them; one he intends to reach to the depths of the soul and the space it occupies. The words seek to understand “the breathlessness and blindness of this game…”

            The most prominent fixation in the collection is the portrait—character studies of the self and of others: “Lines join to form the countenance of a man, / a sketch, with some blank spaces left to fate / where griefs and triumphs are yet to set their seal.” Such observations cause one to picture Rilke scribbling bits of his poems on scraps of paper or in a notebook while he watches the people around him. He draws on faces and movements and gestures, capturing glimpses of people from up close and afar, intimate and mysterious, ultimately fleeting: “…two portraits who were walking and moved on / in opposite directions and were gone: / it was forever and it left no trace.” At other times, the poems place the reader at the center of the character study, asking them to step into the persona he is portraying, such as when he writes, “The uncertain light on faded tapestries / brings back lost afternoons and memories. / You are afraid. You are a child again.” In these instances, the reader slips into Rilke’s limelight effortlessly, a willing subject whose intentions and emotions can be exposed.

            Lehmann, the poems’ translator, opted to maintain the rhyme scheme in the English iteration, which makes the language perhaps less bleak than in previous translations. There is a playfulness here, a consideration for how buoyant words can be, for the multitudinous ways they can be manipulated into shape. One wonderful feature of this translation is the heavy punch packed by the poems’ ending lines, particularly those with a sinister resonance. For instance: “And youths, the hope of ancient houses, pay / and taste my poisonous mouth and come to grief.” While Lehmann assuredly showcases so many moments of marvelous beauty using fittingly beautiful words, the darker lines are the ones that stick, the kickers with undeniable ominousness: “She touches her hair—it’s too dark to see— / and starts at a strange voice in her ear: / Nowyourewithme.” Lehmann’s choices showcase a fresh means of approaching Rilke’s poetry, an updated take on work that is so fitting for its own time but also undeniably fit for today as well.