#286.  RILKE’S BOOK OF HOURS.  I have complained elsewhere of the cloistral hush that pervades much of Rilke’s work, the whispering tone that never capers or puns or farts, the cumulative effect of which I can find a bit suffocating.  And Anita Barrows’s and Joanne Macy’s translation of his Book of Hours has saddled it with a subtitle, Love Poems to God, which I find not only icky but a bit misleading.  But maybe all this is inseparable from what Rilke is for; as with the flagellating mournfulness of Hopkins and the linen-shroud bemoanings of Pessoa, you have to be careful to hold on to the baby as you toss out the bath water.  The verses of Rilke’s Book of Hours, one of the most important and enduringly popular of his early works, were written in three short stints, a few days or weeks, each two years apart, prefiguring the astonishing concentrated bursts of creativity that produced the Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus.  These earlier poems are less dense (also less opaque) than the later.  They are addresses to God in which Rilke attempts to bridge the distances created by the traditional and patriarchal images of God:  “We must not portray you in king’s robes, / you drifting mist that brought forth the morning.  //  Once again from the old paintboxes / we take the same gold for scepter and crown / that has disguised you through the ages.”  God in one poem is spoken to and of as “the gentlest of Ways,” “the great homesickness we could never shake off,” “the forest that always surrounds us,” and “the song we sang in every silence.”  This produced a sense of marvelous poetic freedom and exploration—that modest sense that no metaphor can ever be complete and final, just as it may be wonderfully expressive, even beautiful, of an aspect of the whole.  As another poet said a very long time ago, “The way that can be named is not the eternal Way.” There is in them some sense like that of John of the Cross: “I love the dark hours of my being.” “Extinguish my eyes, I’ll go one seeing you. / Seal my ears, I’ll go on hearing you.”  Like the work of the Hindu and Sufi poet-saints, Rilke’s poems represent an attempt to renew the language of reverence and seeking: “Sometimes I pray: Please don’t talk. / Let all your doing be by gesture only. / Go on writing in faces and stones / what your silence means.”  And, as in a remarkable sequence in the second book, not to destroy the old patriarchal images but to move beyond them to a fresh vision:

So, God, you are the one

who comes after.

It is sons who inherit,

while fathers die.

Sons stand and bloom.

You are my heir.

         “I’m living just as the century ends” Rilke wrote, and at the end of our century just past, Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy took to translating these poems.  One is a clinical psychotherapist, raised “in a highly patriarchal family,” the other raised as a Christian who took to social work; both took to Buddhism.  Perhaps these breakings-away made this open and apophatic streak in Rilke’s poems available to them.  Theirs are renderings, I’d say, rather than strict translation: they jettison Rilke’s rhyme and stanzaic schemes, they omit and select verses and poems, they reorder the sequence.  But the versions here are very fine as English-language poems (which is what I suppose I always care about, over originals I can’t read).  In place of Rilke’s forms they bring a fine sense of alliteration, of diction, and of “the opening of form in American poetry.”  I speak as an utter amateur of Rilke’s work and of German poetry, but I found these versions expressively spare and immensely moving.  I know I will return to them.

Because someone once dared 

to want you,

I know that we, too, may want you.

When gold is in the mountain

and we’ve ravaged the depths

‘til we’ve given up digging,

it will be brought forth into day

by the river that mines

the silences of stone.

Even when we don’t desire it,

God is ripening.

Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God, translated by Anita Barrows and Joanne Macy.  Riverhead Books, 1996.