Commentators usually gloss this passage along the following lines: Rilke, perceiving the standing figures in the Picasso Saltimbanques as forming a large D, puns on this visual peculiarity by coining the word Dastehen (roughly, “standing-thereness,” and strongly echoing Dasein—“existence,” “being-thereness”) to register the quality of the acrobats’ presence. Hence the translator’s challenge to find an equivalent word that begins with a capital D. But this line of thought may be fundamentally in error. The elegy visualizes a family of itinerant acrobats performing in the outlying regions of the city before passersby who randomly gather and disperse. The large capital letter of their Dastehen—barely there, only for a moment “erect” and “on show,” before “even the strongest” are rolled and crumpled again—likely refers to the figure they construct in one of their feats of acrobatic balancing (later in the elegy Rilke will employ the metaphor of a swiftly erected and deconstructed tree). The capital letter they form would thus be like those in the “grotesque alphabets” of entwined bodies so popular with late medieval engravers. And assuming that the capital letter they form exists in some written alphabet (for Dastehen, after all, may spell itself differently), D seems an especially unlikely figure for an acrobatic tour-de-force to construct.
The reference is to August II, King of Poland (1670–1733). He was notorious for his feats of strength, his drinking bouts, and his sexual prowess. According to legend he fathered more than a hundred children.
An abbreviation for subrisio saltatoris—“acrobat’s smile.” The passage envisions an apothecary’s shelf with rows of small labeled vials on it.
THE SIXTH ELEGY
The site of the Temple of Amon in southern Egypt, which Rilke visited in January 1911. The temple’s stone pillars depict battle scenes with the pharaoh-generals in their conquering chariots.
THE EIGHTH ELEGY
Rudolf Kassner (1873–1959) was an Austrian cultural philosopher and friend of Rilke’s from 1907 to the very end of the latter’s life. They admired each other greatly, but differed over key issues. Kassner argued (from the position of a philosophical, allegorized pseudo-Christianity) that the human limitations Rilke laments as tragic and inexplicable are in fact necessary conditions which a mature “conversion” must accept. He considered the latter’s depiction of “the Open” and the animal’s pure consciousness as “atavistic.”
The Etruscans depicted the soul as a bird on the walls of their sarcophagus-chambers. The lids of the sarcophagi themselves were often sculpted representations of the dead person lying in repose.
THE TENTH ELEGY
Rilke’s Pschent is the Arabic spelling of the Greek transcription of the ancient Egyptian word for the double crown worn by the pharaohs to signify the union of Upper and Lower Egypt. But turn-of-the-century Egyptologists also used the term to designate the royal headcloth over which the crown was worn. Before the restoration of the Sphinx in 1925, an actual owl supposedly nested at the headcloth’s edge.
Also by Edward Snow
PROSE
A Study of Vermeer
Inside Bruegel
TRANSLATIONS
Rainer Maria Rilke: New Poems [1907]
Rainer Maria Rilke: New Poems: The Other Part [1908]
Rainer Maria Rilke: The Book of Images
Rainer Maria Rilke: Uncollected Poems
(with Michael Winkler) Rainer Maria Rilke: Diaries of a Young Poet
RAINER MARIA RILKE was born in Prague in 1875 and traveled throughout Europe for much of his adult life, returning frequently to Paris. There he came under the influence of the sculptor Auguste Rodin and produced much of his finest work, most notably the two volumes of New Poems as well as the great modernist novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. Among his other books of poems are The Book of Images and The Book of Hours. He lived the last years of his life in Switzerland, where he completed his two poetic masterworks, the Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus. He died of leukemia in December 1926.
EDWARD SNOW is a professor of English at Rice University. North Point Press has published his translations of Rilke’s New Poems [1907], New Poems [1908]: The Other Part, The Book of Images, and Uncollected Poems. He is the recipient of an Academy of Arts and Letters Award for the body of his Rilke translations, as well as the Academy of American Poets’ Harold Morton Landon Translation Award and the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. He is also the author of A Study of Vermeer and Inside Bruegel.
North Point Press
A division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux
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Copyright © 2000 by Edward Snow
All rights reserved
Published in 2000 by North Point Press
First paperback edition, 2001
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Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies: A Bilingual Edition
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