Word! The Language Column
Rilke for Ravers

Rainer Maria Rilke and our columnist, Ulrike Almut Sandig, have both translated poetry from various languages into German. Sandig now takes it to the next level by “transadapting” two of Rilke’s French poems into present-day German with a focus on the rhymes – and an invitation to dance.

By Ulrike Almut Sandig

I’m revving up the poetry time machine again for the penultimate instalment of this series. We’re off to early 1920s Valais in the Swiss Alps, where the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who was suffering from leukaemia, spent his “leisure time”, as he put it so modestly, writing poetry in French.

The French Rilke

French was his mother tongue: his mother named him René and spoke to him in French during his childhood in Prague. If you ask me, Rilke’s French poetry sounds a whole lot like Rilke.

I find it hard to read Rilke without any preconceptions. It’s the curse of the canon: your own reading ends up being coloured or eclipsed by too many other interpretations. One thing that really impresses me, though, is that not only did he do translations, too, but he translated works by 56 writers from eight different languages into German, if the Bamberger Zeitung hasn’t miscounted. Perhaps his motivation was the same as mine: to add voices that he felt were missing in German poetry. How would Paul Valérie and Dante sound to us today if we didn’t know them from Rilke’s translations?

Les Chansons des Roses

I know his Roses series not from reading it, but from hearing it: I’ve been singing with Amaryllis, a queer chamber choir in Berlin, for several months now. Our repertoire includes two of his Chansons des Roses set to music by Morten Lauridsen. I’ve learnt from singing them that Rilke sounds like Rilke not only by virtue of the delicate dynamism of his imagery, but also because his poetry comes to life in its sustained sounds and precise placement of pauses.

Oddly enough, while most translations of Rilke’s French poems retain his dainty imagery, they make no attempt to adapt his beautiful rhymes or the sound of his poetry. How come? I decided to experiment myself: to try and adapt the two poems we sing in the choir: Contre qui, rose – set to a nocturne by Lauridsen – and the love poem La rose complète.

Unfaithful adaptation

But I couldn’t translate both content and form into German either. Or was I just in the mood for something else? In any case, at some point I threw the content overboard – and kept the nice rhymes. The resulting “transadaptations” are two poems filtered through the present day and age, and consequently totally different from the originals.

In my take on La rose complète, the rose’s admirer is dancing at a party. The lifelong inhalation in the second stanza of the original is transmuted into snorting a line of coke. Tranquil emotion becomes an enthusiastic dance pose.
  “Flowers are ubiquitous in your poetry,” Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis once chided Rilke. “A narcissus here, a camellia there, a rose over there. Oh Rainer! I object!”

And she’s right! In my second unfaithful adaptation, I summarily replaced the rose with a troll. A real one, of flesh and blood, wreaking havoc on the Internet. He is the dark shadow of Rilke’s fretful speaker, who asks (quite intrusively, from a present-day perspective) what the rose has to defend itself against.
    My German lyrics can’t be sung to Lauridsen’s setting – but to a party music beat. Oh Rainer!