Hi Matthew
> I think it's significant that Rilke ended up, in the
>Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus, as the ultimate inspiration-driven
>poet, waiting years to finish something and then pouring it out in a few
>days.
I'm not sure that's precisely inspiration. More perhaps like a long
gestation and violent labour.
Recently I finished translating the Duino Elegies, and it left me full of
admiration for their complexity, thought-skill and sheer audacity - and
their beauty. Rilke runs energies through them in such multidinous
vectors of relationship, that even when I found myself sighing heavily
over another panegyric to the hero or somesuch, ten lines later I was
gasping as the transformations he then made possible. And that's a
function of the torque of the language, the tensions and relationships he
makes between words: a virtuosity pushed further than it might reasonably
go by the urgencies the poems express. One of the things that fascinated
me was the attention he gives to the direction of energies (I mean,
banally, up, down, around, forward, back): and also how densely he packs
language, while simultaneously creating gaps, even chasms, in how he
leaps from idea to idea. The whole poem might be seen as a massive flood
of feeling, full of currents and eddies and whirlpools with centres of
stillness, grasping at anything in its path.
By which clumsy attempt at description I mean, he could not have written
them without, paradoxically, an unusual sense of control over his medium,
which the idea of inspiration tends to gloss. The Elegies are totally
astounding poems.
Best
Alison
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