"Rilke was a jerk"

Actually, in his third Dream Song the American poet John Berryman put the emphasis on the word "jerk":

Rilke was a jerk.
I admit his griefs & music
& titled spelled all-disappointed ladies.
A threshold worse than the circles
where the vile settle & lurk,
Rilke's. As I said,—

And so he probably was a colossal jerk.  Now we are constantly reminded of this unpleasant fact in every piece on the poet.  Here is Robert Vilain writing last week in the London Times on a new translation of Rilke's Stunden-Buch:

Popular veneration and academic admiration persist despite the fact that Rilke in person was frequently vain, self-pitying, obsessive, narcissistic, snobbish, whining, arrogant, childish, demanding, lachrymose and neurotic, as well as being given to tantrums and panics.

But this is mild stuff compared to Ralf Freedman's 1996 biography of Rilke, The Life of a Poet.  Here, in 600 pages, nearly everything bad and revolting the poet ever did in his life is meticulously researched and presented on the page.  Rilke comes across as the most repugnant man ever to have walked the earth.  Here is how one reviewer summarized the content:

Yet Life of a Poet makes clear that this hollow-eyed communer with angels, Greek torsos and death was not merely a selfish snob; he was also an anti-Semite, a coward, a psychic vampire, a crybaby. He was a son who refused to go to his dying father's bedside, a husband who exploited and abandoned his wife, a father who almost never saw his daughter and who even stole from a special fund for her education to pay for his first-class hotel rooms. He was a seducer of other men's wives, a pampered intellectual gigolo, and a virtual parody of the soulful artiste who deems himself superior to ordinary people because he is so tenderly sensitive, a delicate blossom easily punished by a passing breeze or sudden frost.

In the end, what does that tell us about Rilke's poetry? Not much, I'm afraid.  Would we prefer that Rilke had been a nice man - generous and good - and the Duineser Elegien had never been written?  Yes, it would be nice to admire the man as we admire his art, but most of the great poets were very unpleasant people.  Poetry is a narcissistic enterprise, and no doubt Rilke was a world-class narcissist. But preoccupation with the self is at the core of Rilke's art. In his greatest works of poetry - such as the Elegien or Die Sonnette an Orpheus - he transcends his own self and pierces the emotional core of the reader's self. You'd really have to be a "jerk" not to marvel at it.

Comments

[Newton SABBÁ GUIMARÃES, Ph. D.]

What a pity he was so a bad man! I admired his poetry and even tried to translate a few of his poems to Judaeospanish of my childhood. I am surprised and a little sad. His poems are marvelous and his German very high, perhaps the nicest since von Schiller und von Goethe!

[David]

Translating Rilke is nearly impossible. Our greatest poet of the modern era- Robert Lowell - attempted, but ended up creating something entirely new:

http://www.dialoginternational.com/dialog_international/2012/04/national-poetry-month-rilke-lowell-and-hannah-arendt.html

[Dieter Kief]

McIntyre's Rilke collection in the paperback of the University of California Press is still available here and there for a few bucks. It's the best Rilke collection I know of and it features an introductory essay by McIntyre, which is great, really.
McIntyre's translation is not bad either, very useful.

I once literally stumbled on the book on a staircase in New York, where some gentle soul had left it, to be taken for free. And the book accompanies me ever since.

[Claude Neuman]

Evening (The book of images)

The evening slowly changes its array
that's held for it by rows of ancient trees;
you watch: and lands from you then break away,
one heaven-bound and one that falls and flees;

and they leave you, to neither quite belonging,
not quite so somber as the house tongue-tied,
not quite so sure eternity to sing
as that which becomes star and soars each night-

and they leave you (untold, too mixed by far)
your life, afraid and huge and ripe in age,
so that it may, now fettered and now sage,
become in you, by turns, both stone and star.

Abend

Der Abend wechselt langsam die Gewänder,
die ihm ein Rand von alten Bäumen hält;
du schaust: und von dir scheiden sich die Länder,
ein himmelfahrendes und eins, das fällt;

und lassen dich, zu keinem ganz gehörend,
nicht ganz so dunkel wie das Haus, das schweigt,
nicht ganz so sicher Ewiges beschwörend
wie das, was Stern wird jede Nacht und steigt -

und lassen dir (unsäglich zu entwirrn)
dein Leben bang und riesenhaft und reifend,
so dass es, bald begrenzt und bald begreifend,
abwechselnd Stein in dir wird und Gestirn.