Rainer Maria Rilke has been on my reading list for about as long as I’ve had a reading list. He’d always been overlooked until on a crystalline and sunny day I found this collection at my university’s second-hand book vendor who consistently mispronounced the poet’s last name.

The Sonnets to Orpheus for those of you who aren’t in the know (yet), are one of Rilke’s two greatest achievements, along with the Duino Elegies. It is a cycle of fifty-five sonnets written in 1922. They are divided into two sections, the first of twenty six, the second of twenty nine. But enough about the technicalities.

As I may have remarked previously, I don’t speak German. I will therefore not speak of the linguistic beauty of Rilke’s poetry, because it is lost on me. The poetic quality, of course, is still there, but only in its essence. Given that I don’t speak German I also cannot speak of the quality of Edward Snow’s translation, which someone fluent in the language can judge better.

What I can however speak of is the beauty of the poems as translated by Edward Snow. I read on a tram, with its bustle around me. The poems were like transformative to my environment. They took me away from the noise around me and from the noise in my head, and instead placed me elsewhere. In a world where the divine act of creation can still occur (there is an interesting essay to be written about the concept of the divine and art in Rilke and Heidegger’s work, which I won’t write today, but one day I will). In Rilke and Snow’s world (as it should be properly known, given that we are only seeing Rilke through Snow’s eye) death is ever present, and is thus understood.

Being is understood here as a constant transformation, as is perhaps best shown in the closing line of the final sonnet: “To the rushing water speak: I am.” Being is. The form changes with time, “each passing hour grows younger.” The old is replaced with the new, but the new is contained within the old.

For Rilke this transformation, from the very beginning of the cycle is necessitated by art. In the third sonnet he writes: “Singing, as you teach it, is not desire // not the courting of some end to be attained // Singing is Being.” Being is translated from the German Dasein, which more accurately can be translated as ‘there-being’. Our being-in-the-world (this is what Dasein is translated as when translated from Heidegger) is marked by our creation of art. Heidegger would argue further (and it is clear he was influenced by Rilke) that not only is our Dasein marked by creation of art, the creation of art establishes our Being. Without art, we are no longer there. It centers and ‘settles’ the world of a people.

I should stop here because if I say more I’ll need to spend the day on this, and I do not have the day to spend on this. I will another day maybe.

The Sonnets to Orpheus in Edward Snow’s wonderful translation are necessary reading for all. Here they are on Amazon , and here on Book Depository.