The Hare With Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal [87]
‘You must change your life,’ Rilke wrote in his poem on the ‘Archaic Torso of Apollo’. Could any instruction be more thrilling?
It was not until after Elisabeth died, aged ninety-two, that I realised how important Rilke was to her. I knew there were some letters, but they were a rumour, a muffled roll of splendour. It was when I stood in front of the statue of Apollo with his lyre in the courtyard of the Palais Ephrussi on a winter’s afternoon and haltingly tried to remember Rilke’s poem, the marble glistening like ‘a predator’s coat’, that I knew I had to find them.
Elisabeth had been given an introduction to Rilke by her uncle. Pips had helped Rilke when he was stranded in Germany by the outbreak of war. Now he wrote to invite Rilke to Kövesces: ‘this house is always open for you. You would make us all very happy if you would announce yourself “sans ceremonie”.’ And Pips begs permission for his favourite niece to send some poems. Elisabeth wrote – breathlessly – to Rilke in the summer of 1921, enclosing ‘Michelangelo’, a verse-drama, and asking him whether she might dedicate it to him. There was a long delay until the spring – a delay occasioned by his finishing the Duino Elegies – but then he wrote back a five-page letter and they began to correspond, the twenty-year-old student in Vienna and the fifty-year-old poet in Switzerland.
The correspondence started with a refusal. He resisted a dedication. The best outcome would be to have the poem published, then the book ‘would represent a lasting link to me . . . It will be a pleasure to accept being a mentor in your first “Erstling”, but only if you don’t name me.’ But, continues the letter, I would be interested to see what you are writing. They wrote to each other for five years. Twelve very long letters from Rilke, sixty pages interspersed with manuscript copies of his recent poems and translations, and many volumes of his verse with warm dedications of his own.
Dr Elisabeth Ephrussi, poet and lawyer, 1922
If you stand in a library and look at Rilke’s collected works, the yard or so of volumes, most of them are letters, and most of these seem to be to ‘titled, disappointed ladies’, to borrow John Berry-man’s penetrating phrase. Elisabeth was a young poetic baroness, and so not unusual amongst many of his correspondents. But Rilke was a great letter-writer, and these in particular are wonderful letters, exhortatory, lyrical, funny and engaged, a testament to what he called ‘a writing friendship’. They have never been translated and only recently transcribed by a Rilke scholar working in England. I move my pots to one side and cover the tables with photocopies of these letters. I spend a happy couple of weeks trying out possible translations of these sinuous, rhythmical sentences with a German PhD student.
Translating the work of his friend, the French poet Paul Valéry, Rilke writes about his ‘great silence’, the years when Valéry didn’t write poetry at all. Rilke encloses the translation he has just finished. He writes about Paris and how the recent death of Proust has affected him, made him think of his years there, working as Rodin’s secretary, makes him wish to return and study again. Has Elisabeth read Proust? She should do so.
And he is very careful and particular about Elisabeth’s situation in Vienna. He is intrigued by the contrast between her academic studies at the university where she is studying law and her poetry:
Be that as it may, dear friend, I am not anxious for your artistic abilities, to which I attach such a great importance . . . Even though I cannot foresee which path you will decide to take with your law doctorate, I find the great contrast between your two occupations positive; the more diverse the life of the mind, the better the chances are that your inspiration will be protected, the inspiration which cannot be predicted, that which is motivated from within.’
Rilke reads her recent poems ‘A January Evening’, ‘Roman Night’ and ‘King Oedipus’: ‘all three good, however I tend to put Oedipus over the rest’. In this poem