On Rilke's Archaïscher Torso Apollos: A Discussion

An old friend writes. We will call him "Kit" (pronounced "Keet" in the European way).

Kit responded to my translation on this anti-blog of Rainer Maria Rilke's exceedingly famous poem, Archaïscher Torso Apollos ("Ancient" or "Archaic Torso of Apollo"), which first appeared in Rilke's collection, Der neuen Gedichte anderer Teil [1908].

Kit's questions are intentionally cheeky and provocative, and so, I took him at his word and as an opportunity to read the poem in a sustained fashion. You will find, if you choose to, the results, below.

Hey 

So people really liked your Torso of Apollo translation. I never could make heads (no pun intended) nor tails of the German. What was Rilke thinking? Let's just talk about your poem. 

1. I find "the eyes ripening like apples" unsavory. Don't you? It's an off-putting simile. I mean, apples are a pure and wondrous fruit, but they can't compare to eyes. The "But" seems to confirm that this is somehow negative. I'm sure you have some answers here. 

2. What do you make of his gaze turned low. Is he checking out his own six pack? Gotta be, right?  

3. Endured? Does that mean he fucked for long periods of time without ejaculating? (I used to have pictures of Rilke on my wall, but not because of this poem. I never got this poem…) 

4. Whoa. Otherwise? OTHERWISE? If it weren't the case that Apollo was such a great top who so appreciated his own six pack, the head of his memorializing statue wouldn't have been broken off? What shimmers like a predator's fur? Show it to me. Now! 

5. I don't think I can even bear (bare?) to discuss that final stanza. I'm devastated by this poem. If you loved me, truly, you'd text to make sure I can bear (bare?) this world for another fortnight…. 

5.1 So what breaks out like a star? His abs? I'm so petty, I know. (Time has not been kind.) 

5.2 Because there is no place that does not see you. (If I saved up some money and flew you out here, could you explain this to me every day?) 

5.3 You must change your life. Every fucking day.

Okay, so you're really asking me to do this, right? Don't say you didn't ask for it. 

Okay...

So people really liked your Torso of Apollo translation. I never could make heads (no pun intended) nor tails of the German. What was Rilke thinking? Let's just talk about your poem.

1. I find "the eyes ripening like apples" unsavory. Don't you? It's an off-putting simile. I mean, apples are a pure and wondrous fruit, but they can't compare to eyes. The "But" seems to confirm that this is somehow negative. I'm sure you have some answers here.

Well, it certainly is a mysterious image to be sure. For myself, I can't get the picture out of my head (no pun intended--okay maybe a little), at least initially, of the god with actual apples where his eyes should be, that glow with the surging power of fecundity, of ripening. And so, initially I see him sort of like a basilisk, a human form with these huge, inhuman eyes, glowing and penetrating, both empty and unreadable and yet filled with an unknowable, inscrutable knowledge, a gaze that looks past you, through you, and into you, akin to the uncanny gaze of a blind man. It is the sort of gaze that doesn't seem to see you, or take you into account, but that makes you afraid, as you are sometimes in dreams, that these impossible-to-understand eyes will see you and you will be caught in them, or have to endure whatever unknown thing happens next after you have been seen. This is an image of being seen by something that seems not to see. And this, this is, certainly, a terrifying image, indeed. And it cannot help but remind one of the famous beginning of the First Elegy of the Duineser Elegien, most pertinently, the penultimate line of the first stanza:

Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel
Ordnungen? und gesetzt selbst, es nähme
einer mich plötzlich ans Herz: ich verginge von seinem
stärkeren Dasein. Denn das Schöne ist nichts
als des Schrecklichen Anfang, den wir noch grade ertragen,
und wir bewundern es so, weil es gelassen verschmäht,
uns zu zerstören. Ein jeder Engel ist schrecklich.

[My God, my God. Please don't make me translate this awful, impossible passage for you--I know what it means! The Elegies are too long, too complicated, and too fucked up. Please, please don't make me. Kit can read it, why can't you? It's too hard. Okay. Okay, I've avoided this for twenty years, and tried many times--I will try again:]

Who, if I screamed, would hear me among the Angelic
Orders? and even if One were to take
me suddenly to Its heart: I would succumb into Its
stronger existence [Dasein, Heidegger, what are you doing here?]. For Beauty is Nothing
other than the beginning of Terror, that we are still able to bear,
and we revere It so, because It calmly disdains
to destroy us. Every Angel is Terror.

Look. This stanza is a miniature of our poem, itself. A long sentence followed by a short: Du mußt dein Leben ändern.

And that is, I think, part of what Rilke is getting at in his description of this mutilated statue: the gaze is disdainful of us and our destruction--it doesn't care and it doesn't need to care because we are so insignificant that it doesn't need to destroy us. But he is also saying that it is because the head is missing that we are able to endure the experience of looking at the statue, otherwise we would be in the face of the god himself, which no human can survive, as Semele could not when she asked Zeus to show to her himself, in his undisguised godhood: she was incinerated by the experience. 

What our eyes cannot take in--which are the eyes of the god--which are as absent as the head, itself, is that which our eyes cannot take in because we couldn't survive it. But the power of the god--or of the statue of the god--is that the gaze of the god still remains, though the head, and its unseeable-but-still-seeing eyes, have been lost. We couldn't possibly know his legendary/unknown/unseeable head; we couldn't know it and we mustn't know it. It is a knowledge outside our human knowledge. 

Moreover, the accent is less on the apple, nor even on the eyeapple--the more I circle this image, which is not an image, but I think a deliberately inscrutable idea, the more pleasingly weird it becomes--but on the quality of ripening. They--the eyes--are becoming. They are in an everlasting state of becoming both because a god is eternal and even in the absence of his head we can sense that endless becoming and the absent eyes in the absent head that perceive becoming, that ripen the future in their gaze, for we must never forget that in addition to being the god of music and the sun (in which apples ripen), Apollo is the god of prophecy. He is the god of the seer, the blind ones, the ones without eyes, who can see the future as it ripens.

We will continue with your following complaint, but not your second point, which is your third complaint, tomorrow.

1. I find "the eyes ripening like apples" unsavory. Don't you? It's an off-putting simile. I mean, apples are a pure and wondrous fruit, but they can't compare to eyes. The "But" seems to confirm that this is somehow negative. I'm sure you have some answers here.

The "But" doesn't confirm the unsavoriness of the eyeapples, unless it's because apples are sweet. The turn underlines that even though the statue is a headless one, even though the penetrating, ripening, glowing eyes--eyes that glow as ripening apples do in the sun--are absent, the remaining torso glows still as a kind of light source. This whole poem is about seeing and light, eyes, and not being able to see.

2. What do you make of his gaze turned low. Is he checking out his own six pack? Gotta be, right? 

His bright gaze is turned low, as you would screw down the pin (zurückgeschraubt) on a lantern to make the light lower, less bright. It is the brightness of his gaze that is turned low, not its direction, which I am certain you know. His gaze still holds fast and glows or gleams in its headless, eyeless, apprehension of you. And this whole poem is about how you are apprehended in and by his gaze, which still sees you without a head.

3. Endured? Does that mean he fucked for long periods of time without ejaculating? (I used to have pictures of Rilke on my wall, but not because of this poem. I never got this poem…)

Undoubtedly. Though I'm sure also with ejaculation much of the time. We are, of course, speaking of a god, here, and your profanity not withstanding--or perhaps withstanding very well--it brings to mind what it would mean for a god to masturbate when he has a whole world of men and women to fuck. One imagines that gods don't masturbate but enact things--such as fucking--upon the world, which exists for their lust, pleasure, enjoyment, entertainment, benevolence, malevolence, meddling, observation, contemplation, perpetuation, perturbation, complication, simplification, interest, self-interest, interference, intercession, abrogation, abandonment, arbitration, and use.

Stephen Mitchell--who set me on the track of translating Rilke because I was not comfortable with what I'm sure were, to him, advantageous and necessary choices in bringing Rilke into English--translates trug as "flared," which perhaps is available to better German-speakers than I am, and which I feel is an appropriate verb choice in a poem about light, exploding stars, and seeing, but I couldn't find anything in my dictionary to reenforce that choice, and so, rather than "borne," which had other, interesting implications, I went for the base notion of tragen, which I suppose is the opposite direction from "flaring," counting that the difficulty of a near-synonym for "carrying" or "bearing" would be productive as well. Interestingly, when quoting the entire line, google-translate renders trug as "flared" as well, though when examined in isolation, trug and tragen evince nothing close to this interpretation. Google translate is unreliable in these matters, taking all kinds of misleading semi-colloquial chances when literalism is what one wants much of the time.

Moving on: the eye of the narrator of the poem, considers, in order of appearance and description, the legendary/unheard of/unknown/unseen/unseeable head (in a strange near-synesthetic moment, Rilke insists on a term that employs the root, hören, not kennen or sehen), to the torso, the breast, the loins, and finally the center, or the middle; the presence, the naming, of which occurs at--or very nearly at--the geographic, the visual, center of the sonnet, for this is, after all a sonnet, one should recall.

It is here, at this still moment, at the center of the poem and the center of the statue, where the fecundity of the god remains and endures and perhaps flares; it is here we take a brief rest--where the energy, the light, of this statue holds itself, like a secret, but a secret full of and filled with, nearly, palpably, exploding with unknown, unknowable, knowing potential: knowledge--with the full stop of the Punkt, the period. This is the first major turn of the sonnet, coming after a leisurely, idiosyncratic, almost laconic, catalog of tourist attractions along the way, and immediately after what I feel is one of the most gorgeous, and aurally-pleasing, lines I've encountered in German: Sonst könnte nicht der Bug/der Brust dich blenden, und im leisen Drehen/der Lenden könnte nicht ein Lächeln gehen.... Very nice, RMR; well done. We must pause here, because time stops, because everything after this moment of swirling whirlpool, or black hole--this event horizon--will be different and take us by surprise. Time winds down, slows, and stops, and thus takes on a sense of urgency--or is it, rather, urgency, itself? It is a place--and they are more rare than we think--it is a place wherein Time takes on--accepts onto itself, gathers--a meaningfulness, a meaning. 

After this moment of stillness, the poem will explode back at us, take us in, and perhaps demolish us, if we let it. Because it is after this moment that the poem ceases to be under our control--nor perhaps under the control of its author. It is after this moment, that the poem resists our casual reading and pleasure, where it stops being a still, silent thing, where--or should I say when--instead, it reaches out, explodes through our fingertips and eyes, where it sees us, where it reads us.

4. Whoa. Otherwise? OTHERWISE? If it weren't the case that Apollo was such a great top who so appreciated his own six pack, the head of his memorializing statue wouldn't have been broken off? What shimmers like a predator's fur? Show it to me. Now!

First off, I am fairly certain that, while the god was, as you say, a great top, he was not only a top. And, of course, as a god, he could only be aware of his perfection--though it was a human-like/inhuman perfection, which we cannot understand, and one subject to the exigencies of his various domains as god of the sun, music, poetry, healing, prophecy, and so on--and thus unknowable and alien to us, except through our degraded, incomplete, illiterate, uncomprehending, failed attempts to represent the inscrutable, unknowable echoes of that perfection, the ones that reach us, that we can perceive, in stone or word.

Here, sonst is indicating a specific "otherwise," which echoes the first sonst in the second stanza. The narrator seems to be suggesting that, were the head of the statue still attached, könnte nicht der Bug/der Brust dich blenden; and, were the head present, stünde dieser Stein entstellt und kurz. The beautiful, legendary, unheard head would distract the viewer from the details that are the genius of the statue, and one assumes that the center of attention would not be the loins, but would locate itself in the legendary head, that which we couldn't, that which we mustn't, know.

Were the god's magnificent head still viewable, it would make the rest of the now-always-already-defaced statue seem like a stumped, inert, lifeless stone--the presence, the actuality, the uncontemplatable, impossibly beautiful face of the god, would actually deface the rest of the statue, which in its headless version is the only thing to which we have access. Otherwise, we couldn't (wir kannten nicht) see everything below the brilliant slope of the shoulders as a bright, flaming, shimmering, shaming, rebuking thing, in its perfection. The shoulders would be the vanishing point--through-seeable--under the terrible weight, the awful incomprehensibility of the head and eyes of the god. We are not meant to look gods in the face, as we discussed earlier. We are lucky that only this torso remains to allow us even the access to even the idea of the terrible face--das wunderfurchtbare Gesicht--of perfection.

5. I don't think I can even bear (bare?) to discuss that final stanza. Steve, I'm devastated by this poem. If you loved me, truly, you'd text to make sure I can bear (bare?) this world for another fortnight…. 

5.1 So what breaks out like a star? His abs? I'm so petty, I know. (Time has not been kind.)

Yes, the god's abdominals, his loins, and every edge of his crushed, broken, fragmented, and disfigured, shimmering, predator-like form--a form, an extant, existential shape--a thing, a stumped, stupid stone--that can barely, and ultimately fails to, contain its terrible light.

The last two stanzas are comprised of only two sentences: the first, which is quite long, and begins with our familiar *sonst ("otherwise") and which continues all the way to the end--the last line, in fact--of the last stanza; and the second sentence, the shortest, by far, in the whole poem, which concludes and turns the whole apparatus, the whole world, including you, upside-down, inside-out. I can't help that my eyes are actually tearing up as I write this, ripening with tears, to my hot shame-joy, my Schadenfreude, to turn another familiar word inside-out and upside-down. My eyes.... Wir kannten nicht sein unerhörtes Haupt, darin die Augenäpfel reiften.

5.2 Because there is no place that does not see you. (If I saved up some money and flew you out here, could you explain this to me everyday?)

The narrator, the poet, encounters a headless ruin of a statue, in his wondering-wanderings, in a museum, perhaps; someplace, anyway--we are not told where, here; not here, anyway. And the encounter thrills him. He feels able to appreciate this object for what is missing from it; each detail refining itself as he regards it, finding that the absent head, the eyes that he cannot see, allow him access to this engagement with form and thing, with stone and body, with the edges of representation, itself. He finds that meaningfulness, that meaning, comes from an absence, an imputation, that sonst would not be possible, rather unbelievable: sonst unglaublich. Let's neologize it into sonst Unglaublick. And from all its edges, this thing, this ruin, bursts out against him: in his regard, his apprehension, his reading of it, he finds himself regarded, read, apprehended, as though a criminal by the policing agent of reality, of life. He is a criminal in the world. Stealing and lying, using subterfuge to make his way to survive. In the face of this ruin--which has no face--in the face of this attempt to give form to perfection, or perfection to form, Gestalt--he is a Nothing. This statue that reads you when you least expect to be read--and I especially mean this in the Paris is Burning sense of being read, as well as the standard sense--is the Purpurwort, das wir sangen/über, o über/dem Dorn.

5.3 You must change your life. Every fucking day.

Yes. As we have learned. I quote, here, Rilke's own epitaph:

Rose, oh reiner Widerspruch, Lust,
Niemandes Schlaf zu sein unter soviel
Lidern.

Rose, oh pure contradiction, Desire,
Nobody's sleep under so many
eyelids.

And because he is so close to me, lately, I can only give you Paul Celan's response to Apollo and the Rose of Nobody. Stein and Erde are not so different from each other, after all, are they? I turn the inside-out inside-out again but find that I--that we--are in a fourth, a fifth, dimension further away from where we started. It is all I can do.

Niemand knetet uns wieder aus Erde und Lehm,
niemand bespricht unsern Staub.
Niemand. 

Gelobt seist du, Niemand.
Dir zulieb wollen
wir blühn.
Dir
entgegen. 

Ein Nichts
waren wir, sind wir, werden
wir bleiben, blühend:
die Nichts-, die
Niemandsrose. 

Mit
dem Griffel seelenhell,
dem Staubfaden himmelswüst,
der Krone rot
vom Purpurwort, das wir sangen
über, o über
dem Dorn. 

PSALM
by Paul Celan (b. 23 November 1920) 

Nobody kneads us again from earth and loam,
nobody summons our dust.
Nobody. 

Blessed are you, Nobody.
For your sake would
we bloom.
Against your
will. 

A nothing
we were, we are, shall
we ever remain, blooming:
the nothing--, the
nobody's rose. 

With
pistil bright as soul,
stamen waste of heaven,
corona red
from the purple word, which we sang
over, oh, over
the thorn. 

Translation attributed to L. Steve Schmersal, May 2014.

*** **** ***** ******

Kit, continued to complain, even before I finished responding to his initial set, so I close with this final series of responses. I disagree that anything I have said approaches what one might call "brilliant." The poets are brilliant--we can barely read by their light. It is far too bright to read by: it is too brilliant: it is blinding. Sonst könnte nicht der Bug/der Brust dich blenden....

1. Okay, so I follow all of your interpretation thus far (I think) and it seems quite brilliant. More brilliant for me than the poem itself. I keep reading the poem, but it doesn't grab me like so many of Rilke's poems do. Why is that?  

2. So, why did he write it? I mean is it just a contemplation or did he have some particular motivation? 

3. Why is it so famous? Seriously, I have never ever been able to grasp that.

You're adding questions when I haven't even finished your first series of complaints? Nonetheless, I will try to answer the unanswerable:

1. I couldn't possibly answer for you why a poem speaks or doesn't speak to you. All right, there probably are some poems that would be more congenial to such a line of questioning that--based upon our shared history and my knowledge of you and your tastes and perspectives, your investments as I understand them--I might be able to describe why they may grab you or not grab you. This doesn't seem to be one of them. I don't know why it doesn't grab you, perhaps because I don't know why the poems of his that do grab you do so grab you. Grab you.

2. I wasn't going to go into his motivation in my discussion, and I would have to re-look at some sources to "refresh my recollection," to quote a memorable phrase from the Iran-Contra hearings that was used so respectfully and unsuccessfully to attempt to cajole information out of an out-of-touch, forgetful, old, and sleepy Chief Executive. I can tell you that both parts of Der neuen Gedichte--1907 & 1908--were a direct outgrowth of Rilke's experiences living in Paris and working as Rodin's secretary during that time. He was stimulated, challenged, and moved by Rodin's attempts to capture or express the "thingness" of things, people, objects, history, places, moments, ideas, relationships, sensual experiences, and emotions. Both parts of the New Poems obsessively circle this question-problem. And, of course, he was living in fin-de-siècle/post-fin-de-siècle Paris, the capital of the Nineteenth Century, where everything newly old had just been demolished, repaved, rebuilt, and was newly new again, again. Rilke, who was always undergoing some agonizing crisis or another, was profoundly affected and challenged by these things. He called his two collections "New Poems" for a reason. It was and wasn't "mere" contemplation, and that was his motivation. And it also therefore is not surprising that the statue that furnished the occasion for this poem is to be found in the Louvre. 

3. Why is it so famous? Why have you never been able to grasp that? I think you have grasped it, and in that grasping--or grabbing--you have answered your own question, and I quote: 

5. I don't think I can even bear (bare?) to discuss that final stanza. Steve, I'm devastated by this poem.... 

[...] 

5.3 You must change your life. Every fucking day.

It is famous because it devastates us. It is disarmingly simple, yet more complicated and harrowing than we would ever like to admit or be able to bare or bear. 

And that is all I have to say on the subject for the rest of yesterday, while you can still enjoy the rest of today. It's after midnight in New York.


*** **** ***** ******

Archaic Torso of Apollo

Rainer Maria Rilke, New Poems, the Other Part [1908]

We cannot know his unheard of head,

in which his eyes like apples ripened. But

his torso glows still like a candelabrum,

in which his gaze, though turned low,

holds firm and gleams. Otherwise the bow

of the breast could not blind you, and in the gentle turn

of the loins a smile couldn't go

to that center, there where procreation endured.

Otherwise this stone would stand defaced and stumped

under the shoulder's translucent downturn

and not shimmer so like a predator's fur;

and not break out from all its edges

like a star: because there is no place

that does not see you. You must change your life.

Translation by L. Steve Schmersal, 4 July 2003

Archaïscher Torso Apollos

Rainer Maria Rilke, Der neuen Gedichte anderer Teil [1908]

Wir kannten nicht sein unerhörtes Haupt,
darin die Augenäpfel reiften. Aber
sein Torso glüht noch wie ein Kandelaber,
in dem sein Schauen, nur zurückgeschraubt,

sich hält und glänzt. Sonst könnte nicht der Bug
der Brust dich blenden, und im leisen Drehen
der Lenden könnte nicht ein Lächeln gehen
zu jener Mitte, die die Zeugung trug.

Sonst stünde dieser Stein entstellt und kurz
unter der Schultern durchsichtigem Sturz
und flimmerte nicht so wie Raubtierfelle;

und bräche nicht aus allen seinen Rändern
aus wie ein Stern: denn da ist keine Stelle,
die dich nicht sieht. Du mußt dein Leben ändern.