Rilke: To His Polish Translator Author(s): Jim Powell Source: The Threepenny Review, No. 42 (Summer, 1990), p.

9 Published by: Threepenny Review Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4383883 Accessed: 15/12/2009 03:03
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=tpr. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Threepenny Review is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Threepenny Review.

http://www.jstor.org

that the watersof the ocean are not really comes from what amounts to an authorotherthanthe watersof the pool? ial intervention, a Swami ex machina. matter another is Man A But Single It is the achievement of the authorial altogether. The project of the book is voice in this book that it can accommosimilar to that of Ulysses, though its date without inconsistency the tones of total length cannot amount to that of a the reflecting essayist, the scientific single chapter in Joyce's book: to take observer, and the omniscient narrator us through a man's day, omitting as unashamedly Thackerayan puppetnothing in it, not even defecation or master. In the last of these he goes on to in born was man This masturbation. present a hypothesis: "Just let us supEngland but lives in Southern Califorpose, however..." What if George dies nia, like Isherwood himself, and teaches in his sleep? Again he disclaims responat a college much like Los Angeles sibility; we are free to "suppose" that State, where Isherwood had recently George does or George doesn't, but taught. At times resembling "a withered since the hypothesis (like the analogy boy," he is fifty-eight,about the author's earlier) has been suggested, it is there, age when he wrote it, and is obsessed on the page, and brings home to us with with the signs of aging and of approachall the more force that if it be not now, ing death. Not because he is gay (though yet it will come. he is), but because he lives alone, his The death is described in the original lover being dead. He literally embodies tone: scientific that legal term, "a single man." On the first page, we are aware of an Throttled out of its oxygen, the heart odd authorial tone. The mechanics of clenchesand stops.The lungsgo dead,their waking are described with quasi-scienpower line cut. All over the body,the artetific detachment. The body is presented rialscontract. as a mechanism ("meanwhile the cortex, that grim disciplinarian, has taken Bit by bit we watch the body close down. its place at the central controls"), but at the same time in a voice of wondering if And if some partof the nonentitywe called and curious how detachment: knowing George has indeed been absent at this how interesting this specimen is, it momentof terminalshock, away out there to find thenit will return on the deepwaters, seems to say, and though one may know itself homeless. For it can associate no all about the way it works, how unexlonger with what lies here, unsnoring,on pected its reactions sometimes are. in the bed.Thisis now cousinto the garbage Finally the processes of waking are will Both back the on container the porch. completed, and the voice is less that of have to be carted away and disposed of, scientific enquirer than of sciencebeforetoo long. fiction writer: "It knows its name. It is called George." These are the last words of the book, This absorbed but disinterested observer now gives way for most of the fierce, factual, and yet speculative.What I have to stress yet again is the sheer tact book to an account of George's conwhich the authorial voice has insinwith it records which impartially sciousness, uated its analogy and its hypothesis. as it follows him through his day. The "Unsnoring"is a word that tells us physeconomy of the book is such that each scene is essential to our picture of ically what might be there by its very negation; "associate" quietly and accuGeorge. The concluding sequence of rately suggests a connection far looser chapters, which he spends in the comthan we regularly assume for the elepany of a young and attractive student, ments of human identity.The effect of it, Kenny,is done with especial energy and all is double: we are both less and delicacy. The writing has never been cleaner or more eloquent. The day ends greater than we thought. We are less because we are, after all, mere mechwith George in drunken sleep, alone, as anisms, and because we are just like he has started it, with no male Molly rock pools, separate collections of Bloom beside him. loosely associated characteristics; but It is at this point that Isherwood calls we are greater because the very looseon his old talent for analogy. Some rock ness of the association makes us the pools on the coast are described: "each more readily part of the infinite conpool is separate and different, and you sciousness of God. Identity is trancan, if you are fanciful, give them names, scended, as it was in Prater Violet, but such as George, Charlotte, Kenny,Mrs. here far more thoroughly and less comStrunk." If you are fanciful: he makes fortingly.The last sentence consists of a the comparison and at the same time firm statement barely softened by the evades responsibility for it. Nevertheminuscule modification, rhythmical and less, it has been made. The pool and the syntactical, of the final three words-it human identity are each a temporary is bleak indeed. The whole of the organization, which by being sequesbook's ending is all the more of a tered for a while resembles a permanent rhetorical triumph in that Isherwood But structure of essential attributes. has been enabled by his analogy to then the tide comes in: make his point about the relation between the individual and God in an Over Georgeand the others in sleep come entirely unreligious context, and withthe waters of that other ocean-that consciousness which is no one in particular out faltering in the consistency of his but which contains everyone and every- fictional terms. No deus ex machina thing,past, presentand future,and extends here. George has returned to the great stars. unbroken beyondthe uttermost ocean, as Isherwood the man has by now. It is a Vedantist emphasis, the main emphasis of the whole book too, (By such words people describe God.) made with an exquisite delicacy and in no way that alters the narrative convenWemaysurelysupposethat,in the darkness tions already established. are of the full flood,some of thesecreatures that Isherwood wrote is Everything lifted from their pools to drift far out over but Goodbye to Berlin worth reading, the deep waters....Can they tell us, in any are the two works Man A and Single manner, about their journey? Is there, all the more will which endure, clearly to them for tell-except indeed, anything

becausethey tied into the detailof their own eras. It is surely of permanent interest that reading them we may imagineexactlywhat it was like to live in the Berlinof the early 1930s or the Los Angeles of the early 1960s. The books are perhaps alike in all their unlikenessthrough the two principal characters,assemblagesof consciousness not completely at home in their

respective locations-expatriates who are of an environmentand yet at the same time interestingly separatedfrom it. They take nothing for granted: becausethey are not where they were bornand raised,thoughtheyhavemade it their home, they observe it with a fiercerpoignancy, they are all the more we are not the same that aware sharply E as our attachments.

Rilke:ToHis PolishTranslator
The yes spokento life and to deathturnsout to be one.To admitthe one which in the end shuts out everything without the other is a restriction from averted is infinite.Deathis what us, the sideof life unshoneon by us. of our nature,one that is awareness the We must try to compass greatest at home in both unboundedregions,inexhaustiblynourishedby both. The trueshapeof our life reachesthroughboth domains,the blood of the coursesthroughboth:thereis neithera this worldnor greatestcirculation a beyondbut insteadthe greatunity in which the entitiesthat transcend are at home: that realm whose depth and influence, us, the "Angels," we sharewith the deadandwith thoseto come. unbounded, everywhere We of this here and now are not for the blink of an eye content in the world of time, nor boundto it: we are incessantly passingoverand over those who seemingly to and our to us, before to those who came origins can not say are-one all world that In after us& come greatest"open' that they of time the since presupposes simultaneousn veryfallingaway all the so be. to And a into are. all deep plunges everywhere Transiency time-bound a in use to not are now and here this in creation of shapes way only, but as far as we are able, to involvein those highermeanings in which we take part.But not in the Christiansense,from which more and more passionately I depart-rather, in a purely earthly,deeply we mustinitiatewhatwe heresee and earthyawareness, blissfully worldly, touch into a wider,into the widest horizon.Not into a beyondwhose whole-into the whole. the earth,butinto something shadowdarkens andperishanduse,areprovisionality Nature,the thingsof ourintercourse our and our are we as as friendship, But here, possession they are, long ing. andjoy,as already in our extremity confidants theyhavebeenthe familiars So it is importantnot to makethis world hereout to be of our forebears. which they evil and put it down: becauseof their very provisionalness, this world of things is supposedto be sharewith us, these appearances, Yes, grasped in an innermost sense and transformed.Transformed? becauseit is our task to imprintthis provisional, perishingearthin ourselves so deeply,with such passion and endurancethat its realityrises We are the bees of the invisible.Wedistractedly again in us "invisibly." visiblein orderto gatherit into the greatgolden the the plunder honeyof The earthhas no escapeotherthan to becomeinvishive of the Invisible. ible:in us who with a partof our naturepartakeof invisibility.

-translated byJimPowell

SUMMER 1990