“Let everything happen to you
My introduction to Rilke was through his novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, where he introduces many of the themes that permeate the Elegies and Sonnets. Here we find references to alienation, fear, poverty, loneliness, art, disease, and death. Yet even with death there is great beauty and soaring poetry even in translation (especially fine by Stephen Mitchell).
Rilke creates powerful yet elegant poetic odes to the majesty of the human experience and its relationship to the external world in this comprehensive translation of two major works. A realm in which the human being exists in a state of perplexity and struggle. I was fascinated by the ideas of death as an other, the "terrible rival" from the notebooks, and a meditation on the fear of death as well as death overcome. The great joy of learning to be yourself and enjoy your being; what I call a will to relax and "let your being be". The many aspects of love that appear both as desire and as a rival for the work of the artist.
Through it all we find the poet "learning to see" with a new will and a new being. There were moments I was reminded of Nietzsche's Zarathrustra, and of course Orpheus and and other myths from Ovid along with the Bible and other literary resonances. Above all I came to accept Rilke's admonishment for us to go ahead and become "beginners". To begin is to begin to create and will your being and ultimately your life, even in the face of death.
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