<em>Nick Ripatrazone looks at Letters Around a Garden by Rainer Maria Rilke, written to his close friend Antoinette, a gardener, a century ago.</em>
‘ Aside from a few tulips, my little garden has not yet recited its Easter prayer,” wrote the poet Rainer Maria Rilke on Good Friday, 1924. His recipient was Antoinette de Bonstetten, a horticulture student at the University of Lausanne, whose skill might be useful to Rilke’s vision for the grounds of Château de Muzot, where the poet was halfway through a residency that would produce ambitious poems – yet leave the poet plagued with illness.
It was a bittersweet coincidence to read Rilke’s words 100 years later, on the most solemn of days. Here in north-west New Jersey, weeks of rain gave way to a persistent sun, and healthy bloom. Yet this Good Friday was feverishly windy, the type of swirl that sneaks under shut doors and moves its way through our home, rattling and rocking enough objects to affirm that it was a day of wrath and unrest.
Rilke apologised to Bonstetten for the absence of growth; “I would have preferred it to be the one to wish you a happy Eastertide.” In its stead, “I hereby offer you another blossoming that anyway you already know; only its obedient reflection is added in my spirit. It’s worth remembering that if I was able to offer its reflection, it was only because it had rendered me clear as crystal.”
Enclosed along with his letters, as a salve, was a copy of “Palme” by Paul Valéry, translated by Rilke himself. In a contemporary translation from James Merrill, a certain sentiment resounds. An angel, “veiling, barely, his dread / Beauty and its blaze” offers sustenance to the speaker. “His eyelids make the sign / of prayer; I lower mine.” It is a poem of lamentations, speaking of “These days which, like yourself, / Seem empty and effaced / Have avid roots that delve / To work deep in the waste.”
Letters Around a Garden collects 22 letters from Rilke to Bonstetten, who apparently held them close until sharing them later in life with La Délirante, a Parisian publisher. Bonstetten’s letters to Rilke, notes translator Will Stone, remain unknown.
Stone knows his subject well. He has previously translated Rilke’s verse, and is thought-ful about the art: “Somewhere along the route the translation finds itself, one hopes, out in the ubiquitous no-man’s-land between languages, where the imps of poetry plot their audacious designs.” A good translator “needs to be ever patient and flexible, like those cameramen who wait in the undergrowth for hours, days and nights to capture a field mouse carrying a grain of corn past their noses”, and be “ready to capture it, to nail down the fleeting image, the one ideal equivalent which corresponds, the initial intruder that soon sits snugly and unnoticed in the worn nest of the original”. Stone’s epistolary translations are a gift; for such a spare number of pieces, the book offers welcome insights.
Baptised and raised Catholic, later lapsing, Rilke’s faith has been the subject of much debate. Some biographers and critics have posited that Rilke’s inward-facing mysticism was the inevitable antithesis of his mother’s outward, strict piety; the juxtaposition is perhaps too neat and facile, too literary in its reduction. Of course, it also might partially be true. Poets are not often doctrinaire; art needs its cracks.
Rilke’s ambitious series The Visions of Christ and The Life of the Virgin Mary are neither orthodox nor profane; they are idio-syncratic, and are therefore inviting. Rilke was a seeker, haunted by Christ: “God speaks to each of us as he makes us, / then walks with us silently out of the night” he writes in the Book of Hours. God calls us to “go to the limits of your longing. / Embody me.” For to live means to let “everything happen to you: beauty and terror.” “Nearby is the country they call life. / You will know it by its seriousness,” God says. “Give me your hand.”
It is easy to be swept by such lines, and Rilke’s song extends to his letters. The garden at Muzot had fallen into disrepair, and Rilke, hypnotised by his conclusion to the Duino Elegies, sought a reality to meet the poetic myth. He needed to bring it back to life.
Any task with nature, however small, is full of unforeseen challenges. From even the first letter, Rilke is sick, away at a local sanatorium for rounds of treatment. By the second letter, despite “the generous sun of the last fortnight, the Valais spring is tardy in arriving this year”. When he is able, Rilke sets to work: “it’s only the spade now that speaks drily, preparing the future vintage amid the hard and bare vines. And the earth responds with the silence of an ill-awoken church.” Easter is an anchoring point for Rilke. It is when the “complete silence which I endure” finally “softens”.
Without Bonstetten’s responses, Letters Around a Garden feels like an incomplete arrangement. Perhaps it should be that way. Although I spend much time in literary archives poring over words meant for another and never public light, I admit some guilt in my peering. These aren’t quite letters of romantic love, but they are letters of some form of love. Perhaps Rilke thought all letters were acts of love.
“We need art,” he writes in one letter, in the same way that we need a “willing house; a garden innocent and giving; the curve of birds in the air; the winds, the rains, memories and the calm of a starry firmament stretching to the infinite: all this just so a human being can settle with his heart!” We will never know if Rilke found the God he was looking for, yet perhaps he realised that the search was affirmation enough.
<strong><strong>This article originally appeared in the May 2024 issue of the <em>Catholic Herald</em>. To subscribe to our award-winning, thought-provoking magazine and have independent and high-calibre counter-cultural Catholic journalism delivered to your door anywhere in the world click</strong> <mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color"><a href="https://catholicherald.co.uk/subscribe/?swcfpc=1">h</a></mark><a href="https://catholicherald.co.uk/subscribe/?swcfpc=1"><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color">ere</mark></a>.</strong>
