Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God | Making of himself an offering...

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Rilke's Book of Ho...

	Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God Riverhead Trade, 2005 - 272 pages average customer review:based on 29 reviews view larger image
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While visiting Russia in his twenties, Rainer Maria Rilke, one of the twentieth century's greatest poets, was moved by a spirituality he encountered there. Inspired, Rilke returned to Germany and put down on paper what he felt were spontaneously received prayers. Rilke's Book of Hours is the invigorating vision of spiritual practice for the secular world, and a work that seems remarkably prescient today, one hundred years after it was written.

Rilke's Book of Hours shares with the reader a new kind of intimacy with God, or the divine--a reciprocal relationship between the divine and the ordinary in which God needs us as much as we need God. Rilke influenced generations of writers with his Letters to a Young Poet, and now Rilke's Book of Hours tells us that our role in the world is to love it and thereby love God into being. These fresh translations rendered by Joanna Macy, a mystic and spiritual teacher, and Anita Barrows, a skilled poet, capture Rilke's spirit as no one has done before.

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Rilke is timeless

Rilke's Book of Hours; Love Poems to God is a beautiful work of art comprised of both original German text and English translation by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy. Each poem is of honesty and discovery of the spiritual world. Rilke's work is always unique, and his style is simple on the page, yet complex in meaning. He takes the reader's mind and heart to deep, dark places by exploring God and fate and everything in between. He asks questions and answers them as well. Rilke has always been one of my favorite poets because of how closely I relate to his poetry. It is very moving and full of metaphors that take my breath away.
When Rainer Maria Rilke was in his twenties, he visited Russia (a milestone in the poet's life), and was inspired by many spiritual encounters. As soon as he arrived back to Germany, he gathered many poems from his writings while in Russia to form The Book of Hours. When Rilke was a young boy, his mother used to call him Sophia and dress him up in girl's clothing because she was traumatized by the death of her baby daughter. He had a dark childhood because of his mother, but it was she who forced him to write poetry, and it soon became his passion. His parents forced him into military school in order to become an officer, but he soon left the academy and pursued a literary career at Charles University in Prague. He published three literary works while at the university before he left for Munich. His poetry and letters have made Rilke one of the best poets of the twentieth century.
I have heard often how one Rilke poem has changed people's lives or has given them hope. This particular book has introductions of each translator where they specifically tell how Rilke's poetry touched their lives. Rilke's Book of Hours is split into three sections: The Book of Monastic Life, The Book of Pilgrimage, and The Book of Poverty and Death. While all sections are brilliant and inspiring, my personal favorite is The Book of Monastic Life. None of his poems have titles, only numbers to separate them. There are so many poems that touch the depths of my heart. In one poem Rilke writes:

it will be brought forth into day
by the river that mines
the silences of stone

Even when we don't desire it
God is ripening. (I,16)

This is an example of how enlightening and spiritual Rilke's poetry is. If nothing else, this book will give hope and comfort. It lets people know they are not alone in their thoughts or ideas. His honesty and insight is combined with beautiful language set Rilke apart from any other poet. In another poem, Rilke writes:

I want to know my own will
and to move with it.
And I want, in the hushed moments
when the nameless draws near,
To be among the wise ones -
or alone.

I want to unfold.
Let no place in me hold itself closed,
for where I am closed, I am false.
I want to stay clear in your sight... (I, 13)

This is a poem where Rilke lets himself go as he flows across the page. His breath and truth that flow ever so gently speak of innocence and courage. Rilke never holds back. His poetry is timeless.

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Making of himself an offering...

The task of a translator, I think, has always been unappreciated. It is a demanding one, a task that can never be done to the perfection it begs. Language is a living, breathing thing, and it holds within it an entire culture, and in that culture, an entire people, and within these people, an entire world. It is not possible to withdraw one such world and make it fit into the shape of another.

Yet if we are to even try to understand one another, the many of us on this earth and our ways, then translating the great works of any culture is a much needed task that some very brave soul must undertake. Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy are such brave souls, and the two friends are bonded by their deep love for the work of German poet (but born in Prague), Rainer Maria Rilke. While I know a very little of German, I cannot by any measure judge their success in translation. I have read Rilke in two languages, German being neither of them, and only from that experience can I say, cautiously, that I believe them to be as successful as any translators may hope to be. And it may be enough that a translator love a work so deeply and with such devotion that this in itself carries through the spirit of what is intended.

How can one not fall in love with Rilke? The poet transcends time, expressing what humankind has tried to express, surely, since self-awareness first blushed at its own face. In this particular collection, Rilke's poetry is a kind of love letter to God. As love letters do, his poems speak of longing, of devotion, of the desire to serve and please, of the fears of separation, of the joy of reunion. He wishes to present himself to God as he is, with open heart, in praise, one lonely being, perhaps, to another lonely being, both craving to love and be loved.

You, God, who live next door--

If at times, through the long night, I trouble you
with my urgent knocking--
this is why: I hear you breathe so seldom.
I know you're all alone in that room.
If you should be thirsty, there's no one
to get you a glass of water.
I wait listening, always. Just give me a sigh!
I'm right here.

As it happens, the wall between us
is very thin. Why couldn't a cry
from one of us
break it down? It would crumble
easily,

it would barely make a sound.

For Rilke, God is most intimate, most personal. He speaks to Him as if they stand side by side, and indeed they do. The need for company is mutual. Rilke's work is arguably a perfect blend of male and female sensibilities, with both the masculine in its demand and the feminine in its open heart. As Rilke was in his first years raised, oddly enough, as a daughter--his mother had longed for one, and in something weirdly like denial, dressed her long-locked boy as a girl in dresses and called him Rene--so in later years, his father sent him to military school, to toughen him up and teach him a very male discipline. Rilke would find his own good mix. He fit neither of their plans, nor the conventional of a working society.

Poetry was his love for as long as memory, and in whatever context his life, it was the one steady rock. He could and would not do any other work, forever seeking sponsors and mentors so that he may devote himself fully to his art. When he fell in love for the first time, the woman he loved urged him to use the more masculine version of his name, Rainer. And so ever after, he did. But all of this seems like sideline matters, mere tangents, including the love itself, as he had numerous relationships, holding none steady, including a marriage that produced a child. Nothing else came first. Nothing. Only the word in verse.

When Rilke worked alongside sculptor, Auguste Rodin, he watched the sculptor's intensity and passion for his art, and was inspired. They were a match, if not in medium, then in devotion. This was how to live one's life as an artist. With a singular vision, an undistracted dedication. If Rodin created in stone, Rilke created in language, and so he sculpted verse, and in verse, his ongoing and lifelong prayer:

Only in our doing can we grasp you.
Only with our hands can we illumine you.
The mind is but a visitor:
it thinks us out of our world.

Each mind fabricates itself.
We sense its limits, for we have made them.
And just when we would flee them, you come
and make of yourself an offering.

I don't want to think a place for you.
Speak to me from everywhere.
Your Gospel can be comprehended
without looking for its source.

When I go toward you
it is with my whole life.

No doubt, God was listening and listens still. If most of us pray in stutters and whispers, Rilke prayed in lyrical poetry, from the heart to God's ear. Through his, the rest of us feel that much closer to the divine, as well.

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Glad to have the German alongside the translated poems

As previous reviewers have noted, _Rilke's Book of Hours_ has its shortcommings, most notably the way in which the poems have been translated. While I am more forgiving of the translations than others, it is valid concern.

First, the German - Rilke's poetry is spiritually transcendent, moving and sublime. This collection is marvelous. However, the translations are a bit sticky. Certainly some slack must be given anyone who translates literature, poetry especially so. And while I was not happy to see some of Rilke's poems "reinterpreted," the translators were quite upfront and honest with their intentions.

Certainly purists will take issue with the English translations. Nonetheless, I found this a wonderful, beautiful collection of spiritually moving and thought-provoking poems.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

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