The author Feng Zhi is selected from "Letter to a Young Poet"
In the fall of 1926, I first learned Rilke's name and read his early work, Cornett. This prose poem, which now has two Chinese translations, was an unexpected and bizarre acquisition for me. The brilliance of the colors, the sonorous tone of the tone, is dominated from beginning to end by a gloomy and mysterious mood, like a torrential rain in the mountains, and like the sound of the iron horse wind in the autumn night: this is a work of divine help, I thought at the time; but where do you know that it was in a stormy night, and the young poet leaned on the window, staring at the changes in the night, in one fell swoop?
Then I never had the opportunity to read Any other works by Rilke, thinking only that he was no more than a neo-romantic, mystical poet full of northern smells; but I did not know that at that time he had observed the truth of the whole world, tasted the sorrows and joys of people and things, and later reached the state of returning to the spirits of heaven and earth, and died two days before the Chinese New Year's Eve of that year.
As for the reading of his Prayer Book (1905), his New Poem (1907), his Brig Essay (1910), his Late Lamentations of Duino (1923) and sonnets, and the eloquent and moving booklets that cannot be written or read, it has been the last five years. The Book of Prayers is full of Nordic religious sentiments, which are endless music, that is a permanent flood of feelings. In this endless flood of music and eternal feelings, the Romantic poets of the late eighteenth century in Germany (they left Goethe alone) had already performed a helpless tragedy. They only had youth, not adulthood, let alone the completion of gray hair. But Rilke was not like this, and although he had suffered such a fate in his heart, he restrained it. At the age when Novalis died and Hölderlin became insane, that is, on the way from youth to middle age, Rilke had a new will. He transforms music into carving, flowing into crystalline, from the vast ocean to the majestic mountains. He arrived in Paris and learned one thing from the master rodin whom he admired dearly: work—work like a craftsman.
He began to watch, and he watched everything in the universe with pure love. He watched rose petals and poppies; leopards, rhinos, swans, flamingos, black cats; he watched prisoners, sick and mature women, prostitutes, lunatics, beggars, old women, blind men; he looked at mirrors, beautiful lace, women's fate, childhood. He humbly served them, listened to their voices or their words, and shared in their fate, which they all ignored. Everything around him seemed to have just been made from God's hand; he, nakedly stripped of his cultural clothes, looked with primitive eyes. At this time, he deeply felt that thousands of years of human history had been too wasteful, and he asked, "What have we found?" Isn't everything around us almost unspeakable, mostly not even seen? Aren't we the first of us to see every object we actually look at? Until his later years, he wrote such verses:
Suffering is not recognized,
Love has not been learned,
Things that are far away from the dead
No unveiling.
In this way, Rilke carefully discovered the souls of many objects, saw the postures of many objects; he wanted to express in words the things he had grasped that had never been noticed in his lifetime, and the words became for him either too carved or never carved.
How Rodin carved his vivid statues from stiff stones, Rilke exercised the poems in his New Poems from words. Whenever I unfold this new poem, I think of the Musée Rodin in Paris. Most of the poems in this collection are poetry, in which the poet can no longer be seen recounting himself and expressing personal sorrows; only to see that all things have their own world, and together they form a real, serious, and living republic.
Beauty and ugliness, good and evil, nobility and inferiority are no longer his standards; his only criteria are: truth and hypocrisy, survival and wandering, seriousness and funnyness. He mentions Portrell's Carrion in his Essays on Brigg: "Do you remember Portrell's incredible poem Carrion? That's possible, and I understand it now. ...... That is his mission to see the Being in this terrible, ostensibly objectionable thing, which lives among all beings. There is no choice and rejection. ...... I am often amazed at how willing I am to give up everything I expect for the sake of a physical object, even if it is evil. ”
"Choosing and rejecting" is the attitude of many poets, and we often hear people say that this is not the material of poetry, this cannot be included in poetry, but Rilke replied that there is nothing that cannot be included in poetry, as long as it is a real being; ordinary people say that poetry needs emotions, but Rilke said that emotions are what we already have, and what we need is experience: such experience, like a Buddhist disciple, incarnating all things, tasting the sufferings of all beings.
He said in His Essays:
"We have to look at many cities, we have to see people and things, we have to know animals, we have to feel how birds fly, we have to know how little flowers look when they open in the morning.
We must be able to recall: the journey to a foreign land, the unexpected encounter, the gradually approaching parting; - recalling the childhood years that are still unclear; ... Thinking of childhood diseases ... Think of the days in the silent, dreary huts and the mornings on the seashore, think of the sea in general, think of the many seas, think of the nights of the journey, in these nights when everything is chirping in unison and the stars are flying—but this is not enough, if all this can be imagined.
We must recall many nights of love, one night different from the other, remembering the cries of pain of the childbirth and the softly sleeping, dead white-clad women. But we also have to accompany the dying, sitting next to the dead, in the hut with the window open, with some sudden noise. ...... It is only when they become the blood within us, our gaze and gesture, namelessly indistinguishable from ourselves, that can be realized, and at a very rare moment the first word of a line of poetry is formed in the center of them, standing out. ”
This is the confession of Rilke's poem, and he lives it that way.
I can't dwell on the contents of the strange book of "Brigg's Essays" here (I hope to have another opportunity to talk about it in the future). After the publication of the first two episodes of "New Poems" and the completion of "Essays", for more than a decade, Rilke fell into a state of stagnation, withering, and uncreative, in the middle of which he endured the cruel and inhuman world war that he could not bear.
After a long period of silence, suddenly full of inspiration, in 1922, in a few days, in an ancient palace left over from the thirteenth century in southwestern Switzerland (the old palace walls are only planted with roses), the ten long "Lamentations of Duino", which had begun before the war and had been suspended for a long time, were completed in one fell swoop, accompanied by dozens of sonnets. At this time, the stone carvings in the "New Poem" melted into the vast ocean, and the poet was like a singer of the night of the sea, looking at the changes in Vientiane alone, and issuing a deep song against the endless flow of life: praise, praise, praise...
In this way he fulfilled his mission.
In his later poetry, he could be listed with the bandar of ancient Greece. But if we read his book, which was recently published, we will feel that he and we are closer than any of our closest friends. We would follow him to Russia to visit Tolstoy, to Paris to meet Rodin, through Denmark to remember Jacobson and Kirchgaard, to admire the fountains designed by Michia Angero in Rome, and then to Egypt and Spain... Finally, after the lamentations and sonnets were completed, he sang a happy song to his distant friend in the middle of the night.
Rilke was a rare writer who spent his whole life on the go, in loneliness, always speaking the most intimate words to his friends—not only with his friends, but also with many young people: young mothers, unemployed workers, writers who tried to write, revolutionaries in prisons, who loved to write to him about their pain of having nowhere to complain, and he answered sincerely. For several years, these books have always been my loneliest and most wandering companion.
November 1936