R enée Fleming’s performance last night in Kansas City was excellent.[50-sec clip, Renée Fleming, Brad Mehldau, ‘Rilke: Stundenbuch’, ‘Ich liebe dich, du sanftestes Gesetz’, 2006, 1.8MB MP3]
T he singing was gorgeous. The piano accompaniment by Bradley Moore was superb.
I had not previously heard the Brad Mehldau composition, “Songs from Rainer Maria Rilke’s ‘Book of Hours’.” The ‘Love Sublime’ CD on which these were recorded was released in 2006. A disturbing thing for those familiar with Rilke’s poetry is the Anita Barrows-Joanna Macy
Rilke translation used by Mehldau for these texts. Barrows and Macy convey mainly adulation and bended-knee piety, and strike out Rilke’s struggling with the problem of theodicy and anger towards a God who allows/causes suffering.I n the first song (Mönchischen Leben #18, ‘Ich liebe dich, du sanftestes Gesetz’), Rilke’s God as ‘the [maleficent] forest from which we never escape’ is transmuted by Barrow and Macy into a uterine ‘forest that always surrounded us’.
T hroughout Barrow’s and Macy’s “translation” there is wholesale, highly-politicized editing going on. They delete major portions of some stanzas (?where they find that Rilke’s original text does not jibe with their own church’s teachings or their own personal religious views), as in the second song (from Pilgerschaft #3, ‘Ich bin nur einer deiner Ganzgeringen’). Likewise in the third song sung by Fleming last night (Pilgerschaft #31, ‘Und seine Sorgfalt ist uns wie ein Alb’). The fourth song (Pilgerschaft #32, ‘Lösch mir die Augen aus: ich kann dich sehn’) completely renovates Rilke’s sense of God as an insurmountable, lethal burden... into a maniacal, martyrous masochist-terrorist’s self-immolation ritual, suicide-bomber-style. Yikes!
L ike all good art songs, Mehldau’s writing affords the vocalist wide latitudes for rhythmic phrasing and melodic interpretation, and Fleming does not disappoint. Her ear ‘colonized’ by the buggy Barrows-Macy translation, she is compelled to become a ‘medium,’ clairvoyantly assaying what Rilke meant. She takes the words she is given, and turns them musically into something far closer to authentic Rilke. To hear her sing this is like hearing an alchemist at work, changing base metals into gold.O f course, there can be no ‘last word’ in translation or poetical hermeneutics, and, equally well, there can hardly be a ‘first word’ either. Hermeneutics is a process, an ongoing reaction to questions about the subjectivity and finiteness of understanding. Mehldau’s composition, then, amounts to an elaborate invitation—to the singer, to the pianist, and to the audience—to (re-)examine the text and decide for themselves what it means, or whether this account of what Rilke wrote is authentic or not.
M any years ago, Gadamer came up with the term ‘philosophical hermeneutics’; here, Mehldau leaves it to Fleming and to us to resolve. Faced with an English translation so very far from what Rilke actually wrote, Fleming concentrates on the question of what happens to us when we ‘understand’. Suffice to say, very few singers are up to a challenge of this sort...
W hat I mean by all this is: hearing Rilke ‘in his own voice’ is important. An honest and genuinely gifted translator can achieve this, even with poetry. It is an altruistic act, this setting aside of one’s own prejudices and temptations in devotion to a poet’s own unique (and sometimes disagreeable—) expressions.
A translator should never be an ‘editor’ in the way that Barrows and Macy allowed themselves to be, co-opting a text and bollocks with the truth. It’s about ‘transparency’.
W hat else? Mehldau offers an imaginative, dramatic, and widely-varied use of sound and silence, which Fleming takes full advantage of. Some links below, on sound art and acoustic ‘territories’ as compositional devices, may interest you in this regard.
- Renée Fleming website
- Harriman-Jewell series
- I love you, Gentlest of Ways
- No one lives his life.
- His caring is a nightmare to us,
- Extinguish my eyes, I’ll go on seeing you,
- Rilke.de
- ’Book of Hours’ in German
- ’Book of Hours’ some of Barbara Deutsch’s 1941 english translations
- Fondation Rainer Maria Rilke
- Brad Mehldau website
- Brad Mehldau page at Wikipedia
- Fleming R. Mehdau: Rilke: Book of Hours. (Nonesuch, 2006.)
- Caltman R. The Language of Hermeneutics. SUNY, 2010.
- Chrzanowska-Kluczewska E, Szpila G, eds. In Search of (Non)Sense. Cambridge Univ, 2009.
- Cronin M. Translation and Identity. Routledge, 2006.
- Eco U. Mouse or Rat: Translation as Negotiation. Phoenix, 2004.
- Eisenhauer R. The Fate of Translation. Peter Lang, 2005.
- Folkerth W. The Sound of Shakespeare. Routledge, 2002.
- Gadamer H-G. (Linge D, tr.) Philosophical Hermeneutics. 2e. Univ California, 2008.
- Grossman E. Why Translation Matters. Yale Univ, 2010.
- Ives P, Lacorte R, eds. Gramsci, Language, and Translation. Lexington, 2010.
- Labelle B. Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life. Continuum, 2010.
- Mieszkowski S, Smith J, de Valck M, eds. Sonic Interventions. Rodopi, 2008.
- Prochnik G. In Pursuit of Silence: Listening for Meaning in a World of Noise. Doubleday, 2010.
- Ricoeur P. On Translation (Thinking in Action). Routledge, 2006.
- Ricoeur P. Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics I. Athlone, 2000.
- Rosen S. Hermeneutics as Politics. 2e. Yale Univ, 2003.
- Sallis J. On Translation. Indiana Univ, 2002.
- Saunders J, ed. The Ashgate Research Companion to Experimental Music. Ashgate, 2009.
- Toop D. Sinister Resonance: The Mediumship of the Listener. Continuum, 2010.
- Trim R. Metaphor Networks: The Comparative Evolution of Figurative Language. Palgrave-Macmillan, 2007.
- Vandevelde P. The Task of the Interpreter: Text, Meaning, and Negotiation. Univ Pittsburgh, 2005.
- Voegelin S. Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art. Continuum, 2010.
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