In the Company of Rilke: Why a 20th-Century Visionary Poet Speaks So Eloquently to 21st-Century Readers

I have been trying on and off for a decade to get into Rilke. His manner is captivating - refined and mysterious -, but what is he talking about? Not about the external world, but some mental realm of his own, esoteric and indefinable. It is a formidable task to make this intelligible, but Dowrick takes it up with verve and an infectious enthusiasm. Her book is intended to get one into Rilke, and with me, at least, it has succeeded. She does not take one through the various stages of Rilke's development, or even offer a close reading of a single poem; but instead she presents a general take on the poet's mind and aims. According to her presentation, Rilke was, above all, a seeker after God - not the God of the dogmatic religions, the transcendent law-giver, but a God who is impersonal and immanent in the world, a God to whom we can attain only through an attentive waiting, and an openness of the spirit to transformation, to seeing everything in a new way. This is, in effect, to give priority to the Rilke of his early volume `The Book of Hours', but there is also much in later Rilke that, as Dowrick shows, picks up the same themes.Much of this book could be described as a New Age spirituality, illustrated by reference to Rilke, supplemented by references to other gurus, such as Rumi and Bede Griffiths. But Dowrick is disarmingly frank, and gives her reader plenty of ammunition to support other views of her favourite poet. Her treatment of Rilke's life and personal relationships will give support to those who dismiss him as incorrigibly self-centred, Narcissistic, snobbish, feline and manipulative, and as someone who guarded his privacy with no respect at all for the most basic social duties - such as visiting one's mother or attending one's daughter's wedding. An objection to Dowrick's interpretation that will occur to many who are, like her, admirers of the poet is that even the Rilke of the Books of Hours is arguably not a theist at all: his `God' needs us just as much as we need him, and is perhaps best interpreted as a higher, generally unconscious level of the human spirit. - But I don't want to criticize this book: it has enabled even me to get into Rilke, as I found on turning back from it to the German volumes. This is quite an achievement!Dowrick is also sensible on the question of language. Yes, it would be best to learn enough German to be able to read Rilke in the original, at least with the help of a bilingual edition (such as the recent OUP anthology). But in practice most English and American readers of Rilke will keep to English. Dowrick sensibly prefers those translators who write good English to those who have good German - sadly these two classes seem scarcely to overlap. But shouldn't the `openness' that reading Rilke calls for extend to the challenge of the new attitudes and the new music that a foreign language opens up for those who take the trouble to learn it?

I'm usually able to persevere with the most pedestrian of books but I am finding the audio book version of this very hard to follow. I think there are several reasons. 1) There's not enough attention to detail - the author talks about how wonderful Rilke is in the original but so far I've not heard any poems read in their entirity in German! 2) Translations are compared but, again, I'm finding the commentry on and around them distracting. I can't see the precision of language with regard to what has been translated/ written just, if I'm honest, turgid opinion on the translation. There's no getting into the weeds of language. Maybe I'm being unfair and need to read rather than listen to the text. I'll keep going and I'll look up all the translators mentioned and return again to previous chapters but so far this is just sending me to sleep. I really do want to know the attraction of Rilke but this, as they say, isn't doing it for me - at the moment...