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In over-writing Rilke’s French poems (they are not translations) Jo Shapcott, in her foreword, describes variously her purposes as “inventing a modern voice to speak them”, and as “responses, arguments, even dramatisations”. From the outset I found it hard to imagine the motive for such an unlikely project and was not surprised at the uneasy outcome.

     A few years before his death, after the Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus, Rilke wrote around 400 poems in French. The poems are perhaps slighter than their predecessors but Rilke’s inimitable voice continues: inward and hermetic, eluding time and epoch-shaped cultural baggage, indifferent to audience, his poetry whispers and insinuates. His poetic moments hover effortlessly above the literal and above polemic. His speaker is an indeterminate ‘I’, more often than a ‘we’, the two usually fused into an impersonal source. There are few poets more impervious to argument, drama or conversion to the modern vision.

     In the ‘Windows’ poems you see immediately how alien the modern voice is to that of Rilke’s: busy, impatiently down-to-earth, assertive, ego-centred yet audience-directed; it’s a voice that surrounds us continually today and seeps into the soul. Why would Jo Shapcott want to impose this voice on Rilke? Would not the more radical project be that of recovering a Rilkean voice for our intrusive times? Not surprisingly then the result, in the ‘Windows’, the ‘Roses’ and ‘Taxes’ sequences, is at once to undermine one’s reception of Rilke and obscure her own poetic gifts. Of the countless examples I offer the following:

You propose I wait, strange window...
Aren’t I intact, with this life that’s listening,
with this full heart that loss is completing

(Rilke)

I won’t stop talking to you just because
You’re acting strange. You mouthed off
all day yesterday

(Jo Shapcott)

She sums up the ‘I’ problem herself a few pages on with:

No chance that who I am
can get lost in this space,
small, airy, like love
with me in the middle.

With the ‘Roses’ poems she adds a further ‘modern’ element - that of claiming that his Roses ‘really’ refer to female genitalia, female eroticism, a claim endorsed enthusiastically by Vicki Feaver in her cover tribute, and that the sequence offers the opportunity to explore that contemporary obsession ‘gender relations’. Fortunately little of this program emerges in her versions of the poems - indeed in many of them she stays quite close to Rilke’s tone, adding furthermore a welcome asperity with her botanical titles to Rilke’s arguably somewhat precious touch. But again what project is this? It’s almost impossible for a modern person to imagine the erotic other than in the literal, quotidian full-frontal manner of contemporary discourse. Thus for Rilke’s ‘Eros’, retaining its classical sense - an alliance of beauty and desire imaginatively projected onto an image - the old guns of repression are put in place to smoke out the real content and to argue with Rilke from the perspective of gender relations. Sorry, but Rilke’s Rose poems are primarily about Roses and the soul connections we make with them.

Rose never tempted again, disconcerter,
by your inner peace; ultimate lover,
this troubling odor of a naked saint.

...ultimate lover,
so far from Eve, from her first call -
rose infinitely holding the fall

(Rilke)

Now you’ve made
a saint out of me
Saint Rose, open-handed,
she who smells of God naked.

But, for myself, I’ve learned
to love the whiff of mildew
because though not Eve, exactly
yes, I stink of the Fall

(Jo Shapcott)

The ‘Tender Taxes’ poems (odd title, Rilke’s own, for his tribute to his long-adopted country and its language) exemplify further the reservations expressed here.

     In the ‘Gladestry Quattrains’ she shifts Rilke’s Valaisian idylls to a country she knows more intimately - the border country. At last her gift shines out. Here the place itself speaks through her poetry unhindered by agenda and an intrusive ‘I’ to inform it. Here among many lovely poems is ‘Gilwern Dingle’ in her own Rilkean voice:

A lane between two meadows,
not leading anywhere
but still managing to tempt
the fields to go along with it.

A track which often has
Nothing     ahead
except the ford,
and the lengthening season.