How to Be In Service to the Art
Exploring the Creative Process of Rilke and the Art of Translation with Mark S. Burrows
“Creative life doesn’t happen on command, things happen when you stop trying to force them—the relinquishment of the ordering mind and demanding ego. When I let go of that, there is a possibility for a new voice, a longed-for voice, to be heard.” —Mark S. Burrows
Preview: Episode 122 with Mark S. Burrows
“A translator has a double loyalty, fidelity, obedience,” says Mark S. Burrows, one of the premiere translators of Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke. “The first is to the writer. You are not creating your own writing. You are listening to a piece so deeply it becomes part of you. I would never dare translate something until I felt that. The second fidelity is as important, to the reader. It should carry the spirit and energy, the beauty, the difficulty, the dazzling darkness of those originals if you’re to be faithful to your task.” Mark shares with us the stunning story of how Rilke wrote the Sonnets to Orpheus and Duino Elegies, then shares the complexities of the art of translation. It’s a soul-opening, life-affirming episode about struggle and creativity, expressing the ineffable, creating the impossible, and how to “dance the orange.”
Mark S. Burrows is an award-winning poet, translator, and scholar. An historian of medieval Christianity, he is a much sought-after speaker and retreat leader in the US and Europe. He is a past president of the Society for the Study of Christian Spirituality and currently edits poetry for the society’s journal Spiritus. His work explores the intersections of spirituality, theology, poetry and the arts, attentive to the interior dynamics that lead to personal and social transformation. Together with Jon Sweeney, he has published three books of meditative poems inspired by Meister Eckhart’s writings, most recently Meister Eckhart’s Book of Darkness and Light, which was awarded Gold Medal by the Nautilus Book Awards in 2024. His translations of German poetry include the first full-length translation of the German-Jewish poet Hilde Domin’s poems, The Wandering Radiance: Selected Poems of Hilde Domin (2023) and the only English translation of poems in their original form that Rilke eventually published as Part I of The Book of Hours (published as Prayers of a Young Poet in 2013). His most recent translation is Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus (2024). He recently published You Are the Future: Living the Questions with Rainer Maria Rilke (2024), cowritten with Stephanie Dowrick. He lives and writes in Camden, ME.
What We’re Reading and Listening to:
Rosemerry:
One of my favorite poets of all time is A.R. Ammons, who writes so beautifully of the natural world, paradox, and how we engage with the mystery. I especially love his use of repetition, as in this poem, “Hymn,” which leaves me with such an expansive feeling, tugged in two directions to arrive so very right here.
In a humble, unapologetic, generous interview with Jack Ridl (Emerging Form guest on episode 54, Jeff Monroe of Reformed Journal shares with us the unraveling and the remaking of an artist … madness, sports, poetry, religion, hope and love.
Speaking of Jack Ridl, I endorsed his new collection of poems coming out October 11 … "'News from the heart!' All at Once brings us poems pierced with loss, grief, violence and desperation and stitched together with devotion, connection, beauty and love. Jack Ridl shows us again how to “push aside the mulch and dig,” how to say the unsayable, how to listen for the unspoken, and how to meet this terrible and generous world." I just love this book … you can preorder it now!
Christie:
I just started watching the Max (HBO) series adaptation of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s brilliant novel, The Sympathizer. I’m only a couple episodes in, but so far it’s a remarkably good and engaging adaptation of a novel I haven’t stopped thinking about since I read it at the beginning of the year.
Speaking of Max, the last season of My Brilliant Friend, their adaptation of Elena Ferrate’s incredible Neapolitan Quartet has finally started and I can’t wait! (Ok, I really am waiting a little longer for some more episodes to drop so I can watch more than one per week.)
Why I Urge You to Do What You’re Passionate About
When Rilke travelled through Russia
and studied Saint Francis
and fell in love with the married Salomé
and wrote poems for The Book of Hours,
he could not have known
that over a century later
a woman on another continent
would find herself wrestled by darkness
and find in his poems encouragement
to lean even deeper into darkness
until she could fall in love
with what she feared most.
He could not have known she would
tattoo his words into her memory
and scribe them into her blood
so whenever she walked or lay in the dark
she would have his words ever with her,
and they made her not only more brave
but more wildly alive than she’d been before.
And what if, as his parents had pushed,
Rilke had joined the military
and turned his back on poetry?
And what if he had not gotten himself expelled
from trade school so he could go on
to study literature and art?
What would have become of the woman
a hundred years later
had she not found his poem
and learned from him to love the dark?
—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
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This week, Mark reads the final poem in Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus, and then reads his translation. We talk about the poem itself, its invitation toward creating our own lives, how life is in the vowels, and the joy in the unfinished (unfinishable) act of creating. If you are not yet a paid subscriber, you can go now to our website, EmergingForm.substack.com, or by clicking the button below. Thank you!
Two Questions:
(share your answers with us here on Substack or in our FB group)
What other artist/writer’s work has most shaped your life (and a few words about how or why)?
Share a neologism (newly made up word) that really works for you.
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Thank you as always Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, for sharing your thoughts and words with the world. We never know how our words, actions or creations will ripple and affect others. It's important to remember this and for all of us to keep speaking/working/acting from the heart.