He published Assírio e Alvim, with the title Exposed over the mountains of the heart an anthology of the work of Maria Teresa Dias Furtado as a translator of Rilke, the enormous poet to whom our author dedicated a very important part of her work as a great Germanist.
Talking about the echo that Rilke’s work had on me continues to be something in the domain of the intimate, unlike my relationship with many other readings. I have had good and bad reasons to love Rilke’s poetry. Starting with the bad ones, I will mention what Paul de Man calls the “Rilke myth”, which seduces the reader with an image of the poet as the bearer of a spiritual gift, which brings him closer to all our pains and ours, to use the poet’s terms in a letter, “almost impossibility of living”, taking us to a level of consoling understanding as a “healer of souls”, to continue quoting the same letter.
This is a bad reading, which takes us away from Rilke’s true greatness, which is that of a poet rigorously and demandingly focused, after Rodin’s lesson, on the construction of these dense sculptures of words, which open windows to what he calls “the inner space of the world” and which makes us feel the appeal of the “Open” in all creation, human and natural, continuing to use his own terms.
It is not, therefore, an aestheticist evasion, riddled with social and artistic snobbery, that this poetry leads us to, contrary to what its detractors may claim. The strength of this poetry in confronting the most diverse aspects of reality, whether works of art, common and everyday objects, or love and death, with the splendor of its discursive torrent and the power of evoking its strangest images, is all this that attracts us to want to penetrate the richness of this work.
I have never forgotten some of the precepts that, in his Letters to a Young Poet, Rilke enunciates:
Strive to love your own doubts as if each one were a closed room, a book written in a foreign language.
Finally, the most fundamental and decisive precept:
There is only one way: go inside yourself and look for the need that makes you write. See if this need has roots deep in your heart. Confess yourself in depth: “Would I die if I wasn’t allowed to write?” This, above all: in the quietest hour of the night, ask yourself this question: “Am I really obliged to write?” – Examine yourself in depth until you find the most profound answer.
This ethics of writing and our relationship with what we write and the consideration of the poem as an object to be built, like a sculpture, should lead us to question ourselves throughout our lives about what we write, without ever losing sight of the essential doubt and the fundamental question that those letters pose to us.
This book that Maria Teresa Dias Furtado offers us, through Assírio e Alvim, constitutes a remarkable anthology of this immense Rilkean work, translated with rigor and invention, and leads me to pose a challenge to the author and editors: why not all of Rilke’s poetic work collected, brought into our language by this excellent translator, for a future Christmas?
Diplomat and writer