Poetry: Why does this version of Rainer Maria Rilke's 1922 masterpiece Die Sonette an Orpheus matter so much? The answer - as so often with translation, and its cousin, the "imitation" or "version" - lies somewhere between the two names on the title page.
All translation operates a system of concealed levers by which a translator pits his weight against the original. When a poet as influential as Don Paterson pits himself against one of the fashionable greats, something like a trial of contemporary poetics must ensue.
The 55 Sonnets to Orpheus, written at near-miraculous speed during the final composition period of the late, great Duino Elegies, concentrate Rilke's extraordinary metaphysical imagination and his ability to render the material world hyper-real - the two faces of his transfiguring, visionary gift - inside a more traditional form. They allow us to see Rilke (1875-1926) as a post-Romantic, a post-Christian chromaticist; a poet who occupies a pivotal position at the entrance to modernity, rather as Mahler does in music.
Rilke - and by extension, Paterson, himself a musician - seems to have little difficulty identifying with the "god with the lyre" (Change). Though the poems of Part One are largely addressed to that "lost god, you eternal trace" (The Trace), those of the second half come close to inhabiting the Orpheus role:
Breath, you invisible poem -
pure exchange, sister to silence,
being and its counterbalance,
rhythm wherein I become,
ocean I accumulate
by stealth [ . . . ]
(Breath)
Such a shift, or enlargement, is characteristic of Rilke's symbol-building. Characteristic, too, is a doubling, or doubling-back, of metaphor. Though what we have here is simply a list of the poetic qualities of breath, by the end of the poem the same "air" is in turn "once the leaf and rind of my every word".
Such doublings require great precision - and at the same time an absence of laboriousness - if they are to be re-enunciated. And it's this need for uncompromising fluency which, one suspects, must have attracted Paterson to the extraordinary task of rendering his own Orpheus in sonnet form. In a thoughtful and thought-provoking Afterword, he tells us he was aiming for "just a little of the self-sufficiency of the German - meaning [ a version] I could memorise, and carry round in my head". The results are memorable indeed.
When a sonnet works, the whole rings to one note. As with a lyre string, when something occludes that singular ring the whole poem is false. Paterson's versions vary in metre, rhyme-scheme, tone and diction - some, such as The Gods, The Spin, The Venturers, are appreciably more ornate than, say, The Ball or The Passing - though never in stanzaic arrangement. But virtually every one of these "new" sonnets occupies its own tone and thought so thoroughly as to ring unquestionably true. To combine this with fidelity to the complex thought-progressions of the original is extraordinary. In some places, Paterson's technical mastery makes of the patter of half-rhyme something almost subliminal: "Mirrors: no-one's had the skill/ to speak about your secret lives./ Doors cut into time, you're filled/ with nothing but the holes of sieves -" (Mirror). Elsewhere, as in Flight, he handles pun as if it were metaphor: while air's "gracile and pliant" qualities unfold from "wind's lass", the aspirant who must "outstrip the weather/ to be his flight's end" brings us to both his conclusion and his purpose on this last word.
As always, Paterson's verse displays the hammered line of argumentation that can "salute all things wrested from doubt" (The Sarcophagi in Rome). It also enlarges itself towards what, for this poet, are new territories - the rhythm of speech, the purely concrete apprehension:
I remember one Spring, in Russia . . .
It was evening, and at the first star
a white horse
crossed the village square, one fetlock
hobbled
for a night alone in the field . . .
(Horse)
Such shifts are exciting for anyone who cares where writing in English today may be heading. They are also deeply moving in their own, poetic, terms. As Paterson and Rilke show us in this astonishing book, the most important work of the poet, even writing from the underworld of nightmarish times, is to summon up the beautiful, to "shape the ceremony/ to fit the perfect steps that might one day/ turn his own around, might turn his face".
Fiona Sampson's latest collection is The Distance Between Us (Seren, 2005). She is the editor of Poetry Review
Orpheus By Don Paterson Faber, 85pp. £12.99