Archaic torso of Apollo
Archaic Torso of Apollo is the title of a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke . The second part of his New Poems begins with the verses, written in Paris in 1908 , with which he turns away from his emotional poetry in order to let things speak for themselves, as it were, and to enable people to experience the world around them directly.
The work captures the overwhelming impressions that the viewer of a torso of the god of poetry, Apollon , experiences. With the inviting sentence of his last verse ( You must change your life ), the poem is one of Rilke's best-known works.
Structure and text
In terms of form, it is a sonnet with five-part iambic verses . The quartets use embracing rhymes that are masculine on the outside and feminine on the inside. The first trio begins with a pair rhyme, after which the structure is again alternately interlaced in the form of cross rhymes ([fgfg]). The rhyme scheme is accordingly[abba cddc eef gfg].
The verses read:
We did not know his unheard-of head,
in which the eyeballs ripened. But
his torso still glows like a candelabra
in which his gaze, only screwed back,
holds and shines. Otherwise the bow of
the breast could not dazzle you, and in the gentle turning of
the loins a smile could not go
to that center that bore the conception.
Otherwise this stone would stand disfigured and just
below the shoulders with a transparent fall
and would not shimmer like the skins of predators;
and do not break out from all its edges
like a star: for there is no place that
does not see you. You have to change your life.
background
Like the first part of his New Poems , Rilke also introduces the second with (even more famous) verses in which the poet god Apollo plays a decisive role. If the first poem , formerly called Apollo , is based on the late Archaic head of a young man in the Louvre in Paris , who looked through the viewer with wide-open eyes, the second is due to Rilke's fascination with a young man 's torso. While Gertrud Höhler speaks of the fragmentary statue of the torso from the Belvedere (by the sculptor Apollonius) as a starting point, Wolfgang G. Müller only writes that it is “a” youth torso that Rilke presumably saw in the Louvre.
Interpretations
For Ulrich Karthaus , the work of art places high demands on the recipient, before whom the recipient can fail. The growing power of light emanating from the stone is a metaphor for truth . The imperative “You have to change your life” does not aim at a transformation of the way of life and cannot be compared with the catalog of religious commandments . The truth glowing from the glow of the torso, which grows to a star-like explosion of light, reminds us of the shine that shines in Franz Kafka's doorkeeper parable from the door of the law, a law that is also not defined. Rather, it is an individual imperative of our own life, a potential that has not yet been realized, which we suddenly recognize in fulfilled moments in our lives.
Wolfgang G. Müller's interpretation goes in a similar direction. He points to Rilke's “dynamic understanding of things”: While looking deeply into an object, what is often referred to in aesthetic emphasis as a transition or transition to a higher existence can occur. In special, lyrically immortalized moments of intense perception, according to Müller, events occur that can have the character of an epiphany , events that are characteristic of aesthetic modernism . Such Damascus experiences , as they at about James Joyce and Virginia Woolf , Hermann Broch and Hugo von Hofmannsthal in his Chandos letter will be, not in the religious to understand the meaning, but as it as an exaggeration of reality, a harrowing process, the existence of the glorify and show itself in the metaphor of the poem.
Like the Apollo sonnet that introduces the first part of the collection, according to Müller, this poem can also be interpreted as a complex epiphany. This can be seen in the constant use of light metaphors, which connect the parts of the now fragmentary statue. If the gaze of God had not been preserved in the torso, "the bow / breast would not blind you" and the shimmering stone "would not break out of all its edges / like a star ..."
Peter Sloterdijk chose the poem's last sentence to give the title to his book on the imperative. For Sloterdijk, “ You have to change your life ” is the summary, condensation and evaporation of all religious teachings, exercise instructions and trainings that point people to their “vertical tensions” and remind them to become aware of their possibilities, to surpass themselves and ultimately To train “with a god”.
Literature (selection)
- Horst Turk: The language of uncontrollable vision. On the metaphor in Rilke's Archaic Torso of Apollo . In: Fugen. German-French Yearbook for Text Analytics (1980), pp. 213–232.
- Peter Horst Neumann: Rilke's Archaic Torso of Apollo in the tradition of modern fragmentarism. In: Lucien Dällenbach / Christian L. Hart NIbbrig (Ed.): Fragment and Totality. Frankfurt am Main 1984, pp. 257-274.
- Gerhard Kaiser: Stone and language: Rilke's sonnet "Archaic Torso Apollos". In: Literatur für Leser (1988), pp. 107-118.
- Gertrud Höhler: Godly feeling. In: Marcel Reich-Ranicki (Ed.): 1000 German poems and their interpretations. From Arno Holz to Rainer Maria Rilke. Frankfurt am Main / Leipzig 1994.
- Ulrich Karthaus: The power of light. In: Marcel Reich-Ranicki (Ed.): 1000 German poems and their interpretations. From Arno Holz to Rainer Maria Rilke. Frankfurt am Main / Leipzig 1994.
Individual evidence
- ^ Rainer Maria Rilke: Archaic Torso Apollo. In: Complete Works. First volume, Insel Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1955, p. 557.
- ↑ Gertrud Höhler: God feeling. In: Marcel Reich-Ranicki (Ed.): 1000 German poems and their interpretations. From Arno Holz to Rainer Maria Rilke. Insel-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main / Leipzig 1994, p. 336.
- ↑ Wolfgang G. Müller, In: Manfred Engel (Ed.): Rilke manual, life - work - effect. Metzler, Stuttgart 2013, p. 313.
- ↑ Ulrich Karthaus: The power of light. In: Marcel Reich-Ranicki (Ed.): 1000 German poems and their interpretations. From Arno Holz to Rainer Maria Rilke. Insel-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main / Leipzig 1994, p. 282.
- ↑ Wolfgang G. Müller, In: Manfred Engel (Ed.): Rilke manual, life - work - effect. Metzler, Stuttgart 2013, p. 304.
- ↑ Wolfgang G. Müller, In: Manfred Engel (Ed.): Rilke manual, life - work - effect. Metzler, Stuttgart 2013, p. 305.
