Marina Tsvetaeva, Her Life in Poems - Rolf Gross

Tsvetaeva to Rilke
[PTR p.105-110]
St.-Gilles-sur-Vie,
May 9, 1926
Rainer Maria Rilke!
May I call you like this You, poetry incarnate, must know, after all, that your very
name is a poem. Rainer Maria, that sounds churchly - and kindly - and chivalrous. Your
name does not rhyme with our time, stems from earlier or later - has always been. Your
name willed it so, and you chose the name.
You are not my dearest poet ("dearest" - a level), you are a phenomenon of nature,
which cannot be mine and which one does not so much love as undergo, - or (still too
little) the fifth element incarnate: poetry itself - or (still too little) that whence poetry
comes to be and which is greater than it (you). It isn't a question of Rilke the person
(personhood: that which is forced upon us!), but of Rilke the spirit, who is still greater
than the poet and who is what really bears the name of Rilke to me, the Rilke of the day
after tomorrow... across all that distance.
What is still left for a poet to do after you A master (like Goethe, e.g.) one
overcomes, but to overcome you means (would mean) to overcome poetry itself. A poet is
he who - overcomes life (is to overcome it). You are an impossible task for future poets.
The poet who comes after you must be you, i.e., you must be born again. You give to
words their first sense, and to things their first words. E.g., when you say "magnificent"
you say "wreaking great things," as it was meant to mean originally (now "magnificent" is
no more than a hollow exclamation mark of sorts). I might have said all this to you more
clearly in Russian, but I don't want to give you the trouble of reading your way into it, I
would rather take the trouble of writing my way into it.
The first thing in your letter that hurled me up the tallest tower of joy (not lifted, not
placed) was the word May, [spelled “Mai” in modern German] the old nobility of which you
restored with that y-spelling. Mai with an i - brings to mind the first of May, not the
workers' holiday - no, the tame May of the bourgeoisie - of engaged and (not overly)
enamored couples.
A few short biographical notes (only necessary ones): from the Russian Revolution
(not revolutionary Russia; the revolution is a country with its own - eternal - laws!) I went
- by way of Berlin - to Prague, and your books went with me. In Prague I read for the first
time Early Poems. Thus did Prague become dear to me - on the first day - because of your
having been a student there. I remained in Prague from 1922 to 1925, three years; in
November 1925, I went to Paris. Were you still there In case you were there: Why didn't
I come to you Because you are the dearest thing to me in the whole world. Quite simply.
And - because you don't know me. From injured pride, out of reverence for chance (fate,
the same thing). From - cowardice, perhaps, that I'd have to endure your alien glance -
on the threshold of your room. (What could your glance at me have been if not alien! It
would have been a glance meant for anybody, after all, since you didn't know me! - and
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