里尔克：未被认可的女权主义者还是自恋的理想主义者
Rainer Maria Rilke:
Unrecognised Feminist Or Narcissistic Idealist?
Remembered primarily as a poet of great philosophical insight, Rilke’s complex treatment of women in both his life and art frequently goes unnoticed.里尔克作为一位具有伟大哲学洞察力的诗人，在他的生活和艺术中对女性的复杂处理常常被忽视。
There’s an irresistible allure to the lyrical prose of Rainer Maria Rilke, widely considered one of Austria’s greatest poets. These lines taken from his posthumous work, Letters to a Young Poet demonstrate that unparalleled clarity we have come to associate with the poet – to distill the complexity of the universe into the simplicity of an image: “Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.”里尔克（Rainer Maria Rilke）的抒情散文具有不可抗拒的诱惑力，她被广泛认为是奥地利最伟大的诗人之一。这些从他遗作《致一位年轻诗人的信》中摘录的诗句表明，我们与诗人的联系是无与伦比的清晰——将宇宙的复杂性提炼成简单的形象：“也许我们生命中所有的龙都是公主，只等着看我们行动一次，以美丽和勇气。也许所有让我们害怕的东西，从本质上说，都是一些无助的东西，需要我们的爱。”
His words – cinematic, dreamlike, mesmeric – have for the last century been lauded for their philosophical depth, their symbolic splendour and their feather-like sensitivity towards the most urgent questions of existence. As such, his legacy belongs to the school of solitude and introspection, remembered most eagerly as a desert island companion directing you towards the inner workings of your soul. If Charles Baudelaire’s legacy is intertwined with the streets of Paris, or if T.S. Eliot’s stretches out across the Margate sky, Rilke’s remains in the quiet embrace of individual solitude. But rarely do we consider Rilke a proponent of early feminist thought, despite the significance of women in shaping his ideas and the humanity with which he describes the female human being.上个世纪以来，他的话——电影般的、梦幻般的、催眠般的——因其哲学深度、象征性的辉煌以及对最紧迫的存在问题的敏感而备受赞誉。因此，他的遗产属于孤独和内省学派，作为一个指引你走向灵魂内在运作的荒岛同伴，他最热切地被铭记。如果查尔斯·波德莱尔的遗产与巴黎的街道交织在一起，或者如果T.s.艾略特的作品横跨玛格丽特的天空，那么里尔克的作品仍然是个人孤独的安静拥抱。但是，我们很少认为里尔克是早期女权主义思想的支持者，尽管女性在塑造他的思想和他描述女性人性方面具有重要意义。
In ‘Letter Seven’, of his most famous collection of correspondence, Rilke writes: “Women, in whom life lingers and dwells more immediately, more fruitfully, and more confidently, must surely have become riper and more human in their depths than light, easy-going man, who is not pulled down beneath the surface of life by the weight of any bodily fruit and who, arrogant and hasty, undervalues what he thinks he loves.” In what might be considered the beginnings of a 1904 feminist manifesto, it appears Rilke is not just championing the vitality of women, but arguing their essence is of a purer humanity than that of the opposite sex, who he criticises for their “deforming influences”.里尔克在他最著名的书信集《第七封信》中写道：“生活在其中的女人，生活更直接、更富有成果、更自信，在她们的内心深处，肯定比轻快、随和的男人更成熟、更人性化，他不会被任何身体果实的重量拉到生活的表面之下，他傲慢而草率地低估了他认为自己所爱的东西。“在1904年女权主义宣言的开端，里尔克似乎不仅仅是在倡导女性的活力，而是认为她们的本质是一种比这更纯洁的人性他批评异性的“畸形影响”。
He adds: “Someday (and even now, especially in the countries of northern Europe, trustworthy signs are already speaking and shining), someday there will be girls and women whose name will no longer mean the mere opposite of the male, but something in itself, something that makes one think not of any complement and limit, but only of life and reality: the female human being.” Today in 2018, society is still grappling with viewing women as wholly independent and subjective beings, such is the effect of centuries of male-centred thinking. It seems Rilke understood this, and could commit these ideas to a language well beyond his time.他补充道：“总有一天（甚至现在，尤其是在北欧国家，值得信赖的标志已经在说话和发光），总有一天，会有女孩和女人的名字不再仅仅是男性的对立面，而是一种自身的东西，让人觉得没有任何补充和限制，但只有生活和现实：女性人类。”2018年的今天，社会仍在努力将女性视为完全独立和主观的存在，这就是几个世纪以来男性中心思想的影响。里尔克似乎明白这一点，并能将这些想法运用到一种超越他时代的语言中。
But Rilke was not the human embodiment of his writing, and any critic must be careful to avoid the common pitfall of identifying the “designer with the design” as Vladimir Nabokov recalled, who himself referenced Rilke in his works. So the question arises: were Rilke’s feminist ideals genuinely felt, or a poetic tool through which to refine his artistic brush?但里尔克并不是他的作品的人性化体现，任何评论家都必须小心避免一个常见的陷阱，即弗拉基米尔·纳博科夫（Vladimir Nabokov）回忆道，他自己在作品中也提到了里尔克。所以问题就来了：里尔克的女权主义理想是真的感受到的，还是一种用来提炼他的艺术画笔的诗歌工具？
Women had an overwhelming influence on Rilke the man and poet: as a boy growing up in Prague, his mother would dress him as a girl, having lost an infant daughter a year before he was born; originally named René Maria, he was given two traditionally female names by his mother; it was Lou Andreas-Salomé – his muse, lover, confidante and in some ways a surrogate mother – who suggested he change René to Rainer; Rilke enjoyed a litany of furiously intense and short-lived relationships with wealthy patronesses and female artists throughout his life, eventually marrying the German sculptor Clara Westhoff.女人对里尔克这个男人和诗人有着压倒性的影响：作为一个在布拉格长大的男孩，他的母亲会把他打扮成一个女孩，在他出生前一年失去了一个幼女；他最初的名字叫雷内玛丽亚，母亲给他起了两个传统上的女性名字；这就是卢安德烈亚斯·萨洛梅——他的缪斯、情人、知己等等作为一个代孕母亲，她建议他把雷纳换成雷纳；里尔克一生都与富有的赞助人和女艺术家保持着一系列激烈而短暂的关系，最终嫁给了德国雕塑家克拉拉·韦斯特霍夫。
With the exception of Westhoff and Andreas-Salomé who remained with the poet throughout his life in some form, Rilke’s love life appeared to follow a consistent pattern, outlined by Hayley Radford in her 2009 BBC Radio 4 documentary, ‘The Women of Rainer Maria Rilke.’ With an almost ritualised inevitability, Rilke’s affairs would last a mere six-weeks, fuelled by a period of incandescent letter-writing, before extinguishing them, often with dreadful consequences. As Oxford professor Karen Leeder highlights in Radford’s documentary, there’s a great “battle in [Rilke] between needing independence, needing his own space – but needing the inspiration of love.”除了韦斯特霍夫和安德烈亚斯·萨洛美在诗人的一生中以某种形式一直陪伴着他，里尔克的爱情生活似乎遵循着海莉·拉德福德在2009年英国广播公司第四台的纪录片《雷纳·玛丽亚·里尔克的女人》中勾勒出的一贯模式，里尔克的风流韵事只持续了六个星期，加上一段时间的热情洋溢的书信，然后就消失了，通常会带来可怕的后果。正如牛津大学教授凯伦·利德在拉德福德的纪录片中所强调的那样，“（里尔克）在需要独立、需要自己的空间和需要爱的灵感之间有一场伟大的战斗。”
Whilst this withdrawal will have undoubtedly caused great anguish to the people around him, it was arguably the very thing that allowed him to flourish as a poet. In his book My Belief: Essays on Life and Art, German writer Hermann Hesse captured the global effects of Rilke’s solitary pursuits: “And at each stage now and again the miracle occurs, his delicate, hesitant, anxiety-prone person withdraws, and through him resounds the music of the universe; like the basin of a fountain he becomes at once instrument and ear.”虽然这种撤退无疑会给他周围的人带来巨大的痛苦，但可以说正是这件事使他成为一个诗人而兴旺发达。德国作家赫尔曼·黑塞在他的《我的信仰：关于生命和艺术的随笔》一书中捕捉到里尔克孤独追求的全球影响：“在每一个阶段，奇迹时不时地发生，他那脆弱、犹豫不决、容易焦虑的人退缩，通过他发出宇宙的音乐；他就像喷泉里的一盆，立刻变成了乐器和耳朵。”
Indeed, women were both the conductors of his life, and the instruments by which he could develop as a thinker of profound insight. Are we to see Rilke as the champion of women his writings lead us to think, or the self-obsessed artist whose idealisations of the female muse empower and destroy with equal force?事实上，女人既是他生活的指挥者，也是他成长为具有深刻洞察力的思想家的工具。我们是要把里尔克看作是他的作品引导我们思考的女性的冠军，还是一个自我迷恋的艺术家，她对女性缪斯的理想化以同样的力量授权和毁灭？
Both can of course be true, but his legacy should reflect this, and resist categorising his identity as one or the other. To essentialise is to dehumanise, a charge that could well be levelled against Rilke: Carousel is a poem that both captures the “luminous” maturation of young girls whilst homogenising their experience; Woman in Love deftly captures the cosmic ambivalence of falling in love, but as the narrator questions “Who am I?”, the spirality of her being is flattened into a two-dimensional circle. Whilst critics have praised Rilke’s intuition into the female experience, there are limits to the empathic reaches of his soul.当然，两者都可能是真的，但他的遗产应该反映这一点，并抵制将他的身份归为一类或另一类。本质化就是去人性化，这是一个可以用来对付里尔克的指控：旋转木马是一首诗，既捕捉到年轻女孩的“光明”成熟，又将她们的经历同质化；恋爱中的女人巧妙地捕捉到了坠入爱河的宇宙矛盾，但作为叙述者的问题是“我是谁？”？，她存在的螺旋形被平展成一个二维的圆。尽管批评家们称赞里尔克对女性经验的直觉，但他心灵的移情能力是有限的。
To draw any rigid conclusions would be to stumble over the very hurdle that I – with Nabokov’s help – identified earlier. Hayley Radford’s characterisation of Rilke as a “flawed idealist” but “forever on the scale of the stars”, does well to articulate the primary preoccupation of his life: to pursue art at all costs. Whilst his ideals were flawed, his flaws were the very cracks through which his ideals could pour out. In Michael Wood’s article in the London Review of Books, he described Rilke in his own words, as “a beginner who can’t begin”. Was his feminist project another beginning he couldn’t quite begin? My charge is that Rilke’s ideals superseded his behaviour. To describe him as a feminist would be to retrofit a political activism that feels incongruous to his artistic pursuits. He attempted to speak for all humanity, to transform man’s dragons into loving princesses. His attempt was flawed, but his failure was great.要得出任何僵化的结论，就是在纳博科夫的帮助下，绊倒了我先前确定的障碍。海利·雷德福德将里尔克描述为一个“有缺陷的理想主义者”，但“永远在星星的尺度上”，这很好地表达了他生命中的首要任务：不惜一切代价追求艺术。虽然他的理想是有缺陷的，但他的缺点正是他的理想可以从中倾泻出来的裂缝。迈克尔·伍德在《伦敦书评》（London Review of Books）上的文章中，用自己的话形容里尔克是“一个不会开始的初学者”。他的女权主义计划是不是又一个他无法开始的开端？我的指控是里尔克的理想取代了他的行为。把他描述成一个女权主义者，等于是在改造一种与他的艺术追求格格不入的政治激进主义。他试图为全人类说话，把人类的龙变成可爱的公主。他的尝试是有缺陷的，但他的失败是巨大的。
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