Sidebar: Rainer Maria Rilke, Jan Morris, and the meaning of Trieste

“Why are M&J visiting Trieste?” you might be wondering. I suppose you could blame it on poetry, or at least: on one particular poet.

I’m not sure when I first began to think of Trieste as a place that I’d like to visit, but the two main suspects are German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, and, later, Welsh writer Jan Morris (though there are many other writers associated with Trieste, including James Joyce, who lived in Trieste for nearly 16 years). But Rilke is the one who first brought Trieste to my attention.

I’ve long thought of Rilke as the epitome of the modern romantic poet, a kind of ur-poet, a writer whose life was completely dedicated to poetry. His devotion to poetry caused his marriage to fail, and he lived an almost monastic life, what I then thought of as a poet’s life: in relative poverty, itinerant, dependent on the support of patrons (in Rilke’s case: usually female; usually titled). As an irreverent aside: I see a striking resemblance between Rilke (as shown in this well-known photograph of him, below) and Mr. Burns, from the Simpsons (if Rilke’s hairline were to recede, and he shaved his moustache, acquired a top hat, and affected a slightly-evil scowl):

Among Rilke’s most famous writings are a suite of ten poems known as the Duino Elegies, which have been translated into English at least twenty times by various translators. When I was first getting familiar with Rilke’s work, I learned that the elegies were named after Duino Castle, an isolated castle set on a promontory overlooking the Adriatic, not far from Trieste. In Rilke’s day the castle was owned by the Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis (great name), and Rilke was a frequent guest there, often staying there in solitude when Princess Marie was elsewhere (though I suspect that there were servants; there were always servants in castles such as this, in those days).

In my own imagination, Duino Castle seemed like the perfect place to write, and this may be when I first thought that I’d like to see it for myself some day. Trieste, as the nearest city of any size, became a destination by proxy.

I have a number of books by and about Rilke, including a collection of Rilke’s letters to Princess Marie. The volume includes a letter dated January 21, 1912, from Rilke (then resident at Duino Castle) to the Princess Marie (who was gadding about somewhere else, probably visiting some other member of the Princely House of Thurn und Taxis). The letter from Rilke was accompanied by a small volume in which Rilke had inscribed the first elegy.

That letter is followed in the collection by a reminiscence from the Princess Marie, describing the composition of the poem.

The Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke & Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis (1958)

Opening to the first elegy (translation by J. B. Leishman, 1939)

As the following image shows, it wasn’t easy being an itinerant poet! While the first two elegies were written by Rilke in a burst of inspiration at Duino Castle, the composition and completion of the entire suite of ten elegies occurred over a period of ten years, and in a variety of settings (I expect that the dates and settings are drawn from Rilke’s letters).

The composition of Rilke’s Duino Elegies

Duino Castle was sold by descendants of the Thurn und Taxis family in 1997.

There is a walking trail along the cliffs near Duino Castle, known as the Rilke Trail, and I hope to walk it with J during our 3-day stay in Trieste. I’m not sure how one gets from Trieste to the start of the trail, but I’m hoping that we can figure it out.

As a kind of footnote to all of the above, here’s what the 1911 Baedeker has to say about Duino (remember: 1911 would have been exactly when Rilke was staying at Duino Castle):

Jan Morris and Trieste

Jan Morris is another writer with a fascination for Trieste, a fascination which originates in the time that she spent there as a young naval officer, just after WWII. She was a he at the time, James Morris, and that transition from he to she is a fascinating, and famous, story of its own. Jan Morris’s final book, in fact, is on Trieste: Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere, published in 2001, and I’ve read it a couple of times.

Jan Morris’s Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere

For Morris, the pervading mood of Trieste is one of melancholy, a mood that I’m much in sympathy with, and she senses everywhere in Trieste the ghosts of the vanished Austro-Hungarian Empire. Her book does a wonderful job of recreating Trieste’s melancholy mood, by giving a voice to the resident Hapsburg-era ghosts, while at the same time providing a succinct overview of Trieste’s complicated history. Jan Morris passed away in November of 2020.

Following the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the end of WWI, Trieste was annexed to Italy, and gradually became a relatively unimportant port in an almost-overlooked part of Italy—which may account for the melancholy atmosphere that Morris describes so well. Hard to recall, today, perhaps, that at the height of its glory, the city served as the port of the entire Austro-Hungarian Empire, connected by regular trains to Vienna, the capital. Here’s what the 1911 Baedeker had to say about Trieste: