On “Plaster Cast Torso of Apollo”
BY Alice Fulton
Rilke’s “Archäischer Torso Apollos” (“Archaic Torso of Apollo”) is a poem I intensely admire and one that haunts my thoughts. It was composed in 1908 after Rilke served as Rodin’s secretary. Like other poems in his volume New Poems, “Archaic Torso of Apollo” attempted to innovate rather than replicate the dominant mode of European poetics.
My poem “Plaster Cast Torso of Apollo” responds to Poetry’s call for “edgy or unconventional translation practices” in that it transposes and repurposes Rilke’s sonnet while retaining many of its formal qualities. In music, a transposition shifts each chord and note of a piece into a new key while retaining the melodic structure. I wrote the poem after seeing a plaster cast torso of Apollo defaced by graffiti. It seemed to me that with one word, one gesture, the entire classical tradition was called into question.
Rilke’s gorgeous sonnet expresses a transformative epiphany in the presence of a radiant ideal, a god. Mortal endeavors seem shabby in contrast to the immortal perfection of the marble Apollo. The viewer feels shamed, exposed. But as I thought about the damning graffiti on the plaster cast torso, I was struck by the way the crude script upstaged the sculpture, which couldn’t feel, see, think, or empathize. And it seemed the act of witness might be the mortal imperative: the change we must make in our lives.
Read the poem this note is about, “Plaster Cast Torso of Apollo.”
Poet and writer Alice Fulton was born in Troy, New York in 1952. She earned a BA from Empire State College and an MFA from Cornell University. She is the author of numerous books, including the collections Coloratura on a Silence Found in Many Expressive Systems (2022); Barely Composed (2015); The Nightingales of Troy (2008), a collection of linked stories; and Cascade Experiment: Selected Poems (...