Stephen Mitchell
Utne Reader
Stephen Mitchell borrows the voices of the greatest prophets and
poets in history and transmutes them into vivid English
translations. Thousands of readers have been introduced to Rainer
Maria Rilke, or reintroduced to the Gospels, the Book of Job, and
the Tao Te Ching via Mitchell's fresh renderings. Mitchell is
currently studying the Book of Genesis in preparation for a Bill
Moyers PBS series on the great text, in which he will share the
spotlight with writers Robert Coles, Cynthia Ozick, Elaine Pagels,
and Grace Paley.'All of my books have been the results of falling in love,' says
Stephen Mitchell of the many translations he's produced in a nearly
thirty-year career. 'They're encounters with consciousnesses that
I've been able to meet in the depths.'
And what imposing consciousnesses! Rainer Maria Rilke, the
Evangelists, and the unknown authors of the book of Job and the
Tao Te Ching, among others, have all found fresh voices in
Mitchell's energetic English. And Mitchell, 51, has found psychic
and spiritual renewal 'in the depths' through loving intimacy with
texts that some see as mere cultural monuments.
'My first serious love affair blew up in 1965, when I was a
first-year graduate student in comparative literature at Yale,' he
says. 'The pain in my heart was so great that I didn't have any way
to deal with it.' So Mitchell, who was also discovering that an
academic career was, as he puts it, 'not where my passion lay,'
began to drift--and to read the Book of Job.
He wrestled for seven years with the Hebrew of the great tale of
unmerited suffering and steadfast faith--'to try to get a handle on
my pain. But I couldn't get what I needed from the text,' he
recalls. So he reset his spiritual compass from West to East, and
spent six years practicing Zen under the Korean master Seung Sahn,
whose teachings are the subject of Mitchell's first book,
Dropping Ashes on the Buddha (1976).'In those years I did
very little writing and reading, I went cold turkey,' he
laughs.
And then a curious thing happened. Everything Mitchell had let
go during those six years--literature, his Jewish past, the habit
of loving struggle with foreign tongues--'came back of itself,' he
says. 'It had all been ripening in the dark.'
He re-encountered the luminous poems of Rilke, which he'd tried
without success or satisfaction to translate in grad school. 'I met
Rilke like you meet an old high school friend after ten years. You
see yourself in that friend, and I saw in Rilke things that I had
experienced in Zen practice.' (The Selected Poetry of Rainer
Maria Rilke, published in 1982, is a generous sampler of
Mitchell's definitive versions of the poet.)
'All the texts I've worked on have come from a similar place of
spiritual depth,' he says. 'Both the poet of Job and the author of
the Tao Te Ching actually saw how the universe works. The
Job poet expressed that in a Jewish way. As for the Asian way, I
think it can be an easier way for many modern Westerners. It can be
a relief to talk about It--the ultimate reality--without the
familiar Western imagery and baggage, all the many centuries of
concepts.'
Is Stephen MItchell himself a spiritual teacher? 'I've heard of
people learning things through my work,' he says. 'But I couldn't
begin to teach until I finished my own inner homework.' He pauses
and smiles. 'Maybe in a couple of years.'