Why, if the seasons of life could be passed
as a laurel, a little darker than all other green,
with tiny waves on the edge of each leaf,
like the smile of a wind—: why, then,
must we be human—and, shunning our Destiny,
long for Fate?…
Oh, not because happiness—
that profit snatched hastily from threatening loss—
exists: not from curiosity, not simply to practice
a heart that could live quite as well in a laurel …
but because it is much just to be here,
because all that is fleeting here needs us,
strangely concerns us. Us, most fleeting of all.
Just once. Everything. Only once. Once and no more.
And we as well: once. Then never again. But this
having been once, although only once,
having been earthed—can it ever be canceled?
And so we push ourselves on and pray to achieve it,
to hold it in our simple hands,
in our ever more crowded gaze, in our speechless heart.
Pray to become it. To give it to someone? We’d rather
keep it a keepsake forever … But to that other land,
alas, what can be taken? Not our power of perceiving,
learned here so slowly; nothing here that’s happened.
Nothing. But possibly suffering. Above all, the hardness of life,
and the long endurance of love—wholly
untellable things. But later, when the stars have us under them,
what then is the use? The stars are still better unspoken.
Nor does the wanderer bring down a handful of earth
from his high mountain slope to the valley (for earth, too, is mute),
but a word he has plucked from the climbing: the yellow and blue
gentian. Are we, perhaps, here just to utter: house,
bridge, fountain, gate, jug, fruit tree, window—
at most: column, tower … but to utter them, remember,
to speak in a way which the named never dreamed
they could be? Isn’t it the hidden purpose
of this cunning earth, in urging on lovers,
to realize, through their rapture, rapture for all?
Threshold: what it can mean for two lovers
to foot down their threshold a little,
just as the many who’ve come through have worn it,
and ahead of the many to follow … so lightly.
Here is the time for words, here is its home.
Speak and proclaim. More than ever,
the things we can live with are falling away,
and imageless action’s usurping their place.
Real acts will quickly crack their shells
when what’s working within them
brings forth a new form.
Our heart dwells between hammers,
like the tongue between the teeth,
where it remains, notwithstanding,
a continual creator of praise.
Praise this world to the Angel, not the unutterable one.
You cannot impress him with the splendor you’ve felt,
for in the heaven of heavens, where he feels so sublimely,
you’re but a beginner. Show him some simple thing, then,
that’s been changed in its passage through human ages
till it lives in our hands, in the shine of our eyes, as a part
of ourselves. Tell him things. He’ll stand more astonished,
as you stood by the roper in Rome or the potter in Egypt.
Show him how happy a thing can be, how innocent and ours;
how even Sorrow, in the midst of lamenting, is determined to alter,
to serve as a thing, or fade in a thing—to escape
into beauty beyond violining. These things whose life
is a constant leaving, they know when you praise them.
Transient, they trust us, the most transient, to come
to their rescue; they wish us to alter them utterly,
within our invisible hearts, into—so endlessly—us!
Whoever we may finally be.
You earthly things—is this not what you want,
to arise invisible in us? Is not your dream
to be one day invisible? Earth!—things!—invisible!
What, if not this deep translation, is your ardent aim?
Earth, my loved one, I will. Believe me.
You need no more of your springtimes to win me.
Already one is more than my blood can endure.
Beyond all the words I can speak I am yours,
as I’ve been from the beginning. Always, you were right,
and your holiest thought’s been of death, our most intimate friend.
But look—I live. Oh, on what? Neither childhood nor
future grows less. Abundant existence
wells up in my heart.9
THE TENTH ELEGY
Someday, released at last from this anguished soul-searching,
may I sing an extolling song to the assenting Angels;
may not even one of the firmly struck hammers of the heart
land upon a slack, uncertain, or broken string;
may my weeping face make me more radiant,
each tear glistening like a new bloom:
how precious to me then my tormented nights will be, and how deep my regret
that I didn’t more willingly kneel to you,
inconsolable sisters, more willingly lose myself in your flowing hair.
We squander our sorrows. How we look along their bitter lengths
searching for an end, and see not their secret.
But they are our serious winter trees, our dark evergreens,
one season of our inner year—not just a season,
but soil, place, village, storehouse, home.
Yet, alas, how strange are the streets of the City of Pain,
where, amid the noise raised against noise that we mistake for stillness,
a stout figure swaggers, cast in inanities’ mold:
itself the gilded din, and decaying memorials.
Oh, how completely would an Angel crush underfoot their market of cheap comforts,
with the church at its side, purchased ready-made,
as swept, as shut, as disappointing as a post office on a Sunday.
The outskirts, though, are always swirling with carnival.
Elevating swings! Daring jugglers and exciting High Divers!
And the shooting galleries with their lifelike ducks,
targets which will fall in a clatter of tin
when a lucky shot happens to hit one.
Encouraged by the crowd, he waddles after more prizes:
booths that can satisfy any kind of curiosity
are drumming their drums and crying their wares.
Especially worth seeing, but for adults only: coins in copulation,
right there onstage, money’s metal genitals rubadubdubbing.
Educational, and sure to encourage multiplication …
Oh, and
just outside that tent, behind the last billboards,
plastered with posters for “Todlos,”
the dark bitter beer so sweet to the addicted,
so long as they swallow it while chewing on fresh distractions—
and just at the back of the billboards, right behind them, is … reality.
Children are playing; to one side, earnest,
in patchy grass, lovers are holding each other,
and dogs are doing nature’s business.
The young man is drawn farther on; perhaps he loves a young Lament …
He follows her into the meadows. She says:
We live out there. A long way …
Where? And the young man follows. He’s moved by her manner: her shoulders, her neck—
maybe she comes from a noble fa
mily? Still, he leaves her,
turns back, looks around, waves … What’s the use?
She’s a Lament.
Only those who died young, in their first stages
of timeless serenity, scarcely weaned,
follow her lovingly. She waits and befriends the girls.
Gently shows them what she’s wearing. Pearls
the shape of tears, and patience’s fine-spun veils.
She walks with the young men in silence.
But there in the valley where they live,
one of the older Laments answers the youth’s questions:
Long ago, she says, the Lamentations were a powerful clan.
Our fathers worked the mines in that mountain range.
Among humans, sometimes, you can still find a polished lump of primal pain,
or a piece of petrified rage amid the slag of an ancient volcano.
Yes, that would have come from there. We used to be rich.
And gently she guides him through the immense land of Lamentation,
shows him temple columns or the ruins of castles
where the Lords of Lamentation wisely ruled
the country long ago. Shows him the tall weeping trees,
shows him fields flowering with griefstrife
(which the living only know as becalmed leaves);
shows him sorrow’s pastured herds—and sometimes
a startled bird, cutting across their gaze,
loops the first letter of its lonely cry.
At evening she leads him to the graves of the elders,
the seers and sybils who prophesied and warned.
But with night coming on, they move more slowly,
and soon the tomb, whose stone, awash with
moonlight, rises to watch over all, confronts them.
Brother to the Nile’s sublime Sphinx, the silent chamber’s secret face.
And they are stunned by the crowned head that has quietly formed—
forever—the features of man
on the scale of the stars.
His eyes can’t take it in, his mind still reeling from recent death,
but their gaze frightens an owl from behind the stone crown.
And the bird, with slow swooping strokes, brushes the statue’s fuller cheek
until that touching faintly speaks,
in death’s different hearing,
as though on the facing pages of an open book
an unutterable shape were shaped.
And higher, the stars. New ones. The stars of Pain’s Land.
Slowly the Lament names them: “There, look:
there’s the Rider, the Staff, and they call that bigger
constellation Garland of Fruit. Then, farther on,
toward the Pole: Cradle, Path, Puppet, Window, The Burning Book.
But in the southern sky, clear as lines on the palm of a blessed hand,
the brilliantly glowing ‘M’
that stands for Mothers …”
But the dead youth must go on, and silently the elder Lament
leads him as far as the gorge
where the true Source of Joy
shines in the moonlight.
Solemnly she names it and says: “For men
it is the stream which bears them on.”
They stand at the foot of the range,
and there she embraces him, weeping.
Alone he climbs the Mountains of Primal Pain.
And not once does his step echo from
Destiny’s soundless path.
Yet if the eternal dead were to wake an image in us,
look, they might be pointing to the catkins
hanging from empty hazels, or they might remind us
of the rain that falls on the dark earth in early spring.
And we, who have always thought
of happiness as ascending,
would feel the emotion
that almost undoes us
when a happy thing falls.10
NOTES
Lifeleading
1. Life of a Poet: Rainer Maria Rilke, by Ralph Freedman. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995, 129.
2. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1941; reprinted by Octagon Books, New York: Octagon Books Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971. More recently (1988), Peter Lang has published Beatrice Bullock-Kimball’s monograph, The European Heritage of Rose Symbolism and Rose Metaphors in View of Rilke’s Epitaph.
3. Capri, ca. New Year’s Day 1907.
4. Paris, June 27, 1906.
5. My Sister, My Spouse: A Biography of Lou Andreas-Salomié. New York: Norton and Co., 1962, new ed. 1974, 186, 270.
6. New York: Fromm Intl., 1984, 73.
7. Rilke: A Life, by Wolfgang Leppmann. New York: Fromm International, 1984, 75.
8. Freedman, Life of a Poet, 113.
9. Quoted by H. F. Peters in Rainer Maria Rilke: Masks and the Man. Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press, 1960. Reprinted by Gordian Press, NY, 1977, 10.
10. Freedman, Life of a Poet, 373.
11. “Parting,” Paris, early 1906.
12. From “The Book of Poverty and Death,” which is Book III of The Book of Hours, 1903.
13. From “Turning-Point,” Paris, 1914.
14. “Autumn,” Paris, Sept. 11, 1902.
15. “Autumn Day,” Paris, Sept. 21, 1902.
16. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996.
17. “To Music,” a gift to Frau Hanna Wolff after a private concert at her home, Munich, Jan. 11 or 12, 1918.
18. “The Lace,” II, Capri, ca. Feb. 10, 1907.
19. “Buddha,” Meudon, end of 1905.
20. Phases of Rilke, Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1958, 72.
21. The Romantic Rebellion, New York: Harper and Row, 1973, 353, 4.
22. “The Panther,” Jardin des Plantes, Paris, 1903.
23. From “The Fourth Elegy.”
24. Last entry in Rilke’s pocket book, Val-Mont, Switzerland, mid-December 1926.
Transreading
1. Meudon, Winter 1905–6.
2. See Michael Hamburger’s “Brief Afterthoughts on Versions of a Poem by Hölderlin,” in Translating Poetry, edited by Daniel Weissbort. Iowa City: Univ. of Iowa Press, 1989, 51–6.
3. Rilke’s Book of Hours, 111.
4. II.7 of “The Book of Pilgrimage” from The Book of Hours.
Ein Gott Vermags
1. Reprinted in the Canadian Review of Comparative Literature VII, no. 2, 1980, 163–73.
2. Arndt, The Best of Rilke, 162.
3. Sonnets to Orpheus, Part I, 3, Muzot, Feb. 2–5, 1922.
4. Sonnets to Orpheus, Part I, 1, Muzot, Feb. 2–5, 1922.
5. Sonnets to Orpheus, Part I, 2, Muzot, Feb. 2–5, 1922.
6. Sonnets to Orpheus, Part II, 13, Muzot, Feb. 15–17, 1922.
7. Vol. 2, Poetry, 143.
8. “Torso of an Archaic Apollo,” Paris, early Summer 1908, in New Poems, Part II.
Inhalation in a God
1. The Poems of Alexander Pope, a one-volume edition of the Twickenham text, edited by John Butt. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1963, 265.
2. “Lament,” Paris, July 1914.
3. From “The Ninth Elegy.”
4. “The Spanish Trilogy,” I, Ronda, Jan. 6, 1913.
5. Quotations are from “Mathematical Creation,” in The Creative Process, edited by Brewster Ghiselin. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1952, 33–42.
6. “The Great Night,” Paris, 1914.
Schade
1. Freedman, Life of a Poet, 155.
2. Paula Modersohn-Becker, by Gillian Perry. New York: Harper & Row, 1979, 126, plate xvi.
3. Freedman, Life of a Poet, 266.
4. Paula Modersohn-Becker, The Letters and Journals, Günter Busch and Liselette von Reinken, eds.; Arthur S. Wensinger and Carole Clew Hoey, trans. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1990, 195.
5. From “Requiem for a Friend.”
6. Modersoh
n-Becker, Letters and Journals, 539.
7. Ibid., 540.
8. Freedman, Life of a Poet, 254.
9. Paris, Oct. 31–Nov. 2, 1908.
The Grace of Great Things
1. “Primal Sound,” in G. Craig Houston, trans., Rainer Maria Rilke, Selected Works, vol. I, Prose, 51–6.
2. Quoted in My European Heritage, by Brigitte B. Fischer. Boston: Brandon Publishing, 1986, 76.
3. Sonnets to Orpheus, Part II, 1, Feb. 23, 1921.
4. Sonnets to Orpheus, Part II, 29, Feb. 19–23.
5. From “The Ninth Elegy.”
6. From “The First Elegy.”
7. London: Chatto and Windus, 1972.
8. Sonnets to Orpheus, Part II, 12, Muzot, Feb. 15–17, 1922.
9. Paris, mid-July 1906.
10. Rilke, in a letter to Hermann Pongs, quoted by Leppmann, 183.
11. From “The Fifth Elegy.”
12. From “The Fourth Elegy.”
13. Sonnets to Orpheus, Part I, 13.
14. “Transformations,” quoted by Martin Seymour Smith in Hardy. London: Bloomsbury, 1994, 31.
15. From “The Fourth Elegy.”
16. Paris, June 20, 1914.
17. From “The Ninth Elegy.”
18. Sonnets to Orpheus, Part II, 29.
19. Greene and Norton, Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, vol. 2, 1910–26, 139–40.
20. “Death,” Munich, November 9, 1915.
21. From “The Seventh Elegy.”
Erect No Memorial Stone
1. “Oh sage, Dichter, was du tust?” December 1921. Inscribed in a copy of Malte Laurids Brigge belonging to Leonie Zacharias.
2. “Man Must Die Because He Has Known Them” from the sayings of Ptahhotep, ms. from ca. 2000 B.C. Paris, July 1914.
3. Norton: New York, 1975.
4. In The Classical German Elegy 1795–1950, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1980, 242.
5. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1956, 295–333.
6. “Puppet Theater,” Paris, July 20, 1907.
7. Sonnets to Orpheus, Part I, 5, Muzot, Feb. 2–5, 1921.
8. Quoted by Mitchell in the excellent notes to his translation, The Sonnets to Orpheus, 164.
9. Sonnets to Orpheus, Part I, 15, Muzot, Feb. 2–5, 1921.
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