Evening
The evening slowly changes its robes,
which are held by a marge of old trees;
you gaze and countries depart from you,
an ascending one and one that falls;
and let you, belonging to neither one,
not quite as dark as the house that keeps silent,
not all so sure adjure eternity,
like that which becomes star every night and rises -
and let (unspeakable to untangle)
your life appear fearful and
gigantic and riping to you such that alternately,
at times limited at times grasping,
it becomes stone inside you and star.
Rainer Maria Rilke, Autumn 1904 English translation by Philipp Kellmeyer
To be said while falling asleep
I want to sing-in someone,
sit by someone and just be.
I want to rock you and sing you small
and accompany you sleep-in and sleep-out
I want to be the only one in the house,
who would know: the night was cold.
And I want to listen in and out into you,
the world, into the woods.
The chiming clocks call out to each other,
and you get at the bottom of time.
And down there walks a strange man
and disturbs a strange dog.
Beyond silence falls.
Keenly I have laid my eyes upon you;
and they are holding you gently and let you go,
when something moves in the dark.
R.M. Rilke, 14th November 1900, Berlin-Schmargendorf
A springtime wind
With this wind comes fate;
let, o let it come,
all that surging and blind,
before which we will glow -:
all that.(Be still and don't bestir yourself, so it finds us.)
O our fate comes with this wind
From somewhere this new wind brings,
staggering from bearing nameless things,
that which we are over from the sea.
... If only we were it. So we would be home.
(The heavens in us would rise up and down.)
But with this wind, fate goes immensely
beyond us ever and anon.
R.M. Rilke,from: Gedichte, 1906-1926
Autumn’s end
For quite some time I see,
how everything is transforming itself.
Something stands up and acts
and kills and inflicts suffering.
From time to time all the gardens
are not the same from the yellowing
to the yellow’s slow decay:
how long the way was for me.
Now I am at the clearings
and look over the boulevards.
Almost as far as to the distant seas
the solemn, heavy denying heaven can I see.
R.M. Rilke, between 1902-06
Exposed on the cliffs of the heart
Exposed on the cliffs of the heart.
Look, how tiny down there,
look: the last village of words and,
higher,(but how tiny)
still one last farmhouse of feeling.
Can you see it?
Exposed on the cliffs of the heart.
Stoneground under your hands.
Even here, though,something can bloom;
on a silent cliff-edge
an unknowing plant blooms,
singing, into the air.
But the one who knows?
Ah, he began to know and is quiet now,
exposed on the cliffs of the heart.
While, with their full awareness,
many sure-footed mountain animals pass or linger.
And the great sheltered birds flies,
slowly circling, around the peak's pure denial
.-But without a shelter, here on the cliffs of the heart...
Translated by Stephen Mitchell
Heartbeat
Only mouths are we.
Who sings the distant heart
which safely exists in the center of all things?
His giant heartbeat is diverted in usinto little pulses.
And his giant griefs, like his giant jubilation,
far too great for us.
And so we tear ourselves away
from him time after time,
remaining only mouths.
But unexepectedly and secretly
the giant heartbeat enters our being,
so that we scream ----,
and are transformed in being and in countenance.
Little Tear-Vase
Other vessels hold wine, other vessels hold oil
inside the hollowed-out vault circumscribed by their clay.
I, as smaller measure, and as the slimmest of all,
humbly hollow myself so that just a few tears can fill me.
Wine becomes richer, oil becomes clear, in its vessel.
What happens with tears?-
They made me blind in my glass,made me heavy
and made my curve iridescent,made me brittle,
and left me empty at last.
Translated by Stephen Mitchell
Love Song
How can I keep my soul in me,
so that it doesn't touch your soul?
How can I raise it high enough, past you, to other things?
I would like to shelter it, among remote lost objects,
in some dark and silent place
that doesn't resonate when your depths resound.
Yet everything that touches us, me and you,
takes us together like a violin's bow,
which draws one voice out of two seperate strings.
Upon what instrument are we two spanned?
And what musician holds us in his hand?
Oh sweetest song.
Translated by Stephen Mitchell
Self-Portrait
The steadfastness of generations of nobility
shows in the curving lines that form the eyebrows.
And the blue eyes still show traces of childhood fears
and of humility here and there, not of a servant's,
yet of one who serves obediantly, and of a woman.
The mouth formed as a mouth, large and accurate,
not given to long phrases, but to express persuasively what is right.
The forehead without guileand favoring the shadows of quiet downward gazing.
This, as a coherent whole, only casually observed;
never as yet tried in suffering or succeeding,
held together for an enduring fulfillment,
yet so as if for times to come,
out of these scattered things,
something serious and lasting were being planned.
Translated by Albert Ernest Flemming
Telling You All
Telling you all would take too long.
Besides, we read in the Holy Book
how the good is harmful
and how misfortune is good.
Let's invite something new
by unifying our silences;
if, then and there, we advance,
we'll know it soon enough.
And yet towards evening,
when his memory is persistent,
one belated curiousity
stops him before the mirror.
We don't know if he is frightened.
But he stays, he is engrossed,
and, facing his reflection,
transports himself somewhere else.
Translated by A. Poulin
To Lou Andreas-Salome
I held myself too open, I forgot
that outside not just things exist and animals
fully at ease in themselves, whose eyes
reach from their lives' roundedness no differently
than portraits do from frames; forgot that I
with all I did incessantly crammed
looks into myself; looks, opinion, curiosity.
Who knows: perhaps eyes form in space
and look on everywhere.
Ah, only plunged toward you
does my face cease being on display, grows
into you and twines on darkly, endlessly,into your sheltered heart.
As one puts a handkerchief before pent-in-breath-no:
as one presses it against a wound
out of which the whole of life, in a single gush,wants to stream,
I held you to me: I saw you turn red from me.
How could anyone express what took place between us?
We made up for everything there was never time for.
I matured strangely in every impulse of unperformed youth,
and you, love, had wildest childhood over my heart.
Memory won't suffice here: from those moments
there must be layers of pure existenceon my being's floor,
a precipitate from that immensely overfilled solution.
For I don't think back;
all that I am stirs me because of you.
I don't invent you at sadly cooled-off places
from which you've gone away;
even your not being there is warm with you
and more real and more than a privation.
Longing leads out too often into vagueness.
Why should I cast myself, when,
for all I know, your influence falls on me,gently,
like moonlight on a window seat.
The Wait
It is life in slow motion,it's the heart in reverse,
it's a hope-and-a-half:too much and too little at once.
It's a train that suddenly stops with no station around,
and we can hear the cricket,and, leaning out the carriage
door, we vainly contemplate a wind we feel that stirs
the blooming meadows, the meadows made imaginary by this stop.
Translated by A. Poulin
What Survives
Who says that all must vanish?Who knows,
perhaps the flightof the bird you wound remains,
and perhaps flowers survive
caresses in us, in their ground.
It isn't the gesture that lasts,
but it dresses you again in gold armor
-from breast to knees-
and the battle was so pure
an Angel wears it after you.
Translated by A. Poulin
[World was in the face of the beloved]
World was in the face of the beloved-,
but suddenly it poured out and was gone:
world is outside, world can not be grasped.
Why didn't I, from the full, beloved face
as I raised it to my lips, why didn't I drink
world, so near that I couldn't almost taste it?
Ah, I drank. Insatiably I drank.
But I was filled up also, with too much world,
and, drinking, I myself ran over.
Translated by Stephen Mitchell
You who never arrived
You who never arrived in my arms,
Beloved, who were lost from the start,
I don't even know what songs would please you.
I have given up trying to recognize you
in the surging wave of the next moment.
All the immense images in me- the far-off,
deeply-felt landscape,cities, towers, and bridges,
and unsuspected turns in the path,
and those powerful lands that were
once pulsing with the life of the gods-
all rise within me to mean you, who forever elude me.
You, Beloved, who are
all the gardens I have ever gazed at,longing.
An open window in a country house-,
and you almost stepped out, pensive, to meet me.
Streets that I chanced upon,-
you had just walked down them and vanished.
And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors were still dizzy with your presence and,
startled,gave back my too-sudden image.
Who knows?perhaps the same bird echoed through both of us
yesterday, seperate, in the evening...
Translated by Stephen Mitchell
"May I be granted that, in your hands, the habit of looking on love as a thing to accomplish will leave, like an old pain- and that, slowly raising my eyes to look at you, I would no longer know where it had hurt- or where it had been."-Rilke and Benvenuta: an Intimate Correspondence"
Love is something difficult and it is more difficult than other things because in other conflicts nature herself enjoins men to collect themselves, to take themselves firmly in the hand with all their strength, while in the heightening of love the impulse is to give oneself wholly away."-Letters to a Young Poet
"Look, we don't love like flowers with only one season behind us; when we love, a sap older than memory rises in our arms."-The Duino Elegies: The Third Elegy"
Love is at first not anything that means merging, giving over, and uniting with another (for what would a union be of something unclarified and unfinished, still subordinate-?); it is a high inducement to the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world for himself in another's sake."-Letters to a Young Poet
"When I saw others straining toward God, I did not understand it, for though I may have had him less than they did, there was no one blocking the way between him and me, and I could reach his heart easily. It is up to him, after all, to have us, our part consists of almost solely in letting him grasp us."-Rilke and Benvenuta: an Intimate Correspondence
The evening slowly changes its robes,
which are held by a marge of old trees;
you gaze and countries depart from you,
an ascending one and one that falls;
and let you, belonging to neither one,
not quite as dark as the house that keeps silent,
not all so sure adjure eternity,
like that which becomes star every night and rises -
and let (unspeakable to untangle)
your life appear fearful and
gigantic and riping to you such that alternately,
at times limited at times grasping,
it becomes stone inside you and star.
Rainer Maria Rilke, Autumn 1904 English translation by Philipp Kellmeyer
To be said while falling asleep
I want to sing-in someone,
sit by someone and just be.
I want to rock you and sing you small
and accompany you sleep-in and sleep-out
I want to be the only one in the house,
who would know: the night was cold.
And I want to listen in and out into you,
the world, into the woods.
The chiming clocks call out to each other,
and you get at the bottom of time.
And down there walks a strange man
and disturbs a strange dog.
Beyond silence falls.
Keenly I have laid my eyes upon you;
and they are holding you gently and let you go,
when something moves in the dark.
R.M. Rilke, 14th November 1900, Berlin-Schmargendorf
A springtime wind
With this wind comes fate;
let, o let it come,
all that surging and blind,
before which we will glow -:
all that.(Be still and don't bestir yourself, so it finds us.)
O our fate comes with this wind
From somewhere this new wind brings,
staggering from bearing nameless things,
that which we are over from the sea.
... If only we were it. So we would be home.
(The heavens in us would rise up and down.)
But with this wind, fate goes immensely
beyond us ever and anon.
R.M. Rilke,from: Gedichte, 1906-1926
Autumn’s end
For quite some time I see,
how everything is transforming itself.
Something stands up and acts
and kills and inflicts suffering.
From time to time all the gardens
are not the same from the yellowing
to the yellow’s slow decay:
how long the way was for me.
Now I am at the clearings
and look over the boulevards.
Almost as far as to the distant seas
the solemn, heavy denying heaven can I see.
R.M. Rilke, between 1902-06
Exposed on the cliffs of the heart
Exposed on the cliffs of the heart.
Look, how tiny down there,
look: the last village of words and,
higher,(but how tiny)
still one last farmhouse of feeling.
Can you see it?
Exposed on the cliffs of the heart.
Stoneground under your hands.
Even here, though,something can bloom;
on a silent cliff-edge
an unknowing plant blooms,
singing, into the air.
But the one who knows?
Ah, he began to know and is quiet now,
exposed on the cliffs of the heart.
While, with their full awareness,
many sure-footed mountain animals pass or linger.
And the great sheltered birds flies,
slowly circling, around the peak's pure denial
.-But without a shelter, here on the cliffs of the heart...
Translated by Stephen Mitchell
Heartbeat
Only mouths are we.
Who sings the distant heart
which safely exists in the center of all things?
His giant heartbeat is diverted in usinto little pulses.
And his giant griefs, like his giant jubilation,
far too great for us.
And so we tear ourselves away
from him time after time,
remaining only mouths.
But unexepectedly and secretly
the giant heartbeat enters our being,
so that we scream ----,
and are transformed in being and in countenance.
Little Tear-Vase
Other vessels hold wine, other vessels hold oil
inside the hollowed-out vault circumscribed by their clay.
I, as smaller measure, and as the slimmest of all,
humbly hollow myself so that just a few tears can fill me.
Wine becomes richer, oil becomes clear, in its vessel.
What happens with tears?-
They made me blind in my glass,made me heavy
and made my curve iridescent,made me brittle,
and left me empty at last.
Translated by Stephen Mitchell
Love Song
How can I keep my soul in me,
so that it doesn't touch your soul?
How can I raise it high enough, past you, to other things?
I would like to shelter it, among remote lost objects,
in some dark and silent place
that doesn't resonate when your depths resound.
Yet everything that touches us, me and you,
takes us together like a violin's bow,
which draws one voice out of two seperate strings.
Upon what instrument are we two spanned?
And what musician holds us in his hand?
Oh sweetest song.
Translated by Stephen Mitchell
Self-Portrait
The steadfastness of generations of nobility
shows in the curving lines that form the eyebrows.
And the blue eyes still show traces of childhood fears
and of humility here and there, not of a servant's,
yet of one who serves obediantly, and of a woman.
The mouth formed as a mouth, large and accurate,
not given to long phrases, but to express persuasively what is right.
The forehead without guileand favoring the shadows of quiet downward gazing.
This, as a coherent whole, only casually observed;
never as yet tried in suffering or succeeding,
held together for an enduring fulfillment,
yet so as if for times to come,
out of these scattered things,
something serious and lasting were being planned.
Translated by Albert Ernest Flemming
Telling You All
Telling you all would take too long.
Besides, we read in the Holy Book
how the good is harmful
and how misfortune is good.
Let's invite something new
by unifying our silences;
if, then and there, we advance,
we'll know it soon enough.
And yet towards evening,
when his memory is persistent,
one belated curiousity
stops him before the mirror.
We don't know if he is frightened.
But he stays, he is engrossed,
and, facing his reflection,
transports himself somewhere else.
Translated by A. Poulin
To Lou Andreas-Salome
I held myself too open, I forgot
that outside not just things exist and animals
fully at ease in themselves, whose eyes
reach from their lives' roundedness no differently
than portraits do from frames; forgot that I
with all I did incessantly crammed
looks into myself; looks, opinion, curiosity.
Who knows: perhaps eyes form in space
and look on everywhere.
Ah, only plunged toward you
does my face cease being on display, grows
into you and twines on darkly, endlessly,into your sheltered heart.
As one puts a handkerchief before pent-in-breath-no:
as one presses it against a wound
out of which the whole of life, in a single gush,wants to stream,
I held you to me: I saw you turn red from me.
How could anyone express what took place between us?
We made up for everything there was never time for.
I matured strangely in every impulse of unperformed youth,
and you, love, had wildest childhood over my heart.
Memory won't suffice here: from those moments
there must be layers of pure existenceon my being's floor,
a precipitate from that immensely overfilled solution.
For I don't think back;
all that I am stirs me because of you.
I don't invent you at sadly cooled-off places
from which you've gone away;
even your not being there is warm with you
and more real and more than a privation.
Longing leads out too often into vagueness.
Why should I cast myself, when,
for all I know, your influence falls on me,gently,
like moonlight on a window seat.
The Wait
It is life in slow motion,it's the heart in reverse,
it's a hope-and-a-half:too much and too little at once.
It's a train that suddenly stops with no station around,
and we can hear the cricket,and, leaning out the carriage
door, we vainly contemplate a wind we feel that stirs
the blooming meadows, the meadows made imaginary by this stop.
Translated by A. Poulin
What Survives
Who says that all must vanish?Who knows,
perhaps the flightof the bird you wound remains,
and perhaps flowers survive
caresses in us, in their ground.
It isn't the gesture that lasts,
but it dresses you again in gold armor
-from breast to knees-
and the battle was so pure
an Angel wears it after you.
Translated by A. Poulin
[World was in the face of the beloved]
World was in the face of the beloved-,
but suddenly it poured out and was gone:
world is outside, world can not be grasped.
Why didn't I, from the full, beloved face
as I raised it to my lips, why didn't I drink
world, so near that I couldn't almost taste it?
Ah, I drank. Insatiably I drank.
But I was filled up also, with too much world,
and, drinking, I myself ran over.
Translated by Stephen Mitchell
You who never arrived
You who never arrived in my arms,
Beloved, who were lost from the start,
I don't even know what songs would please you.
I have given up trying to recognize you
in the surging wave of the next moment.
All the immense images in me- the far-off,
deeply-felt landscape,cities, towers, and bridges,
and unsuspected turns in the path,
and those powerful lands that were
once pulsing with the life of the gods-
all rise within me to mean you, who forever elude me.
You, Beloved, who are
all the gardens I have ever gazed at,longing.
An open window in a country house-,
and you almost stepped out, pensive, to meet me.
Streets that I chanced upon,-
you had just walked down them and vanished.
And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors were still dizzy with your presence and,
startled,gave back my too-sudden image.
Who knows?perhaps the same bird echoed through both of us
yesterday, seperate, in the evening...
Translated by Stephen Mitchell
"May I be granted that, in your hands, the habit of looking on love as a thing to accomplish will leave, like an old pain- and that, slowly raising my eyes to look at you, I would no longer know where it had hurt- or where it had been."-Rilke and Benvenuta: an Intimate Correspondence"
Love is something difficult and it is more difficult than other things because in other conflicts nature herself enjoins men to collect themselves, to take themselves firmly in the hand with all their strength, while in the heightening of love the impulse is to give oneself wholly away."-Letters to a Young Poet
"Look, we don't love like flowers with only one season behind us; when we love, a sap older than memory rises in our arms."-The Duino Elegies: The Third Elegy"
Love is at first not anything that means merging, giving over, and uniting with another (for what would a union be of something unclarified and unfinished, still subordinate-?); it is a high inducement to the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world for himself in another's sake."-Letters to a Young Poet
"When I saw others straining toward God, I did not understand it, for though I may have had him less than they did, there was no one blocking the way between him and me, and I could reach his heart easily. It is up to him, after all, to have us, our part consists of almost solely in letting him grasp us."-Rilke and Benvenuta: an Intimate Correspondence
No comments:
Post a Comment