Rilke & Co.

[quasimodo1]

This illuminating article about Rilke, Rodin, Auden, Balzac, Steichen, Yeats, Sandburg, Brodsky, Cezanne and Paula Modersohn-Becker (here quoted in part) was written under the title "Genius Envy" by Geoff Dyer. The interactions between artists intimate and remote are very telling of Rilke's and Rodin's evolution as poet and sculptor: -- "After Rodin, the next important influence on Rilke was C�zanne. Rilke’s Letters on C�zanne reveals the enormous influence of the C�zanne retrospective in Paris, in the summer of 1907. He discovered there not a refutation but an intensification of what he had learned from Rodin: fruits, in C�zanne’s still lifes, 'cease to be edible altogether, that’s how thinglike and real they become, how simply indestructible in their stubborn thereness.' And again, as with Rodin (but more confidently and explicitly now), what he discovers is important primarily for what it enables Rilke to realize about himself and his own work: 'It’s not really painting I’m studying. . . . It was the turning point which I recognised, because I had just reached it in my own work or had at least come close to it somehow, after having been ready, probably for a long time, for this one thing which so much depends on.'

The extent to which this breakthrough into “limitless objectivity” was achieved is revealed in “Requiem for a Friend” (1908). The poem was written in response to the death, several weeks after giving birth, of the artist Paula Modersohn-Becker (who had discovered C�zanne years earlier). It is, simultaneously, a lament for his friend and an essay on the art to which they were both indebted:

For that is what you understood: ripe fruits.
You set them before the canvas, in white bowls,
and weighed out each one’s heaviness with your colors.
Women too, you saw, were fruits; and children, molded
from inside, into the shapes of their existence.
And at last you saw yourself as a fruit, you stepped
out of your clothes and brought your naked body
before the mirror, you let yourself inside
down to your gaze; which stayed in front, immense,
and didn’t say: I am that; no: this is.
So free of curiosity your gaze
had become, so unpossessive, of such true
poverty, it had no desire even
for you yourself; it wanted nothing: holy.
(from Stephen Mitchell’s translation)

There are several directions one might follow from here: From C�zanne to poems by Charles Tomlinson (“C�zanne at Aix” in Seeing is Believing [1960]) and Jeremy Reed (“C�zanne” in Nineties [1990]). Or, sticking with Rilke and Paula Modersohn-Becker, to Adrienne Rich’s important corrective, “Paula Becker to Clara Westhoff” (Clara was Paula’s friend and Rilke’s wife), in which a poet speaks as a painter addressing a poet—thereby offering a crisp critique of Rilke:

Do you know: I was dreaming I had died
giving birth to the child.
I couldn’t paint or speak or even move.
My child—I think—survived me. But what was funny
in the dream was, Rainer had written my requiem—
a long, beautiful poem, and calling me his friend.
I was your friend
but in the dream you didn’t say a word.
In the dream his poem was like a letter
to someone who has no right
to be there but must be treated gently, like a guest
who comes on the wrong day.

In real life our chances of meeting people are limited and contingent. In the realm of art and literature those constraints are removed; everyone is potentially in dialogue with everyone else irrespective of chronology and geography."

{excerpt} q1 -- http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/feature.html?id=180435

[quasimodo1]

Rilke file on IMDB!?! http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0727208/

[Chester]

Wonderful essay. Thank you for posting it. It’s good to be reminded, I think, that no one operates in a vacuum. I sometimes see all of art as one body, moving and changing in small but significant ways with each influence that comes its way. And it’s interesting to consider the cross-over influences from one discipline to the next. Also in that essay is this from Frank O’Hara:

"I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not."

I know very little about Rilke (something I am determined to correct). Do you know, quasimodo1, (does anyone here know), what is being referred to as "limitless objectivity"? This seems to suggest a kind of Platonic form sort of thing to me. A search (or discovery) of the absolute real. "Cezanne’s still lifes....simply indestructible in their stubborn thereness." Yes? No? Maybe?

[quasimodo1]

To Chester: My take on "limitless objectivity" as referenced in the essay above and generally as an objective for poet or sculptor or artist is on one level...literal and on the level Rilke or Rodin might have been reaching for is an attempt at poetry where the least amount of ego or id becomes part of the poem (or other artform). I see this as self-defeating for poetry because my view of poetry is of a concept, feeling, description or comment that obtains its quality from maximum lack of objectivity. You could make a point that a poem with this limitless objectivity, if pulled off, would be more Artfull in that no analysis or backround information about the author is necessary because it communicates universally and without the anthropromorphic additions which would so intensely personalize a poem. It is an ideal which I'm not sure is desirable, at least in poetry. But then, who am I to say that giants like Rilke did not know what the ultimate would be. q1

[Chester]

I think I’m inclined to agree with you, q1. With art, aren’t we looking for an interpretation from the artist (or poet, as the case may be)? This is what makes the subject interesting, I think. We are seeing it from a different perspective. Then again, limitless objectivity (were it obtainable, although obtainability seems contradictory to the concept of limitlessness) would be a different perspective as well. But since I don’t think it can exist, practically-speaking, then I think we’re relegated to interpretation. And I’m not seeing anything wrong with that. That, after all, seems to me to be the job of the artist or poet.

[quasimodo1]

Rilke had a lifetime friendship with Lou Andreas-Salome', he met with Leo Tolstoy once. He made a sketch of Leonid Pasternak. In the summer of 1900 Rilke stayed at Wordswede, an artists "colony", and met sculptress Clara Westhoff and the painter, Paula Modersohn-Becker. He eventually marries Westhoff and in 1901, they have a daughter, Ruth. By 1902 this mairrage ends though they remain close. Due to an accute lack of funds, Rilke takes on writing commissions; he travells to Paris where he meets Auguste Rodin and becomes his secretary. About this time, perhaps because of Rodin's influence, Rilke's style ceases to be what some would call subjective and sentimental and his writing becomes intensely compact and his poems begin to exhibit connections to each other, eventually taking on the concise and sequential quality of unified sound, image and theme...a watermark of his greatest work.

[quasimodo1]

Rainer Marie Rilke -- Narcissus --1913, April, Paris -------------------------------------------------------And this: this escapes from me and dissolves in the air and in the aura of the grove, leaves me softly and becomes mine no longer and gleams, because it meets no enmity. -- This rises incessantly away from me, I try to stay, I wait, I linger; but all my borders hasten elsewhere, rush out and even now are there. -- In sleep also. Nothing binds us in. Pliant core in me, kernel full of weakness that can't control its fruitflesh. Fleeing, O flight from all places on my surface. -- What forms down there and must resemble me and quivers up in bleary outlines, -- it might have taken whape that way inside a woman; but I could not attain it -- as I struggled toward it pressing into her. Now it lies open in the apathetic scattered water, and I can gaze at it for ages under my wreath of roses. -- It is not loved there. Down there is nothing but the equanimity of tumbled stones, and I can see my sadness. Was this my image in her eyes' flashing? -- Did it surge into her dream like this as some sweet fear? I can almost feel her fright. For as I lose myself inside my gaze: I could think that I am deadly. {translated by Edward Snow, not written originally in prose format}

[quasimodo1]

O the curves of my longing through the cosmos,

and on all the streaks: my being's flung-outness.

Many an aspect returning only after a thousand

years on the sad ellipsis of its momentum and

passing on. Hastening through the once-existent

future, knowing itself in the year's seasons of airily,

as an exact influence almost starlike in the

overwakeful apparatus for a short time trembling.

Rainer Maria Rilke, Venice, mid-July, 1912 -- {translated by Edward Snow}

[blp]

(does anyone here know), what is being referred to as "limitless objectivity"? This seems to suggest a kind of Platonic form sort of thing to me. A search (or discovery) of the absolute real. "Cezanne’s still lifes....simply indestructible in their stubborn thereness." Yes? No? Maybe?

Well...Kant might have a few things to say about (the fundamental impossibility of perceiving) the absolute real.

It seems to me, just from what's here, that what Rilke gets from the Cezanne still lives' 'stubborn thereness' is a rather uncanny sense of presence that overwhelms ones subjectivity and, thereby, one's sense of self. It sounds similar to the effect often ascribed to meditation where, at some point, one's sense of self 'dissolves in the absolute'. Meditations that involve close observation of an object (such as one of Cezanne's apples) seem particularly relevant. The more you look, the less familiar the object becomes; or, to put it more accurately perhaps, the more you realise how unfamiliar the object is. The more you realise how little you know about objects, the more you realise your assumptions about yourself may have been too much too. This awakening to one's own unknowing looks to me like the beginning of Rilke's limitless objectivity.

To expect, instead, a subjective 'interpretation' from a poet sounds Freudian, in that it accords with the psychoanalytic insight that we always reveal something of our selves in what we say whether we intend to or not. In poetry, especially, where conversational conventions are suspended, one might well expect the greater freedom to associate to reveal more of the psyche.

How to square this with the selflessness of Rilke's limitless objectivity - the insight, in fact, that there is no self to reveal? (how can there be if objectivity is limitless?) Of course there is no real contradiction. What goes on in psychoanalysis is the same as in the defamiliarising meditative observation of the apple. A great deal of what is revealed in free associative trawls through the psyche are, in effect, absurdities - old assumptions and effects of conditioning that, when examined, simply don't make logical sense - and thus, again, you find you know less than you assumed. It's the old peeling back of the layers of the onion - with nothing knowable at the core: the self as Kantian noumenon.

Thanks for posting this, quasimodo. Lovely stuff.

[quasimodo1]

Thanks for the insightful commentary, BLP. In your essay like treatment, I especially like "...A great deal of what is revealed in free associative trawls through the psyche are, in effect, absurdities - old assumptions and effects of conditioning that, when examined, simply don't make logical sense - and thus, again, you find you know less than you assumed. It's the old peeling back of the layers of the onion - with nothing knowable at the core: the self as Kantian noumenon." Shades of Gunter Grass' Peeling the Onion. Here is another from Rilke's uncollected works...

[quasimodo1]

THE SPANISH TRILOGY -- (part 1)

-----------------From this cloud-- look: that so

wildly covers the star that just shone there-- (and

from me), from these mountains across the way,

which hold night, nightwinds, for a while-- (and

from me), from this stream on the valley's floor,

which catches the gleam of torn sky-clearings--

(and from me), from me and from all of this to

make a single thing, Lord: from me and those deep

soughs with which the herd, put up inn the fold,

waits out the great dark cessation of the world--,

....


{--Ronda,

Spain, early January 1913 -- translated by Edward

Snow}

[blp]

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.

....


Translated by Stephen Mitchell

[quasimodo1]

"...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." JBI: For Rilke this reader feels the need for a superlative form of the word subtle and the word "power and clarity" need combination into another. This timeline that I've just been reading gives the impression the parts are far greater than the whole of his life. -- http://picture-poems.com/rilke/rilkebio.html

[quasimodo1]

"The transformed speaks only to relinquishers. All holders-on are stranglers." A two line poem. {Bockel, early Autumn, 1917. ...translated by Edward Snow}

[blp]

So good. Why has it taken me so long to get into Rilke? I think I must have been unlucky with the first of his poems that I read.

[quasimodo1]

See the carefree insect, how it plays, its whole world

the sheltering womb. Nature, when it was

sketched, received it, bore it, and bears it now--,

and in that same motherspace it lives and spends

its intimate time, frisking in the joyful body like a

small Saint John. Whereas the mammal even as it

suckles stares, all eye {Paris, early summer, 1914-

translated by Edward Snow}

[quasimodo1]

To blp: Was your first experience with Rilke the usual recommendation, and/or required reading...The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigg? This prose work, although great, was probably introduced because the poetry seemed inaccessible.

[quasimodo1]

Rainer Maria Rilke -- To Music -- Music:

breathing of statues. Perhaps: stillness of

paintings. You language where languages end.

You time, placed erect on the course of hearts that

expire. Feelings.....for whom? O you the mutation

of feelings.....into what?--: into audible landscape.

You stranger: music. Innermost thing of ours,

which, exceeding us, crowds out,-- other side:

pure, gigantic, no longer to be lived in.

{Munich, January 11-12, 1918, translated by
Edward Snow}

[quasimodo1]

The Second Elegy
Every angel is terrifying. And yet, alas,
I invoke you, almost deadly birds of the soul,
knowing about you. Where are the days of Tobias,
when one of you, veiling his radiance, stood at the front door,
slightly disguised for the journey, no longer appalling;
(a young man like the one who curiously peeked through the window).
But if the archangel now, perilous, from behind the stars
took even one step down toward us: our own heart, beating
higher and higher, would beat us to death. Who are you?


{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

On the mountains of the heart cast out to die.

Look, how small there,

look: the last village of words, and higher,

but how small too, yet one last

farmstead of feeling. Do you see it?

On the mountains of the heart cast out to die.

Rockground under the hands. Here, it's true,

some things flourish; out of mute downplunge

an unknowing herb breaks forth singing.



{Irschenhausen, September 20, 1914. translated by

Edward Snow}

[blp]

To blp: Was your first experience with Rilke the usual recommendation, and/or required reading...The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigg? This prose work, although great, was probably introduced because the poetry seemed inaccessible.

No, actually, the first Rilke I ever read was the poem I posted (You who never arrived...). I liked it, but when I read others I didn't get into them at all. It may have been down to bad translations. I've been looking around for an edition to buy lately and those in the know on Amazon are very particular about the translations. I think someone even says they were initially put off by poor translations.

[quasimodo1]

Rilke has some excellent translators and some not worth mentioning. Stephen Mitchell has always been my favorite but I'm warming up to Edward Snow.

[quasimodo1]

Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue, a wonderful living side by side can grow, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole against the sky.
Rainer Maria Rilke

[quasimodo1]

This is the miracle that happens every time to those who really love: the more they give, the more they possess.
Rainer Maria Rilke

[firefangled]

I do not know who translated this version. It was not Robert Bly's, but this is truer to the original, which was written in rhymed iambic pentameter. It is one of my favorites. Thank you for this thread, Quasi.

Childhood

The school's long stream of time and tediousness
winds slowly on, through torpor, through dismay.
O loneliness, O time that creeps away...
Then out at last: the streets ring loud and gay,
and in the big white squares the fountains play,
and in the parks the world seems measureless. -
And to pass through it all in children's dress,
with others, but quite otherwise than they: -
O wondrous time, O time that fleets away,
O loneliness!

....

[quasimodo1]

To Firefangled: Great addition and it indicates how in touch with childhood Rilke could be. I'll see if I can find this translator who did an excellent job with this poem. If only I knew the German language.

[firefangled]

To Firefangled: Great addition and it indicates how in touch with childhood Rilke could be. I'll see if I can find this translator who did an excellent job with this poem. If only I knew the German language.

My pleasure, Quasi. Rilke had more than one poem to Childhood, all so very in touch.

[Erichtho]

My pleasure, Quasi. Rilke had more than one poem to Childhood, all so very in touch.

And let's not forget about his "prose book" The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, in which the childhood also plays a big part, as a kind of last bastion.

[firefangled]

A sublime poem on loneliness from The Book of Pictures, the same book that contained his poems on childhood.


Loneliness

Being apart and lonely is like rain.
It climbs toward evening from the ocean plains;
from flat places, rolling and remote, it climbs
to heaven, which is its old abode.
And only when leaving heaven drops upon the city.

....

[quasimodo1]

Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke On Love and Other

Difficulties (translations and considerations by

John J.L. Mood) -- "If only we arrange our life

according to that principle which counsels us that

we must always hold to the difficult, then that

which now still seems to us the most alien will

become what we most trust and find most faithful."

[quasimodo1]

FORCE OF GRAVITY Center, how you draw yourself out from all the things, how you also reclaim yourself from flying things, center, you strongest. Stander: like a drink through thirst hurtles the force of gravity through him. Yet from the sleeper falls, as from a stored up cloud, abundant rain of force. [October, 1924]

[quasimodo1]

Ignorant before the heavens of my Life
Ignorant before the heavens of my life,
I stand and gaze in wonder. Oh the vastness
of the stars. Their rising and descent. How still.
As if I didn't exist. Do I have any
share in this? Have I somehow dispensed with
their pure effect? Does my blood's ebb and flow
change with their changes? Let me put aside
every desire, every relationship
except this one, so that my heart grows used to
its farthest spaces. Better that it live
fully aware, in the terror of its stars, than
as if protected, soothed by what is near.

[quasimodo1]

In his Schmargendorf diary of 1899, the 25-year-old poet wrote:
"One must splice oneself into some great circuit...To pass it on is everything; but without seeing the one to whom one passes it, to stretch oneself taut over landscapes and people with a hundred shining wires out to the next pole; is that not it?" (from "Diaries of a Young Poet," translated by Edward Snow & Michael Winkler).

[firefangled]

Quasi, Music left me holding my breath and listening.

Most of my experience with Rilke leaves me feeling how rich we are to be alive with our senses and this core we call heart because of its physical location, when in fact it extends through every fiber of us. He must have felt every nuance of emotion. What strength to each one long enough to so masterfully describe its courses.

[quasimodo1]

RILKE'S POEMS ON LOVE (1)



The rose-gatherer grasps suddenly

the full bud of his vitality

and, at fright at the difference,

the gentle garden within her shrinks

....


October, 1915

[quasimodo1]

TURNING

The path from inner intensity to greatness

leads through sacrifice.--Kassner



He had long won it through gazing.

Stars fell to their knees

under his grappling up-glance.

Or he gazed beseechingly,

and the scent of his urgency

wearied an Immortal,

until it smiled on him from sleep.

....

{Paris, June 20, 1914}

[quasimodo1]

WOMAN IN LOVE

Yes I long for you. I glide,

losing myself, out of my own hand,

without hope of conquering

what comes to me, as if out of your side,

grave and stark and undeterred.

....

1908

[quasimodo1]

"So this is where people came to live; I would have thought it is a city to die in. I have been out. I saw: hospitals. I saw a man who staggered and fell. A crowd formed around him and I was spared the rest. I saw a pregnant woman. She was dragging herself heavily along a high, warm wall, and now and then reached out to touch it as if to convince herself that it was still there. Yes, it was still there. And behind it? I looked on my map: maison d'accouchement. Good. They will deliver her--they can do that." -- first lines of The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, Rilke's one prose work

[quasimodo1]

Rainer Maria Rilke



Fragments From Lost Days

…..Like birds that get used to walking
And grow heavier and heavier, as in falling:
The earth sucks out of their long claws
The brave memory of all
The great things that happen high up,
And makes them almost into leaves that cling
Tightly to the ground,--
Like plants which,
Scarcely growing upward, creep into the earth,
Sink lightly and softly and damply
Into black clods and sicken there lifelessly,--

....

{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

Rainer Maria Rilke



From THE NOTEBOOKS OF MALTE LAURIDS BRIGGE
(September 11th, rue Toullier - pp 6,7)

Have I said it before? I am learning to see. Yea, I am
Beginning. It's still going badly. But I intend to make
The most of my time.
For example, it never occurred to me before how
Many faces there are. There are multitudes of people,
But there are many more faces, because each person
Has several of them. There are people who wear the
Same face for years; naturally it wears out, gets dirty,
Splits at the seams, stretches like gloves worn during
A long journey.

....

[quasimodo1]

From Uncollected Poems
Translated by Edward Snow

HEAD OF AMENOPHIS IV IN BERLIN

As young meadows, flowerfilled, through
A light blanket of new growth cause a slope
To take part in the feelings of the year,
Windknowing, sentient, gentle, almost happy
Over the mountain's slant-perilous form:
So this visage, bloomprofuse, gently transient,
Rests on its skull's anteriors, which,
Descending, as with a vineyard's contours,
Jut out into the cosmos, all radiance everywhere.

....

{late summer or autumn, 1913}

[quasimodo1]

Rainer Maria Rilke

Saturday, August 30, 2008
6:19 PM

But there was something more. There was a voice,
The voice that, seven weeks before, no one had known:
For it wasn't the Chamberlain's voice. This voice
Didn't belong to Christoph Detlev, but to Christoph
Detlev's death.....


{from THE NOTEBOOKS OF MALTE LAURIDS BRIGGE, pp 13-15

[Jozanny]

Is Christoph Detlev an arbitrary name? Interesting piece. I don't read much Rilke.

[quasimodo1]

To Jozanny: I don't think Detlev is arbitrary but it may be; my take on the "Notebooks..." is that "they" are loosely autobiographical. Some research may yield the answer. And another entry from this work...



From The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, pp. 22-24

How ridiculous. I sit here in my little room, I,
Brigge, who am twenty-eight years old and completely
Unknown. I sit here and am nothing. And yet
This nothing begins to think and thinks, five flights up,
On a gray Paris afternoon, these thoughts:

....

[Janine]

Quasi, I think I am going to copy this entire thread, after I get a Word program on my new computer; I only have Works presently. I love these poems! How interesting -the one "Women in Love" - same title as Lawrence's novel. I love these last lines:
Something has given my poor warm life


into the hand of someone random

who doesn't know what even yesterday I was.

I love this poem. It is great. I have a small Rilke book, my friend, Nancy, gave me; but now I see I must invest in a better collection. All the ones you seem to dig up are wonderful; I never heard them before. I need to read them, from start to finish, of this thread. Thanks for posting all these.

I love the poem on this page "Fragments From Lost Days" - that one really gets to me.

[quasimodo1]

From The Uncollected Poems
(Translated by Edward Snow)

TO HOLDERLIN

Lingering, even among what's most intimate,
Is not our option. From fulfilled images
The spirit abruptly plunges toward ones to be filled;
There are no lakes until eternity. Here falling
Is our best. From the mastered emotion
We fall over into the half-sensed, onward and onward.

....


Irschenhousen, September 1914

[quasimodo1]

From The Book of Images
(translated by Edward Snow)

PRESENTIMENT

I am like a flag surrounded by distances.
I sense the winds that are coming, and must live them,
While the things down below don't yet stir:
The doors still close softly, and in the chimneys there's silence;
The windows don't tremble yet, and the dust is still calm.

....

[quasimodo1]

From The Book of Images
(translated by Edward Snow)

THE TSARS
A Poem Cycle (1899-1906)

I.
That was in days when the mountains came:
The trees, which were not yet docile, reared up,
And roaring into ramparts the river rose.

Two foreign pilgrims shouted a name,
And out of his long crippledness
Arose Ilya, the giant of Muron.

....


{one in six from this cycle)

[quasimodo1]

From The Book of Images
(translated by Edward Snow)

THE TSARS
A Poem Cycle (1899-1906)

II.
Great birds still threaten on all sides,
And dragons glow and guard with darkest care
The forest's marvel and the gorge's fall;
And boys grow up, and men anoint themselves
To fight the battle with the nightingale,


....

[quasimodo1]

From The Book of Images
(translated by Edward Snow)

THE TSARS
A Poem Cycle (1899-1906)

IV. It is the hour when the empire vainly
Gazes into its splendor's many mirrors.

The pale Tsar, his clan's last member,
Dreams on the throne before the pageantry,
And his shamed locks faintly tremble
And his hand also, which flees before the purpled
Armrests with a chaotic longing
Into pathless uncertainty.

....

[quasimodo1]

From The Book of Images
(translated by Edward Snow)

THE TSARS
A Poem Cycle (1899-1906)

V. The pale Tsar will not die by the sword,
The strange longing makes him sacrosanct;
He will inherit the festive kingdoms
With which his gentle soul is so afflicted.

Already now, stepping toward a Kremlin window,
He sees a Moscow, whiter, less separate,
Worked into its finally finished night;
The way it is in the first spring weavings,
When through the streets the scent from birch trees
Trembles with endless morning bells.

....



{footnotes}
IV. "It is the hour when the empire vainly." The subject of the last three poems is Feodor, the feeble-minded son of Ivan the Terrible, and the last of the Rurik line.

[quasimodo1]

From The Book of Images
(translated by Edward Snow)

The Tsars
A Poem Cycle (1899-1906)

VI. Still in the surrounding silver-plating
Sapphires gaze like deep female eyes,
Gold tendrils coil together like slim panthers
That mate in the brilliance of their heat,
And soft pearls wait in the shadows
Of wild designs, so that a glimmer might
Briefly light their silent faces.
And all this is mantle, aureole, and land,
And movement runs from edge to edge,--
Like corn in wind, like rivers in a valley,
Light ripples through the jeweled sheath.

....



{footnote} VI. "still in the surrounding silver-plating." Icons in the Russian Orthodox Church were often covered over with gold or silver plating, into which holes were cut to let the face and hands of the underlying figure show through. The metal itself (in contrast to the austerity of the image) was often elaborately ornamented.

[quasimodo1]

From Requiem (1909)

REQUIEM FOR A FRIEND

I have my dead, and I have let them go,
And was amazed to see them so contented,
So soon at home in being dead, so cheerful,
So unlike their reputation. Only you
Return; brush past me, loiter, try to knock
Against something, so that the sound reveals
Your presence. Oh don't take from me what I
Am slowly learning. I'm sure you have gone astray
If you are moved to homesickness for anything
In this dimension. We transform these Things;
....



{Translated by Stephen Mitchell}

[quasimodo1]

From Ahead of All Parting:
Poetry and Prose of Rainer Maria Rilke
(edited and translated by Stephen Mitchell)

From Selected Poems

PORTRAIT OF MY FATHER AS A YOUNG MAN

In the eyes: dream. The brow as if it could feel
Something far off. Around the lips, a great
Freshness-- seductive, though there is no smile.
Under the rows of ornamental braid
On the slim Imperial officer's uniform:
The saber's basket-hilt. Both hands stay
Folded upon it, going nowhere, calm
And now almost invisible, as if they
Were the first to grasp the distance and dissolve.
And all the rest so curtained with itself,
So cloudy, that I cannot understand
This figure as it fades into the background--.

Oh quickly disappearing photograph
In my more slowly disappearing hand.

[quasimodo1]

From a letter to Lou Andreas-Salome', commenting on
The Seventh Elegy, February 20, 1914

The bird is a creature that has a very special feeling of trust in the
external world, as if she knew that she is one with its deepest mystery.
That is why she sings in it as if she were singing within her own
depths; that is why we so easily receive a birdcall into our own depths;
we seem to be translating it without residue into our emotion; indeed,
it can for a moment turn the whole world into inner space, because
we feel that the bird does not distinguish between her heart and
the worlds's.

{II. 2ff., "you would cry out as purely as a bird:"}

[quasimodo1]

Rainer Maria Rilke

Wednesday, September 17, 2008
7:17 PM

From a letter to Lou Andreas-Salome', re: The Second Elegy
(Duino, late January-early February, 1912), written February 20, 1914

What is shown so beautifully in the world of plants--how they make
no secret of their secret, as if they knew that it would always be safe--
is exactly what I experienced in front of the sculptures in Egypt and
what I have always experienced, ever since, in front of Egyptian
Things: this exposure of a secret that is so thoroughly secret, through
and through, in every place, that there is no need to hide it. And
perhaps everything phallic (as I fore-thought in the temple of Karnak,
for I couldn't yet think it) is just a setting-forth of the human hidden
secret in the sense of the open secret of Nature. I can't remember the
Smile of the Egyptian gods without thinking of the word "pollen."

{I. 12, pollen of the flowering godhead:}

[quasimodo1]

Re: Duino Elegies (1923)

The Elegies take their name from Duino Castle, on the Adriatic Sea, where
Rilke spent the winter of 1911/1912 as a guest of his friend Princess
Marie von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe (1855-1934); they are dedicated to her
In gratitude, as having belonged to her from the beginning. [Stephen Mitchell]

The following passage was written by Princess Marie von Thurn:

_____Rilke later told me how these Elegies arose. He had felt no premonition
of what was being prepared deep inside him; though there may be a hint
of it in a letter he wrote: "The nightingale is approaching--" Had he perhaps felt what
was to come over him; he began to think that this winter too would be without
result.
_____Then, one morning, he received a troublesome business letter. He wanted
to take care of it quickly, and had to deal with numbers and other such tedious
matters. Outside, a violent north wind was blowing, but the sun shone and the
water gleamed as if covered with silver. Rilke climbed down to the bastions which,
jutting out to the east, and west, were connected to the foot of the castle by
a narrow path along the cliffs, which abruptly drop off, for about two hundred feet,
into the sea. Rilke walked back and forth, completely absorbed in the problem
of how to answer the letter. Then, all at once, in the midst of his thoughts,
he stopped; it seemed that from the raging storm a voice had called to him:
"Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels' hierarchies?"
_____He stood still, listening. "What is that?" he whispered. "What is coming?"
Taking out the notebook that he always carried with him, he wrote down
these words, together with a few lines that formed by themselves without his
intervention. He knew that the god had spoken. Very calmly he climbed back up to
his room, set his notebook aside, and answered the difficult letter.
By the evening the whole First Elegy had been written.
(Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe, Erinnerungen
An Rainer Maria Rilke, p. 40 f.)

[quasimodo1]

From The Complete French Poems
(translated by A. Poulin, Jr.)

WINTER

I love those former winters that still weren't meant for sports.
We feared them a little, they were so hard and sharp;
We confronted them with a bit of courage,
To return into our house, white, sparkling wise-men.
And the fire, that great fire consoling us against them,
Was a strong and living fire, a real fire.
We wrote badly, our fingers were all stiff,
But what joy to dream and entertain whatever
Helps escaping memories delay a while…..
They came so close, we saw them better
Than in summer…..we proposed colors to them.
Inside, all was painting,
While outside all became engraving.

And the trees, who worked at home, in lamplight…..

[quasimodo1]

From the Duino Elegies (1923)
(The property of Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe)
[1912/1922]

THE FIRST ELEGY

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels'
Hierarchies? And even if one of them pressed me
Suddenly against his heart: I would be consumed
In that overwhelming existence. For beauty is nothing
But the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to
Endure,
And we are so awed because it serenely disdains
To annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying.
____And so I hold myself back and swallow the call-note
Of my dark sobbing. Ah, whom can we ever turn to
In our need? Not angels, not humans,
And already the knowing animals are aware
That we are not really at home in
Our interpreted world. Perhaps there remains for us
Some tree on a hillside, which every day we can take
Into our vision; there remains for us yesterday's street
And the loyalty of a habit so much at ease
When it stayed with us that it moved in and never left.
Oh and night: there is night, when a wind full of infinite
space
Gnaws at our faces. Whom would it not remain for--that
Longed-after,
Mildly disillusioning presence, which the solitary heart
So painfully meets. Is it any less difficult for lovers?
But they keep on using each other to hide their own fate.
_____Don't you know yet? Fling the emptiness out of your arms
Into the spaces we breathe; perhaps the birds
Will feel the expanded air with more passionate flying.

{excerpt, beginning of The First Elegy}

[quasimodo1]

From Ahead of All Parting
The Selected Poetry and Prose of Rainer Maria Rilke
(edited and translated by Stephen Mitchell)

From New Poems (1907,1908)

SELF-PORTRAIT, 1906

The stamina of an old, long-noble race
In the eyebrows' heavy arches. In the mild
Blue eyes, the solemn anguish of a child
And, here and there, humility-- not a fool's,
But feminine: The look of one who serves.
The mouth quite ordinary, large and straight,
Composed, yet not unwilling to speak out
When necessary. The forehead still naïve,
Most comfortable in shadows, looking down.

....

[quasimodo1]

From The Book of Images
(translated by Edward Snow)

ABOUT FOUNTAINS

Suddenly I know a lot about fountains,
Those incomprehensible trees of glass.
I could talk now as of my own tears,
Which I, gripped by such fantastic dreaming,
Spilled once and then somehow forgot.

Could I forget that the heavens reach hands
Toward many things and into this commotion?


....

[quasimodo1]

From Ahead of All Parting:
The Selected Poetry and Prose of Rainer Maria Rilke
(edited and translated by Stephen Mitchell)

From The Sonnets to Orpheus

XII

Will transformation. Oh be inspired for the flame
In which a Thing disappears and bursts into something else;
The spirit of re-creation which masters this earthly form
Loves most the pivoting point where you are no longer
Yourself.

What tightens into survival is already inert;
How safe is it really in its inconspicuous gray?
....

[quasimodo1]

From Ahead of all Parting
The Selected Poetry and Prose of Rainer Maria Rilke
(edited and 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 separate strings.
Upon what instrument are we two spanned?
And what musician holds us in his hand?
Oh sweetest song.

[quasimodo1]

From Ahead of All Parting:
The Poetry and Prose of Rainer Maria Rilke
(edited and translated by Stephen Mitchell)

THE SONNETS TO ORPHEUS
XXIV

Shall we reject our primordial friendship, the sublime
Unwooing gods, because the steel that we keep
Harshly bringing to hardness has never known them--
Or shall we suddenly look for them on a map?

{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

From Ahead of All Parting: The Selected Poetry and Prose of Rainer Maria Rilke
(edited and translated by Stephen Mitchell)

THE GROWN-UP

All this stood upon her and was the world
And stood upon her with all its fear and grace
As trees stand, growing straight up, imageless
Yet wholly image, like the Ark of God,
And solemn, as if imposed upon a race.


{1907-1908}

[quasimodo1]

From The Complete French Poems
(translated by A. Poulin, Jr.)
From The Migration of Powers

DOUBT

Tender nature, happy nature, where so many
Desires seek and intersect each other,
Indifferent, and yet still the basis
Of consents,


{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

From Ahead of All Parting:
The Selected Poetry and Prose of Rainer Maria Rilke
(edited and translated by Stephen Mitchell)

From The Sonnets To Orpheus

XV

O fountain-mouth, you generous, always-filled
Mouth that speaks pure oneness, constantly--
You marble mask before the water's still
Flowing face. And in the background, the

....

[quasimodo1]

from Ahead Of All Parting
The Selected Poetry and Prose of
Rainer Maria Rilke
(Edited and Translated by
Stephen Mitchell)

from The Book Of Pictures
(1902, 1906)

THE BLINDMAN'S SONG

I am blind, you outsiders. It is a curse,
a contradiction, a tiresome farce,
and every day I despair.
I put my hand on the arm of my wife
(colorless hand on colorless sleeve)
and she walks me through empty air.

....

[Mila-trans]

Hey,
I am sitting with a translation of a book and need to find the proper translation of a poem quoted in the book I am working on. I cannot find the name of the poem or where it is published neither in the original nor in the translation. I just know it's author.

Quote:
How can the least happen
if the abundance of the future,
all the time,
is not moving towards us?
R.M.Rilke

Does these word say anything to anyone? Do you know which poem they come from?
I found a quote on this forum earlier saying the same but in different words here (http://www.online-literature.com/forums/showpost.php?p=592016&postcount=19)posted by quasimodo1.

Looking forward to hearing from you!

[quasimodo1]

To Mila-trans: As prolific as Rilke was, I woulld need to know if your excerpt starts with a first line and anything else you have....the book your working from, the ISBN number...anything at all. q1

[Mila-trans]

Hello again!

The book I translate is "Hints on the Art of Jumping" by Michael Barnett ISBN 3-905276-01-1. Rilke's quote is to be found in chapter 12, page 112 - I am not so sure if this can be of any help....But to come any closer to what poem this might be taken from would help tremendously.
Thanx a lot!!!

[quasimodo1]

http://www.dealoz.com/prod.pl?cat=book&op=buy&q=ean%3D9783905276015%26data_id%3D13139251%26isbn% 3D3905276011%26mfr%3DCEC%2520COSMIC%2520ENERGY%252 0CONNECTIONS%26asin%3D3905276011&store_id=&start=0&rcount=2&lang=en-us&search_country=us&shipto=us&cur=usd&zip=&nw=y&limit=100&sort=featured&class=&shipping_pref=cost Mila-trans: this link might not help. I'll be checking my texts. Someone will get back to you.

[quasimodo1]

To Mili-trans: You were correct in your finding the text posted where you first noticed it. It is from Rilke"s Uncollected Poems, bilinqual edition, translated by Edward Snow. Dated as shown in the posting. If you need the original German, please let me know. q1 ps: first line is as quoted in the posting.

[Mila-trans]

That is awesome!!! THANK YOU!!!! If you have the name of the poem or its German text and/or title - please, do let me know - then I can get much closer to solving this puzzle :) Great forum you got here :) And superb knowledge you possess on this topic, really!!! I have been searching high&low....:)

[quasimodo1]

To Mila-trans: The poem has no name as such, as far as my texts indicate so usually the title becomes the first line or sentence. In this case its dated and notes are available in the translator's (Snow's) bilingual book. I can send you the German, just give me until tomorrow to put it together. q1

[Mila-trans]

I see....meanwhile, I'll try to get a copy of Snow's book :)

[quasimodo1]

from The Complete French Poems
[translated by A. Poulin, Jr.]

THE VALAISIAN QUATRAINS

I. SMALL FOUNTAIN

Nymph, forever dressing
with what undresses you,
let your body be excited
for the round rough water.



{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

from Ahead of All Parting:
The Selected Poetry and Prose of
Rainer Maria Rilke
[edited and translated by
Stephen Mitchell]

from Duino Elegies

THE NINTH ELEGY

Why, if this interval of being can be spent serenely
in the form of a laurel, slightly darker than all
other green, with tiny waves on the edges
of every leaf (like the smile of a breeze) --;why then
have to be human -- and, escaping from fate,
keep longing for fate?......

{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

from Rainer Maria Rilke
The Complete French Poems
(translated by A. Poulin, Jr.)

from Saltimbanques
(Prose Poems)

TANGERINE EATER

Oh, what foresight! This rabbit of the fruit-world. Imagine, in a single
specimen thirty-seven small seeds ready to fall just about anywhere and
sprout her progeny. We had to fix that. She could have populated the
earth-- this little determined Mandarin who wears an oversized dress as
if she were to grow bigger. In fact, badly dressed: more preoccupied with
multiplication than with style. Show her the pomegranate in her armor
of Cordova leather: ... {excerpt}

[Mila-trans]

Thank you so much!!!

It helped tremendously. I got it approved and the text is as you quoted it :)

Sorry for the late answer and thanks a lot for your help again!!!

Mila

[quasimodo1]

from Uncollected Poems
Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by
Edward Snow
ALMOST AS ON THE LAST DAY...

Almost as on the last day the dead will tear themselves
from the earth's embrace, and the unburdened ball,
racing after them, will vanish into the sky--:
thus almost now these, the living, plunge into the soil,
and that soil, the earth, sinks laden toward the watery worldbed
into millennial weed, where destinies as yet--
mutely with blank fishgaze--
have cold encounters. {excerpt}

{Irchenhausen, early September 1914} {no title}

[quasimodo1]

from Uncollected Poems
Rainer Marie Rilke translated by
Edward Snow

DEATH

And here we have Death, a bluish distillate
in a cup without a saucer.
A peculiar place for a cup:
set on the back of a hand. One can still see
clearly the break of the handle
on the glazed slope. Dusty. And around its edge
"Hope" fractured in worn-out writing.

That's what the drinker whom the drink was for
at a distant morning meal spelled out.

{excerpt}

{Munich, November 9, 1915}

[quasimodo1]

from Uncollected Poems
of Rainer Maria Rilke
translated by Edward Snow

. . .WHEN WILL, WHEN WILL,...
{title by first line}

. . . When will, when will, when will it be enough,
the saying and lamenting? ......

.....Louder than storms, louder than oceans, humans
have been crying out . . .What preponderance of quietness
must abide in cosmic space, since the cricket
remains audible to us, for all our screaming. When the star
shines silently for us, in the screamed-at ether!

If the remotest, the old and most ancient fathers would talk
to us!
And we: listeners at last! The first human listeners.

{Muzot, February 1, 1922} {excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

from Uncollected Poems
Rainer Maria Rilke translated by
Edward Snow

HEART'S SWING. O SO SECURELY FASTENED
[titled by first line]

Heart's swing. O so securely fastened
to what invisible bough? Who, who gave you that push,
so that you swung me up into the leaves?
How close I was to the fruit, delectable. But not-to-remain
in this momentum's essence. Only the closeness, only
to the ever-too-high suddenly the possible
closeness. Proximities-- and then
from the irresistibly swung-up-to place
sure to be lost again, the new view, the prospect.
And now: the commanded reverse
back and across, out into equilibrium's arms. Below,
in between, the hesitation, the force of earth, the passage
through the will of gravity--, on past: and the sling pulls taut,
weighted by the curiosity of the heart,
upward into that other opposite.
Again how different, how new! How they envy each other
at the ends of the rope, these halves of delight!
Quarters, only quarters . . . For there above
the upper half-circle remains, that segment of the heavens
undisturbed, unbegun--, and even for the boldest
CLOSED: would he not plunge headfirst from the barred pathway?

{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

from The Book of Images
(bilingual edition, translated by Edward Snow)

MEMORY

And you wait, await the one thing
that will infinitely increase your life;
the gigantic, the stupendous,
the awakening of stones,
depths turned round toward you.

The volumes in brown and gold
flicker dimly on the bookshelves;
and you think of lands traveled through,
of paintings, of the garments
of women found and lost.

And then all at once you know: that was it.
You rise, and there stands before you
the fear and prayer and shape
of a vanished year.

(circa 1902)

[quasimodo1]

from The Book of Images
Rainer Maria Rilke translated by Edward Snow

THOSE OF THE HOUSE OF COLONNA

You far-off men, who stand now so motionless
in portraits, you sat at ease on horseback
and impatiently you strode through the hall;
like a great dog, with that same gesture
your hands now rest beside you.

Your face is so filled with gazing,
because for you the world was picture and picture;
out of armor, flags, ripe fruit, and women
welled for you that great confidence
that everything is and counts.

But back then when you were still too young
to lead your forces in the great battles,
too young to wear the robes of papal crimson,
not always favored in riding and hunting,
boys-still, who forswore the charms of women,
have you from all those boyhood days
not one, not a single memory?

Have you forgotten how life felt back then?

Back then the altar, with its painting
on which Mary gave birth, was tucked away
in the solitary side aisle.
You were enthralled
by a flower tendril;
the thought
that the fountain all alone
outside in the garden bathed in moonlight
cast its water skyward
was like a world.

The window opened right up to your feet like a door,
and all was park with lawns and paths:
strangely near and yet so far away,
strangely bright and yet as if concealed,
and the springs had voices like rain,
and it was as if no morning came
to meet that long night
which stood with all its stars.

Back then, boys, your hands grew,
and were warm. (But you didn't know it.)
Back then your faces burgeoned wide.

[quasimodo1]

from The Book of Images
{ Rainer Maria Rilke translated by Edward Snow}

THE ASHANTI
(Jardin d'Acclimatation)

No vision of far-off countries,
no feeling of brown women who
dance out of their falling garments.

No wild unheard-of melodies.
No songs which issued from the blood,
and no blood which screamed out from the depths.

No brown girls who stretched out
velvetly in tropical exhaustion;
no eyes which blazed like weapons,

and the mouth broad with laughter.
And a bizarre agreement
with the light-skinned humans; vanity.

And it made me shudder seeing that.

O how much truer are the animals
that pace up ad down in steel grids,
unrelated to the antics of the new
alien things which they don't understand;
and they burn like a silent fire
softly out and subside into themselves,
indifferent to the new adventure
and with their fierce instincts all alone.
{between June 1899 and August 1906}

[quasimodo1]

from The Book of Images
(translated by Edward Snow)

EVENING

Slowly the evening puts on the garments
held for it by a rim of ancient trees;
you watch: and the lands divide from you,
one going heavenward, one that falls;

and leave you, to neither quite belonging,
not quite so dark as the house sunk in silence,
not quite so surely pledging the eternal
as that which grows star each night and climbs--

and leave you (inexpressibly to untangle)
your life afraid and huge and ripening,
so that it, now bound in ad now embracing,
grows alternately stone in you and star.

[quasimodo1]

from Uncollected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke
(translated by Edward Snow)

ONCE I TOOK YOUR FACE INTO
{first line}

Once I took your face into
my hands. Moonlight fell on it.
Most incomprehensible object
under overflowing tears.

Like something docile, that quietly endures,
it felt almost the way a thing feels.
And yet there was no being in that chill
night, which endlessly eludes me.

O these places toward which we surge,
pushing into the scant surfaces
all the waves of our heart,
our pleasures and our weaknesses,
and to whom do we finally hold them out?

To the stranger, who misunderstood us,
to the other, whom we never found,
to those slaves, who bound us,
to the spring winds, which promptly vanished,
and to silence, that spendthrift.

{Paris, end of 1913}

[quasimodo1]

from Uncollected Poems
(bilingual edition, translated by Edward Snow)

THE HAND

See the little titmouse,
lost and bewildered in the room:
twenty heartbeats long
it lay in a hand.
Human hand. One determined to protect.
Unpossessingly protect.
But
now on the windowsill
free
it remains cut off in its fear
from itself
and what surrounds it,
the cosmos, which it doesn't recognize.
Ah, how perplexing a hand is
even bent on rescue.
Even the most assistance-giving hand
still has death enough
and held money

{Muzot, end of 1921}

[quasimodo1]

Formerly one knew (or perhaps one guessed it) that one had one’s death within one, as a fruit its kernel. The children had a little
death within them and the grown-ups a big one. The women had it in their womb and the men in their breast. One had it, and
it gave one a singular dignity and a quiet pride.”
- Rainer Maria Rilke

[dmm]

Hi there, quasi. Your discussion about Rilke encouraged me to register and participate in this forum, which I find very interesting and also will allow me to practice my english. What surprised me the most was that I did not found any references within your threads to what I consider two of the finest Rilke´s prose works: "Letters to a young poet" and, above all, "Letters to a venecian friend". This "Lettres à une amie venitienne" (originally published in french) contains 31 letters sent to a young lady called Adelmina Romanelli, where most of Rilke´s concerns and points of view are easily understood. I feel compelled to recommend "Lettres à une amie venitienne" to those who want to see deeply into Rilke´s works. In the same was as Nietzsche´s poems enables one to understand his prose, "Lettres..." is a very apt text to understand Rilke´s poems.

:yawnb:Regards

[quasimodo1]

To dmm: I have referenced "Letters to a Young Poet" somewhere in this thread, at least peripherally. I'm taking note of your other suggestions. Thanks. q1

[quasimodo1]

To Lou Andreas-Salome St. Petersburg, 1900

Saturday morning

I have your letter, your dear letter that does me good with every
word, that touches me as with a wave, so strong and surging, that
surrounds me as with gardens and builds up heavens about me,
that makes me able and happy to say to you what struggled
stupidly with my last difficult letter: that I long for you and
that it was namelessly dismaying to live these days without any
news, after that unexpected and quick farewell and among the
almost hostile impressions of this difficult city, in which you could
not speak to me out of the distance through any thing at all. So it
came to that ugly letter of recently which could scarcely find its
way out of the isolation, out of the unaccustomed and intolerable
aloneness of my experiences and was only a hurrying, a perplex-
ity and conf usedness, something that must be alien to you in the
beauty to which your life has immediately rounded itself out
again under the new circumstances.

Now I can scarcely bear it that in the great song around you, in
which you are finding again little childrens' voices, my voice
should have been the strange, the only banal one, the voice of
the world among those holy words and stillnesses of which days
about you are woven. Wasn't it so? I fear it must have been so.
What shall I do? Can I drown out the other letter with this one? In
this one your words echo, the other is built upon your being
away, of which I learned nothing, and now that I am informed no
longer has the right to exist ... but does, doesn't it?

Will you say a word to irce? That in spite of it, everything is as
you write; that no squirrel has died of it and nothing, nothing has
darkened under it or even remained in shadow behind it.

[quasimodo1]

from Ahead of all Parting
{translated by Stephen Mitchell}

from Selected Prose

Finding. Losing. Have you really thought about what loss is? It is not simply the negation of that generous moment which came to gratify an expectation you yourself never imagined you had. For between that moment and loss, there is always what is called-- rather clumsily, I agree-- Possession.
Now loss, cruel though it may be, can have no effect on possession; it ends it, perhaps; it affirms it; basically it is just a second acquisition, completely inner this time, and intense in a different way.
That is what you felt, Balthusz; no longer seeing Mitsou, you began to see him even more.
Is he still alive? He survives in you, and his joy, the joy of a small carefree cat, having given you pleasure, now puts you under an obligation: you had to express it by the resources of your laborious sorrow. Thus, a year later, I found you grown up and consoled.

[quasimodo1]

LIKENESS OF MY FATHER IN HIS YOUTH

{translated from the German by William Harmon}

In the eyes: dream.
Forehead communicating
with something distant.
Around the mouth
an extraordinary power of youth
and seductiveness, but a seductiveness minus the smiling.

And in front of the full-dress braid of the trim
old-fashioned outfit of nobility
the ample hilt of the sabre, and his two hands,
which attend, at rest, forced towards nothing.

And very nearly invisible now, as though
what held fast to far things were first to go.

And every other thing is self-concealed
and expunged, as though beyond our understanding
and, out from unfathomable depths, profoundly opaque—

you, fast-fading daguerrotype
in my slower-fading hands.

[quasimodo1]

from SONNETS TO ORPHEUS

{translated from the German by Lorne Mook}

Part 1, Sonnet 5

Erect no memorial stone. Just let the roses,
year after year, in his memory, bloom.
For it’s Orpheus, and he metamorphoses
into this and that. No need to make room

for any other names; once and for all,
it’s Orpheus if it’s singing. He arrives,
departs. Is it not much that he survives,
sometimes, a few days longer than the bowl

of roses? Although to vanish makes him afraid,
he must vanish so that each of us understands.
In that his word surpasses this existence,

he’s gone alone already into distance.
The lyre’s lattice hinders not his hands.
And when he has overstepped he has obeyed.

[quasimodo1]

from Ahead of All Parting: The Selected Poetry and Prose of
Rainer Maria Rilke
(translated by Stephen Mitchell)

RILKE, ON DEATH

Our intimate companion, Death
We should not be afraid that our strength is insufficient to endure any experience of death, even the closest and most terrifying. Death is not beyond our strength: it is the measuring-line at the vessel's brim: we are full whenever we reach it -- and being full means (for us) being heavy--- I am not saying that we should love death; but we should love life so generously, so without calculation and selection, that we involuntarily come to include, and to love, death too (life's averted half): this is in fact what always happens in the great turmoils of love, which cannot be held back or defined. Only because we exclude death, then it suddenly enters our thoughts, has it become more and more of a stranger to us: and because we have kept it a stranger, it has become our enemy. It is conceivable that it is infinitely closer to us than life itself-- What do we know of it?
Prejudiced as we are against death, we do not manage to release it from all its distorted images. It is a friend, our deepest friend, perhaps the only one who can never be misled by our attitudes and vacillations-- and this, you must understand, not in the sentimental-romantic sense of life's opposite, a denial of life: but our friend precisely when we most passionately, most vehemently, assent to being here, to living and working on earth, to Nature, to love. Life simultaneously says Yes and No. Death (I implore you to believe this!) is the true Yes-sayer. It says only Yes. In the presence of eternity.

{To Countess Margot Sizzo-Noris-Crouy, January 6, 1923}

[quasimodo1]

from Ahead Of All Parting: The Selected Poetry and Prose
of Rainer Maria Rilke
{translated by Stephen Mitchell}

Notes on THE SONNETS TO ORPHEUS {1923}

These strange Sonnets were not intended or expected work: they appeared often many in one day (the first part of the book was written in about three days), completely, in February of last year, when I was, moreover, about to gather myself for the continuation of those older poems-- the great Duino Elegies. I could do nothing but submit, purely and obediently, to the dictation of this inner impulse; and I understood only little by little the relation of these verses to the figure of Vera Knoop, who died at the age of eighteen or nineteen, whom I hardly knew and saw only a few times in her life, when she was still a child, though with extraordinary attention and emotion. Without my arranging it this way (except for a few poems at the beginning of the second part, all the Sonnets kept the chronological order of their appearance), it happened that only the next-to-last poems of both parts explicitly refer to Vera, address her, or evoke her figure.
This beautiful child, who had just begun to dance and attracted the attention of everyone who saw her, by the art of movement and transformation which was innate in her body and spirit-- unexpectedly declared to her mother that she no longer could or would dance (this happened just at the end of childhood). Her body changed, grew strangely heaavy and massive, without losing its beautiful Slavic features; this was already the beginning of the mysterious glandular disease that later was to bring death so quickly. During the time that remained to her, Vera devoted herself to music; finally she only drew-- as if the denied dance came forth from her ever more quietly, ever more discreetly.

{to Countess Margot Sizzo-Noris-Crouy, April 12, 1923}

[Nick Capozzoli]

I've tried adapting some of these poems to English and would like your feedback. Lets start with this one:

From a Childhood

Darkness grew like treasure in the room
In which the boy, almost autistic, sat.
When his mother stepped into its gloom
A crystal quivered in the cabinet.
She felt the room had done her wrong.
She kissed her boy and murmured, "You are here!"
Then both glanced shyly at the clavier
Where often evenings she would play a song
Through which the child sat spellbound on the floor.
He sat quite still. His wide eyes seemed to pore
Upon her hands that heavy rings had bent.
One time it seemed that they would move no more,
Then over the whitening keys they went.

[Nick Capozzoli]

Evening

Evening takes off his old clothes,
Tossed on a rim of tall trees.
Horizon parts the world. Half goes
Skyward, the other bends its knees.

Neither part is yours. Not so dark
As those silent distant houses
Nor sure as the eternal mark
That turns to star at night, arouses

Perplexity you cannot unfold.
Your life entire, complete, still ajar...
At one hemmed in, yet open, bold,
Turning now from stone to star.

[Nick Capozzoli]

This is a famous poem, and here's my effort to adapt it to English:

The Panther

His gaze has grown so weary
Of circling bars he sees
Nothing: an infinity
Of bars, no world but these.

His padded gait alone
Rounds the contracted stage,
A dance of might, a zone
Where will is numb with rage.

Now and then a film
Wipes his clouded eyes.
The image stiffens him,
Enters his heart and dies.

[Nick Capozzoli]

Entrance

Whoever you may be, at dusk step out,
Out from your room where nothing is in doubt.
What stands at last before uncertainty
Is your own house, whoever you may be.
Then with your eyes that scarce may wearily
Lift themselves above the doorstep stone
You slowly raise a heavy blavkened tree
To silhouette the sky, lank, alone.
Now you have made the world. It is wide
And like some words that yet in silence spread.
But when their sense no longer seems to hide
From you, too soon the vision leaves your head.


Nick

[quasimodo1]

To Nick Capozzoli: Are you skilled enough in German to actually translate these poems? I'm assuming, yes. Are you familiar with Stephen Mitchell... in my view...the very best translator and editor of Rilke's works? You're interpretation is impressive, to me at least. (Also, have you read "The Notebooks of Malte Lourdes Brigg"?

[Nick Capozzoli]

To Nick Capozzoli: Are you skilled enough in German to actually translate these poems? I'm assuming, yes. Are you familiar with Stephen Mitchell... in my view...the very best translator and editor of Rilke's works? You're interpretation is impressive, to me at least. (Also, have you read "The Notebooks of Malte Lourdes Brigg"?

Yes, I know German. My father is Italian and my mother is German, and I speak both languages. I like Rilke's German because it resonates with English, and I try to translate his German into English that sounds like what he writes in German. A good example would be the image in From a Childhood that I translated into A crystal quivered in the cabinet. Look at the German as decide whether or not my translation captures its essence.

I'm familiar with Mitchell's translations. They are OK as prose-like cribs, but I think they are lacking as imitations (as Lowell called his translations) into English poetry. If I thought Mitchell's translations were perfect, I would not have bothered to try to adapt Rilke to English.

Nick

[quasimodo1]

So you prefer Edward Snow or A. Poulin, Jr. who translates Rilke's French poems?

[quasimodo1]

http://picture-poems.com/rilke/ --- Rilke in German and English

...............................................Ima ginärer Lebenslauf

Erst eine Kindheit, grenzenlos und ohne
Verzicht und Ziel. O unbewußte Lust.
Auf einmal Schrecken, Schranke, Schule, Frohne
und Absturtz in Versuchung und Verlust.

Trotz. Der Gebogene wird selber Bieger
und rächt an anderen, daß er erlag.
Geliebt, gefürchtet, Retter, Ringer, Sieger
und Überwinder, Schlag auf Schlag.

Und dann allein im Weiten, Leichten, Kalten.
Doch tief in der errichteten Gestalt
ein Atemholen nach dem Ersten, Alten . . .

Da stürzte Gott aus seinem Hinterhalt.
{new translations by Cliff Crego}

[quasimodo1]

from The Complete French Poems
{translated by A. Poulin, Jr.}

GROWING OLD

In some summers there is so much fruit,
the peasants decide not to reap anymore.
Not having reaped you, O my days,
my nights, have I let the slow flames
of your lovely produce fall into ashes?

My nights, my days, you have borne so much!
All your branches have retained the gesture
of that long labor you are rising from:
my days, my nights. O my rustic friends!

I look for what was so good for you.
O my lovely, half-dead trees,
could some equal sweetness still
stroke your leaves, open your calyx?

{excerpt}

[Nick Capozzoli]

Autumn Day

Lord, it is time. Summer was so wide.
Now rest your shadow on the garden dial,
Unbind your breeze upon the flowers.

The fruits to fill their final skins,
Give them a few more Southern days,
To reach perfection, and then drive
Sweetness through the heavy vine.

Who has no home will build none now.
Who is alone will long remain
Awake till dawn writing letters
Or walking the alleys up and down
Wandering where blown leaves intend.

[Nick Capozzoli]

Fall

Leaves are falling from far away
Twisting in motions that deny
Their withered garden in the sky.

The heavy earth at the end of day
Turns from the stars to loneliness.

Thus do we all, this hand and all
The rest filled now with heaviness.

Yet there is one who holds this fall
Always soft in His caress.

[Nick Capozzoli]

The One Going Blind

She sat so like the others at tea.
She seemed at first to hold her cup
Somewhat at odds, then pleasantly
She laughed. It almost hurt.

We got up and laughed. Then small talk
And slowly, it seemed by chance,
Smiling and speaking low we began to walk
Through various rooms. I saw her glance

Towards the noise, then following behind
Absorbed like one who had to sing
To a crowd of critics, her blind
Eyes night pools glistening

Like water lights. She took her time
As if chance objects might intervene.
It seemed she did not really mind,
A night bird flying in the trees, serene.

[quasimodo1]

from The Complete French Poems
{translated by A. Poulin, Jr.}

from ORCHARDS
{Part 26: THE FOUNTAIN}

I want just one lesson, and it's yours,
fountain falling back into yourself--
that of risked waters on which depends
this celestial return toward earthly life.

Nothing will serve as example
as much as your multiple murmur:
you, O light column of a temple
that destroys itself by nature.

In your fall, how each jet of water
modulates itself as it ends its dance.
I feel like such a student, imitator
of your innumerable nuance.

But what's more convincing than your singing
is that instant of ecstatic silence when
at night, drawn back by a breath, your own
return passes through your liquid leaping.

[jinjang]

Je peins comme je vois, comme je sens, et j'ai des sensations tres fortes. Les autres aussi sentent et voient comme moi, mais ils n'osent pas...J'ai le courage de mes opinions.
by Paul Cezanne

Translation: I paint as I see, as I feel, and I have very strong sensations. The others also feel and see like me, but they do not dare...I have the courage of my opinions... by Paul Cezanne

[quasimodo1]

To Helmuth Westhoff [Westerwede

November 12, 1901]

You wrote me a very fine letter and thought of me so kindly,
although I still hadn't sent you the poem about the "Peacock-
feather" I promised you long ago; but see, now I will go right
away and copy it neatly out of the book in which it is printed.
I composed this little poem several (it must have been at least
five) , several years ago in the city of Munich where in October
there is something like your free market. A whole field of booths.
And while the other people went about laughing and teasing
each other and trying to touch and tickle each other with the
long peacockfeathers (which amused them very much), I went
about alone with my peacockf eather which was much too proud
to tickle anybody, and the longer I carried it about with me thus,
the more the slenderness of its form engaged me as it balanced on
its elastic shaft, and the beauty of its head from which the "pea-
**** eye" looked out at me dark and mysterious. It was as though
I were seeing such a feather for the very first time, and it seemed
to me to hold a whole wealth of beauties that no one was notic-
ing but I. And out of this feeling came the little poem that I dedi-
cated at that time to a dear friend, a painter, who I knew loved
peacockfeathers too. You can imagine what a peacockfeather
means to a painter, who has a different, far more intimate rela-



59

tionship with colors than we have, how much he can learn from
it and how much the harmony in the variety, and the multitude
of colors all together there on such a little spot, can give him.

But do you know what the principal thing was for me, dear
Helmuth: that I saw once again that most people hold things in
their hands to do something stupid with them (as, for example,
tickling each other with peacockf eathers) , instead of looking
carefully at each thing and asking each about the beauty it pos-
sesses. So it comes to pass that most people don't know at all how
beautiful the world is and how much splendor is revealed in the
smallest things, in some flower, a stone, the bark of a tree, or a
birch leaf. Grown-up people, who have business and cares and
worry about a lot of trifles, gradually lose their eye entirely for
these riches which children, when they are alert and good chil-
dren, soon notice and love with all their hearts. And yet the
finest thing would be if all people would always stay in this rela-
tionship like alert and good children, with simple and reverent
feelings, and if they would not lose the power to rejoice as deeply
in a birch leaf or in the feather of a peacock or the pinion of a
hooded crow as in a great mountain range or a splendid palace.
The small is as little small as the big is big. There is a great and
eternal beauty throughout the world, and it is scattered justly
over the small things and the big; for in the important and essen-
tial there is no injustice on the whole earth.

This, dear Helmuth, all hangs together somewhat with the
poem of the peacockfeather in which I could only express badly
what I meant. I was still very young then. But now I know it
better every year and can tell people better all the time that
there is a great deal of beauty in the world almost nothing but
beauty.

That you know as well as I, dear Helmuth. And now,
thank you again, dear Helmuth. It doesn't matter that to-
day isn't my birthday but only my name day, which you
really don't celebrate at all. With us in Austria that is a festive
day. There everyone has a saint whose name has been given to
him, and on the day that is dedicated to that saint, he receives



6o

for him, wishes and words and gifts which he may keep for
himself, and doesn't have to pass on to the saint. It is quite a
beautiful and sympathetic custom.

Yes, it is too bad you aren't with us, with Friedrich and your
parents, for then I would be able to talk to you and tell you
something nice, and what is more, I could offer you the cake
I g t a very beautiful cake , which without help the two of
us alone can finish up only with great difficulty.

I gave our black dog your greeting. Then he stood up, settled
himself on his hind legs, laid his front paws on my shoulders and
tried to give me a big, black kiss which I naturally don't allow.

He is strong and has a voice that rings out fearfully if one
hasn't a good conscience. But we always have one.

Clara sends you many affectionate greetings, but above all,
dear Helmuth, greetings, and thanks from

Your faithful

Rainer

[quasimodo1]

Rodin gave him more than pictures and more than an under-
standing of observation plastically rendered. Rodin, through in-
cessant work, was always in touch with the unconscious sources
of his creative power. Rilke, subject to spells of inspiration in-
terrupted by arid periods when he was burdened with the un-
easiness of living the Cornet was written in a single night, the
three sections of the Book of Hours in twenty-four, ten, and
eight days, respectively, in three different years , learned the
value of this "always working" and tried hard to attain it himself.
That he never did, his correspondence is there to testify, as well as
the completing of the Elegies and the coming of the Sonnets, again
all in a few days' hurricane. His nearest approach to it was per-
haps between May, 1908, and January, 1910, a time spent almost
continuously in Paris, when he wrote New Poems //, the
Requiems, and the Notebooks.

After the New Poems he was no longer so consciously preoccu-
pied with seeing.

Work of sight is done,

now for some heartwork

on those pictures within you . . .

he wrote in a poem called "Turning," in a letter to Lou Andreas-
Salome. In the Notebooks he rid himself of many fears; for it is a
book of fear, of the fears of his childhood, of great cities, of
loneliness, of death, of love, of losing himself. And in 1910, the
ordeal of that writing over, he was able to declare that "almost
all songs are possible."

Letters were to Rilke at once a means of communication and
a channel for artistic expression.

[quasimodo1]

To Adolf Bonz * Im Rheingau, Berlin- Wilmersdorf

[December] 25, 1897

. , . I want to speak to you in all sincerity now . . . about the
poems. You see, my view on this point is purely subjective, and
it must be and must remain so. It is not my way to write poems
of epic or lyric style that can stand five to ten years of desk air
without becoming deathly sick. Short stories and dramas are re-
sults that do not age for me, poems, which accompany every
phase of my spiritual longing, are experiences through which I



ripen. Short stories are chapters, poems are continuations, short
stories are an appeal to the public, courtings of its favor and inter-
est, poems are gifts to everyone, presents, bounties-, with a short-
story book in my hand, I am a petitioner before those who are
empty, with poems in my heart, I am king of those who feel. A
king, however, who would tell his subjects in ten years how he
felt ten years ago, is a sham. Seven sketchbooks full of things I
am burning to utter await my choice, and they must be said
either now or never. But because I knew that I would want to
say them, I have undertaken to mark each lyric period by a book.
Since the Dreamcroivned period seven sketchbooks have come
into being and an eighth is begun which seems to me to indicate
an entirely new stage. So it is my plain duty to settle accounts
with these ripe riches, that is, to commit what is good in them
either to the fire or to the book trade. I prefer the latter, for my
books have had success, that is, they have awakened here a smile,
there a love, there a longing, and have given me an echo of that
love, the reflection of that smile and the dream of that longing
and have thereby made me richer and riper and purer. Please
understand me, I grow up by them, they are my link with the out-
side, my compromise with the world. Now I can defend the
verses as episodes, as little moments of a great becoming, as real,
deep spring: if ever I have a name, they would be misunderstood
as final products, as maturities, mistaken for summer. I cannot
keep my springtime silent in order to give it out some day in sum-
mer, old and faded, and were I untrue to my resolve, which for
four years has been fulfilled in Life and Songs, Wild Chicory,
Offerings to the Lares, Dreamcroivned, all further publication,
seeming to me a betrayal then, would probably cease too. But I
am earnestly sworn to persevere, and this whole attitude is so
bound up with my life that I cannot dismiss it. Quite the con-
trary, if I ever have a name, that is, have become (and the be-
coming is much too glorious for me to long for that) , then the
poems will be entirely superfluous; a selection can then be made,
a complete edition which will then also have something about it
of a comprehensive result but then they will be blossoms,



memories of spring, lovely and warm with the summer that lies
over their stillness. Until then is further than from today until
tomorrow. What I am saying today is nothing but the word
"heart's need" of the other day, a rocket sent into the air, burst-
ing into these thousand words of my innermost conviction. And
valued and dear as your advice is to me, you will now not take
it amiss any more if I do not follow it, but do everything to con-
secrate a new book of poems, Days of Celebration, to young '98.
I cannot do otherwise, so help me God. . . .

C 'O

[quasimodo1]

To Marietta

Baroness von Nordeck zur Rabenau Hotel de Russie, Rome

April 14, 1910

If it is in any way possible: put generosity to the test: forgive
me for letting so much time go by over your kind letter, draw
no conclusions from its having happened. I constantly wanted
to thank you for your affectionate remembrance and for your
not giving me up and for making me secure in the conviction that
I may be allowed to read you again and again. I wish very much
that from time to time a meeting might come about, friendly and
delightful, as the one in Paris was, of which I often think. Your
letter, which made the trip to Paris, finally found me almost in
your neighborhood, in Leipzig; I shall tell you in a moment what
took me there and in the end kept me quite long in Germany, but
first let me go into your news: on the whole it is good, even
though this wish and that (like the work with your violin in
Paris) remains outside and unrealized . I would almost like to
say, do not drown it out too much with the noise of sociability,
there is no harm if it goes on growing and becomes stronger and
stronger. Often it is so with me that I ask myself whether fulfill-
ment really has anything to do with wishes. Yes, as long as the
wish is weak, it is like a half and needs to be fulfilled like a second
half, in order to be something independent. But wishes can grow
so wonderfully into something whole, full, sound, that permits
of no further completion whatever, that goes on growing only
out of itself and forms and fills itself. Sometimes one could be-
lieve that just this had been the cause of the greatness and intensity
of a life, that it engaged in too great wishes, which from within



drove forth effect after effect into life, as a spring does action
upon action, and which scarcely knew any longer for what they
were originally tensed, and only in an elementary way, like some
falling force of water, transposed themselves into activity and
warmth, into immediate existence, into cheerful courage, accord-
ing as the event and the occasion geared them in. I know that I
am taking your little intimation much too importantly and pon-
derously by loading it with so many words; it vanishes altogether
beneath them; but this as an insight had somehow matured in me
(perhaps in the reading of the saints' lives, with which I am much
occupied, again and again), and I could not resist the little im-
pulse to express what was somehow ready. You will know of
course that it was not meant so pretentiously and seriously as it
looks here, . . .

What kept me in Germany (Leipzig and Berlin especially)
from the beginning of January until a few weeks ago was the
final editing of a new book, the Notebooks of that young Dane,
of which I must surely have spoken to you in Capri. They have
finally come to a kind of conclusion, they are being printed now,
there too life is going on. And here, about me, is Rome (which
greets you), Rome which is having its blossom time, with full
hanging wisteria, with thousands of new roses daily, with all its
beautiful fountains that are like eternal life, serenely new, with-
out age, without exhaustion. . . .

[quasimodo1]

Rodin gave him more than pictures and more than an under-
standing of observation plastically rendered. Rodin, through in-
cessant work, was always in touch with the unconscious sources
of his creative power. Rilke, subject to spells of inspiration in-
terrupted by arid periods when he was burdened with the un-
easiness of living the Cornet was written in a single night, the
three sections of the Book of Hours in twenty-four, ten, and
eight days, respectively, in three different years , learned the
value of this "always working" and tried hard to attain it himself.
That he never did, his correspondence is there to testify, as well as
the completing of the Elegies and the coming of the Sonnets, again
all in a few days' hurricane. His nearest approach to it was per-
haps between May, 1908, and January, 1910, a time spent almost
continuously in Paris, when he wrote New Poems //, the
Requiems, and the Notebooks.

After the New Poems he was no longer so consciously preoccu-
pied with seeing.

Work of sight is done,

now for some heartwork

on those pictures within you . . .

he wrote in a poem called "Turning," in a letter to Lou Andreas-
Salome. In the Notebooks he rid himself of many fears; for it is a
book of fear, of the fears of his childhood, of great cities, of
loneliness, of death, of love, of losing himself. And in 1910, the
ordeal of that writing over, he was able to declare that "almost
all songs are possible."

[jinjang]

Those letters Rilke wrote are exquisite. One can learn a lot about the person by his letters. I wonder when was the last time I wrote a letter. I used to write one a day for friends and family back home but it somehow ceased. Maybe I should pick up a pen and start writing letters, at least, to my mother.
I think I will read these letters over and over again. I appreciate your choices as always.

[Nick Capozzoli]

Autumn Day

Lord, it is time. Summer was so wide.
Now rest your shadow on the garden dial,
Unbind your breeze upon the flowers.

The fruits to fill their final skins,
Give them a few more Southern days,
To reach perfection, and then drive
Sweetness through the heavy vine.

Who has no home will build none now.
Who is alone will long remain
Awake till dawn writing letters
Or walking the alleys up and down
Wandering where blown leaves intend.

The fourth line should be:

Tell fruits to fill their final skins

[quasimodo1]

To Frieda von Billow Munich

August 13, 1897

. . . We are reading in the most various books on Italian
Renaissance art and seeking an opportunity to get as independent
a judgment as possible on this interesting period. From the early
golden age of Florence we want to push forward by degrees to



_ 29

the Caraccis. As a matter of fact, I am especially fascinated by
one Florentine master of the quattrocento Sandro Botticelli,
whom I now want to go into somewhat more deeply and per-
sonally. His Madonnas with their weary sadness, their great
eyes asking for release and fulfillment, those women who dread
growing old without a holy youth, stand at the heart of the long-
ing of our time. I do not know whether you had the opportunity
to see Botticelli and how you stand toward his works. It is inter-
esting in any case to meet this man in a period when the Bible
and the holy legends constituted the subject matter for all paint-
ers and each was seeking to do as much justice as possible to the
religious motif, to narrate the legendary version without wanting
anything for himself in so doing save at most the solution of
some problem of color technique or of pure form; along comes
Sandro Botticelli and in his naive longing for God perceives that
the Madonna, in her deep sympathy ennobled and sanctified by
her strange motherhood, can quite well become the herald of his
own sadness and of his weariness. And in fact all his Madonnas
look as if they were still under the spell of a melancholy story,
quite bare of hope, that Sandro has been telling them; but they
are utterly tender in feeling and keep his avowals in confessional
sanctity and meditate on their obscurities and gaze on much,
much misery and have nothing but that little playing boy upon
their laps who wants to become the Redeemer. . . .

[quasimodo1]

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article6836668.ece

[Virgil]

Quasi, I know nothing about Rilke, but I defintely want to. Is there anything I should start with?

[quasimodo1]

Well Virgil, you would want Stephen Mitchell as translator and AHEAD OF ALL PARTING: THE SELECTED POETRY AND PROSE OF RAINER MARIA RILKE has Rilke's greatest material. ...from the old standby- The Modern Library, NY. ISBN 0-679-60161-9. The "Duino Elegies" and "The Sonnets to Orpheus" ought to get you interested. q1

[quasimodo1]

From RILKE’S BOOK OF HOURS, translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy, letter from Rilke to Frieda von Bulow, spring 1899. “At bottom one seeks in everything new (country or person or thing) only an expression that helps some personal confession to greater power and maturity. All things are there in order that they may… become images for us. And they do not suffer from it, for while they are expressing us more and more clearly, our souls close over them in the same measure. And I feel in these days that Russian things will give me the names for those most timid devoutnesses of my nature which, since my childhood, have been longing to enter my art.”

[Virgil]

Well Virgil, you would want Stephen Mitchell as translator and AHEAD OF ALL PARTING: THE SELECTED POETRY AND PROSE OF RAINER MARIA RILKE has Rilke's greatest material. ...from the old standby- The Modern Library, NY. ISBN 0-679-60161-9. The "Duino Elegies" and "The Sonnets to Orpheus" ought to get you interested. q1

Thank you Q. I will look for that.

[quasimodo1]

Rilke the clay pot --- http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article6836668.ece

[quasimodo1]

Angels to Radios: On Rainer Maria Rilke By Ange Mlinko --- http://www.thenation.com/doc/20091214/mlinko/single --- "It is said that the tradition of English poetry began with Caedmon--an illiterate seventh-century lay brother who, ashamed of his inability to versify when the harp was passed around at a feast, fell asleep in his stable among the animals and dreamed of an angel. This angel, too, bade him sing, and again Caedmon protested that he did not know any songs; but then, inexplicably, he found himself obeying the angel's dictum: "Sing the beginning of the creatures!" Immediately on waking he wrote down the eulogy to the world and its maker that had been transmitted to him in his dream; today the nine-line Anglo-Saxon "Caedmon's Hymn" is the earliest known English poem--a product of what poets now often call "dictation." The gods (or God), the muses (or the Muse); afflatus, ecstasy, poetic madness: the lore of poetry worldwide attests to the claim that poetry at its best emerges from somewhere "other"--a source beyond the poet's ego and conscious mind. Sometimes the poem appears in dreams, as with Caedmon; sometimes during autohypnosis, as with William Butler Yeats. James Merrill's medium of choice was his Ouija board; Jack Spicer's, his orphic radio. A key interchange in the transition from angels to radios is the visionary poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke." ... {excerpt from article/review}

[stlukesguild]

bump (for Virgil):seeya:

[Virgil]

bump (for Virgil):seeya:

Thank you! I forgot about this.

[quasimodo1]

from The Complete French Poems
{translated by A. Poulin, Jr.}

TWO POEMS

I. Love me, let a little of this smile
that pleases you linger on my mouth;
tomorrow, when you touch it,
my too-childish arm will awaken perfect.

I am not one of those who stops
the tender walker, the cherished pilgrim;
it is enough for me forever to reflect
the hurried God who has fulfilled me.

But should he overflow, let my alabaster
body be the vase to hold him--
or let him contemplate me as the shepherd
contemplates the star about to rise.

II. Let that too-near tomorrow I ignore
be hidden from me by your hand;
that will be a different day; its dawn
will blind me with its sudden soar.

Only once will we be very strong
in this dark abandon's shade,
but if you draw me toward its house,
do so as to camouflage the door.

[quasimodo1]

From THE NOTEBOOKS OF MALTE LAURIDS BRIGGE by Rainer Marie Rilke… Introduction_______ When Rilke arrived in Paris on August 28, 1902, and found a room at 11, rue Toullier, he believed he had come there to collect himself, to study in the libraries with one dreamy eye on a distant degree, and to meet the controversial sculptor, Auguste Rodin, whose work he had received a commission from a German publisher to write about. Rilke had recently married and fathered a child; his own father was no longer paying him the small stipend which had supplied Rilke for some years with the simplest of essentials; so that the commission, scarcely munificent, nevertheless seemed at least like a life ring if not a rescue launch. He not only needed an immediate income, he found it necessary, now, to think of the future, of a career of some kind, a useful pursuit. But Rilke had begun to slip out of the knot of his marriage in the moment that he tied it; and as time went on his habit of letting go of things even as he reached out for them would become firmly established; although, when he wrote about such “partings” later, it suddenly seemed to be the objects themselves or the beckoning women who broke the lines of attraction and connection.
{excerpt from introduction by William H. Gass}http://i840.photobucket.com/albums/zz321/quasimodo1/RilkeValery.jpg {Rilke with Valery}

[aveljano777]

Good evening, Quasimodo! My English isn’t correct because my Russian is correct and also because I didn’t practice it since I became to understand “The Beatles” texts well:) Please, can you help me in my looking for the full text of Rilke’s “The Valaisian Quatrains” in English? I always thought this cycle consists of 36 poems (I now it in russian translation by V. Mikushevich, and 36 poems are presented on German resource rilke.de). But recently I’ve got information, that this cycle consists of 39 poems, so my idea about it can be incorrect. If you have a book with the full text of “The Valaisian Quatrains”, please, write me the last three poems… or maybe you know electronic resource, when the full text is published. I’ll be so gratefull…

[quasimodo1]

"But most important, it was out of his experience of homelessness that Rilke fashioned a persona who speaks with an elegiac voice not for himself but for the world of consciousness, which migrated here into animals (often cats), there into objects (roses, sculptures). This consciousness, which belongs to no one and everyone, earns Rilke's unending praise: it is the principle not only of biological life but ontological essence--whatever it is that causes something to arise from nothing, as in the lines carved on his tombstone:

Rose, O pure contradiction, delight
in being no one's sleep under so many
eyelids." ...from Ange Mlinko's article in The Nation -- 5/24/09 --
http://www.thenation.com/article/angels-radios-rainer-maria-rilke