Rainer Maria Rilke

(1875-1926)

 

verteilten Duft der erst das Unsichtbare

vollzählig macht. Auflächelnd daß man dem

so winken durfte in so großen Umgang

so leicht gewöhnt. Aufweinend vielleicht auch

wenn man bedenkt wie's einen liebte und

fortwollte beides immer ganz in Einem.  

(Ließ ich es schon? Nun schreckt mich dieser Mann

der wieder Herzog wird. Wie er sich sanft

den Draht ins Haupt zieht und sich zu den andern

Figuren hängt und künftighin das Spiel

um Milde bittet .... Welcher Epilog

vollbrachter Herrschaft. Abtun bloßes Dastehn

mit nichts als eigner Kraft: "und das ist wenig.")

ARIEL

(After reading Shakespeare's Tempest)

Once somewhere somehow you had set him free

with that sharp jolt which as a young man tore you

out of your life and vaulted you to greatness.

Then he grew willing: and since then he serves

after each task impatient for his freedom.

And half imperious half almost ashamed

you make excuses say that you still need him

for this and that and ah you must describe

how you helped him. Yet you feel yourself

that everything held back by his detention

is missing from the air. How sweet how tempting:

to let him go  to give up all your magic

submit yourself to destiny like the others

and know that his light friendship without strain now

with no more obligations anywhere

an intensifying of this space you breathe

is working in the element thoughtlessly.

Henceforth dependent never again empowered

to shape the torpid mouth into that call

at which he dived. Defenceless aging poor

and yet still breathing him in like a fragrance

spread endlessly which makes the invisible

complete for the first time. Smiling that you

ever could summon him and feel so much at home

in that vast intimacy. Weeping too perhaps

When you remember how he loved and yet

wished to leave you: always both at once.

(Have I let go already? I look on

terrified by this man who has become

a duke again. How easily he draws

the wire through his head and hangs

himself up with the other puppets; then steps forward

to ask the audience for their applause

and their indulgence... What consummate power:

to lay aside to stand there nakedly

with no strength but one's own "which is most faint")

"Uncollected Poems" 

 

 

 

 

THE TLS AUGUST 30 2016   ‘John Keats Drawn in Death’   A poem by Rainer Maria Rilke translated by Neville Rogers; introduced by Maya Popa In 1821  Joseph Severn sketched a portrait of John Keats aged twenty-five as the poet lay dying of tuberculosis. “Drawn to keep me awake” Severn’s inscription indicates. As Keats’s condition deteriorated Severn followed the poet to Rome remaining by his side until his final moments. Few poets are as posthumously mythologized as Keats. Death has preserved him in a state of suspended youth leaving scholars to marvel at the depth and maturity of his greatest work. Poems such as “When I Have Fears” and “Ode to a Nightingale” bear a heightened sense of mortality appearing to presage the events that would follow. Rainer Maria Rilke read Keats in German translation in 1911. Rilke’s poem “John Keats Drawn in Death”  translated by Neville Rogers and appearing in the TLS in 1966 captures and laments Keats’s dying from a measured description of Severn’s illustration to the urgent exclamations at the poet’s untimely death. The poem mourns him as though he were an intimate friend appropriating his own poetic style in the process. As the speaker describes the sketch he addresses Keats: “So things remain; the drawing’s caught – by mourning / Quickened you’d say” as though borrowing Keats’s idiom. In the penultimate stanza the speaker exclaims: “O eye that will no more Beauty be wringing / Out of some Truth-in-Things unhidden never!” evoking the concluding lines of Keats’s “Ode to a Grecian Urn”: “Beauty is truth truth beauty  – that is all / ye know on earth and all ye need to know”. “John Keats Drawn in Death” offers an insight into Rilke’s feelings towards Keats notably paying tribute through the poem’s shared form.  John Keats Drawn in Death Now from afar to the stilled Singer’s head there Reach the horizon-distances unending And agony falls again past comprehending On the dark form an agony that bred there. So things remain; the drawing’s caught – by mourning Quickened you’d say: a second-brief creation – The flickering passage of a pity scorning The very facts of Being and Cessation. Whose is that face? No more the mind’s endeavour Can features speak with mind together-clinging! O eye that will no more Beauty be wringing Out of some Truth-in-Things unhidden never! – O gate of singing Young mouth surrendered now closed now alas for ever! – Only the forehead seems to be achieving A lasting bridge across the dissolution  – To the tired tumbling locks’ irresolution A mild reproach full of most gentle grieving. RAINER MARIA RILKE Translated by Neville Rogers (1966)   Zu der Zeichnung John Keats im Tode darstellend Zu der Zeichnung John Keats im Tode darstellend Nun reicht an's Antlitz dem gestillten Rühmer die Ferne aus den offnen Horizonten: so fällt der Schmerz den wir nicht fassen konnten zurück an seinen dunklen Eigentümer.   Und dies verharrt so wie es leidbetrachtend sich bildete zum freiesten Gebilde noch einen Augenblick - in neuer Milde das Werden selbst und den Verfall verachtend. Gesicht: o wessen? Nicht mehr dieser eben noch einverstandenen Zusammenhänge. O Aug das nicht das schönste mehr erzwänge der Dinge aus dem abgelehnten Leben. O Schwelle der Gesänge o Jugendmund für immer aufgegeben.   Und nur der Stirne baut sich etwas dauernd hinüber aus verflüchtigten Bezügen als strafte sie die müden Locken lügen die sich an ihr ergeben zärtlich trauernd. Rainer Maria Rilke 27.1.1914 Paris Gesammelte Werke Band III (1927)

 

 

POEM OF THE WEEK

 

FEBRUARY 13, 2018

 

 

‘Rilke: Evening’

A TLS review from 1920 of a new edition of Rilke’s Neue Gedichte(New Poems), first published in 1907, suggested that if there were any truth in the theory of nominative determinism Rainer Maria Rilke “could not possibly help being a poet”, since his name alone – “melodious, melancholy, remote and mystic” – possessed all the qualities so abundantly present in his poetry. This elusive quality perhaps helps account for the number of translators who have been drawn to attempt versions of his work. But Rilke’s “haunting and penetrating sweetness” is also crucial in maintaining the balance between what he sees with his eyes and feels in his heart, so that if the music fails, the ideas, too, fall to bits. Since, as the review continued, Rilke’s verse draws in “a few clear but subdued colours, things whose hidden meaning must be delicately wooed . . . into the light of intelligence” the slightest tonal error risks straying towards the certainties he is in fact so careful to avoid.

“Abend” – or “Evening” in this pitch-perfect translation by Oliver Reynolds, published in the TLS in 1989 – is from Rilke’s collection Das Buch Der Bilder (The Book of Images) from 1902. Rilke published an extended edition of this collection in 1906, after he had finished writing his series Das Stunden Buch (The Book of Hours), a collection marked by a much higher degree of thematic unity; the revised Book of Images is sometimes seen as Rilke’s attempt to distance himself from that, establishing the short lyric as the epitome of great poetry. If, here, the day leans both backwards and forwards between “heaven” and “earth”, “border” and “vista”, “stone” and “star”, it is perhaps partly because the speaker is also trying to create, in words, a place that is “not quite part of either”.

 

 

Abend   Der Abend wechselt langsam die Gewänder,  die ihm ein Rand von alten Bäumen hält;  du schaust: und von dir scheiden sich die Länder,  ein himmelfahrendes und eins, das fällt;  und lassen dich, zu keinem ganz gehörend,  nicht ganz so dunkel wie das Haus, das schweigt,  nicht ganz so sicher Ewiges beschwörend  wie das, was Stern wird jede Nacht und steigt -  und lassen dir (unsäglich zu entwirrn)  dein Leben bang und riesenhaft und reifend,  so daß es, bald begrenzt und bald begreifend,  abwechselnd Stein in dir wird und Gestirn.

Rilke: Evening   Like old retainers, trees hold out day’s evening dress while the fading view wavers between heaven and earth   and leaves you not quite part of either neither the quiet of the dark house nor the grave certainty of light of the rising star   that leaves you, voluble and dumb, in the deserts and gardens of your life alternating border with vista and the stone in you with the star.                                                                     OLIVER REYNOLDS (1989)