An Elegy, translated

The anchorage is consistent only in having verse. Sometimes, I write the next thing to an MA-level essay. Then, I'll go for weeks on end letting the verse speak for itself. As that is the least that verse can do (At its best, poetry does far more.), the latter course seems more honest . . . sometimes.

Translations can serve or undermine a work. The other day, I found on a bargain shelf Selections from Rainer Maria Rilke's Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus: In Praise of Mortality, translated and edited (I'd want for courage) by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy. Allow me, please, to offer you one poem from this book.

The Eighth Elegy
To Rudolf Kassner

With their whole gaze
animals behold the Open.
Only our eyes
are as though reversed
and set like traps around us,
keeping us inside.
That there is something out there
we know only from the creatures' countenance.

We turn even the young child around,
making her look backward
at the forms we create,
not outward into the Open,
which is reflected
in the animals' eyes.

Free from death.
We alone see that.
For the animals,
their death is, as it were, completed.
What's ahead is God. And when they move,
they move in timelessness, as fountains do.

Never, not for a single day, do we let
the space before us be so unbounded
that the blooming of one flower is forever.
We are always making it World
and never letting it be nothing: the puer,
the unconstructed, which we breathe
and endlessly know, and do not crave.

Sometimes, a child loses himself in this stillness
and gets shaken out of it. Or a person dies
and becomes it. For when death draws near,
we see death no more. We stare beyond it
with an animal's wide gaze.
Lovers also look with astonishment
into the Open, when the beloved doesn't block the view.
It surges up, unbidden, in the background.
But neither can get past the otehr,
so World closes in again.

Ever turned toward what we create, we see in it
only reflections of the Open, darkened by us.
Except when an animal silently looks us through and through.
This is our fate: to stand
in our own way. Forever
in the way.

If the confident animal coming toward us
had a mind like ours,
the change in him would startle us.
But to him his own being is endless,
undefined and without regard
for his condition: clear,
like his eyes. Where we see fortune,
he sees all, and himself
in all, made whole for always.

And yet in the warm, watchful animal
there is the weight of a great sadness.
For what at times assaults us
clings to him as well: the sense
that what we yearn for
was once closer and more real
and infinitely tender.
Here all is distance --
there it was braeth.
After that first home
the second feels altered and beset by wind . . .

And we: always and everywhere spectators,
turned not toward the Open
but to the stuff of our own lives.
It drowns us. We set it in order.
It falls apart. We order it again
and fall apart ourselves.

Who has turned us around like this?
Whatever we do, we are in the posture
of one who is about to depart.
Like a person lingering
for a moment on the last hill
where he can see his whole valley --
that is how we live, forever
taking our leave.