Embodiment

Archaic Torso of Apollo
Rainer Maria Rilke
(translated by Stephen Mitchell)

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,
gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.
Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur:
would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

Because Rilke feels right tonight . . .

I Am Much Too Alone in This World, Yet Not Alone
by Rainer Maria Rilke
(translated by Annemarie S. Kidder)

I am much too alone in this world, yet not alone
enough
to truly consecrate the hour.
I am much too small in this world, yet not small
enough
to be to you just object and thing,
dark and smart.
I want my free will and want it accompanying
the path which leads to action;
and want during times that beg questions,
where something is up,
to be among those in the know,
or else be alone.

I want to mirror your image to its fullest perfection,
never be blind or too old
to uphold your weighty wavering reflection.
I want to unfold.
Nowhere I wish to stay crooked, bent;
for there I would be dishonest, untrue.
I want my conscience to be
true before you;
want to describe myself like a picture I observed
for a long time, one close up,
like a new word I learned and embraced,
like the everday jug,
like my mother's face,
like a ship that carried me along
through the deadliest storm.

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.

Standing

Lament
Rainer Maria Rilke
(translated by Stephen Mitchell)

Everything is far
and long gone by.
I think that the star
glittering above me
has been dead for a million years.
I think there were tears
in the car I heard pass
and something terrible was said.
A clock has stopped striking in the house
across the road . . .
When did it start? . . .
I would like to step out of my heart
and go walking beneath the enormous sky.
I would like to pray.
And surely of all the stars that perished
long ago,
one still exists.
I think that I know
which one it is -
which one, at the end of its beam in the sky,
stands like a white city . . .