Ahead of All Parting (43 page)

Blätter, die ein Falter gestreift hat. An dir

taumelt er hin, im tragenden Atem des Tals.

Und du gedenkst eines anderen Mals,

da sie dir schon so vollkommen schien, hier,

diese Stille um einen Gott. Ward sie nicht
mehr
?

Nimmt sie nicht zu? Nimmt sie nicht überhand?

Drängt sie nicht fast wie ein Widerstand

an dein tönendes Herz? Irgendwo bricht sich sein Schlag

an einer lautlosen Pause im Tag …

Dort ist Er.

What silence around a god! How, inside it, you hear

every change in the sparkling fountain-spray

on the marble pool, as it leaps up and falls back entirely.

And over the laurel a feeling: three, perhaps four

leaves that a butterfly touched. With a whir

it goes tumbling past, on the buoyant breath of the valley.

And now you remember another day

when you felt it, already so perfect, here,

the silence around a god. But was it like this?

Isn’t it spreading? Isn’t it immense?

Isn’t it pressing almost like a resistance

upon your resounding heart? Somewhere its beat is broken

on a soundless lull in the afternoon …

There, He is.

Wir hören seit lange die Brunnen mit.

Sie klingen uns beinah wie Zeit.

Aber sie halten viel eher Schritt

mit der wandelnden Ewigkeit.

Das Wasser ist fremd und das Wasser ist dein,

von hier und
doch
nicht von hier.

Eine Weile bist du der Brunnenstein,

und es spiegelt die Dinge in dir.

Wie ist das alles entfernt und verwandt

und lange enträtselt und unerkannt,

sinnlos und wieder voll Sinn.

Dein ist, zu lieben, was du nicht weißt.

Es nimmt dein geschenktes Gefühl und reißt

es mit sich hinüber. Wohin?

We have overheard fountains all our days.

They sound to us almost like time.

But much more closely do they keep pace

with eternity’s subtle rhythm.

The water is strange and the water is yours,

from here and from far below.

You are the fountain-stone, unawares,

and all Things are mirrored in you.

How distant this is, yet deeply akin,

long unriddled and never known,

senseless, then perfectly clear.

Your task is to love what you don’t understand.

It grips your most secret emotion, and

rushes away with it. Where?

Wann war ein Mensch je so wach

wie der Morgen von heut?

Nicht nur Blume und Bach,

auch das Dach ist erfreut.

Selbst sein alternder Rand,

von den Himmeln erhellt,—

wird fühlend: ist Land,

ist Antwort, ist Welt.

Alles atmet und dankt.

O ihr Nöte der Nacht,

wie ihr spurlos versankt.

Aus Scharen von Licht

war ihr Dunkel gemacht,

das sich rein widerspricht.

When was a
man
as awake

as this morning is?

Not just flower and brook:

the roof too rejoices.

Even its weathered rim,

lit by the sky—

finds it can feel: is home,

is answer, is day.

Everything breathes in accord.

How tracelessly you have gone

away, you cares of the night.

Its darkness was formed,

in pure contradiction,

from legions of light.

So wie angehaltner Atem steht

steht die Nymphe in dem vollen Baume

Sieh hinauf. Heut ist der Nachtraum heiter.

Hoher Gott der fernen Vorgesänge

überall erfahr ich dich zutiefst

in der freien Ordnung mancher Hänge

stehn die Sträucher noch wie du sie riefst

Spiegel, du Doppelgänger des Raums! O Spiegel, in dich fort

stürzt die Hälfte der Lächeln / vielleicht die süßesten; denn wie

oft dem Meister der Strich, der probende, auf dem

vorläufigen Blatt blumiger aufschwingt, als später

auf dem bereiteten Grund der geführtere Umriß:

So, oh, lächelst du hin, Unsägliche, deiner

Morgen Herkunft und Freiheit in die immer

nehmenden Spiegel

Immer, o Nymphe, seit je / hab ich dich staunend bewundert

ob du auch nie aus dem Baum mir dem verschlossenen tratst—.

Ich bin die Zeit die vergeht—, du bist ein junges Jahrhundert,

alles ist immer noch neu, was du von Göttern erbatst.

Like held-in breath, serene and motionless

stands the nymph inside the ripening tree

Look up. How calm the heavens are tonight.

Lofty god of distant harmonies

I sense you everywhere deep in every Thing

upon the gently patterned slope the trees

stand silent as when first they heard you sing

Mirror, you doppelgänger of space! O mirror, into you go

plunging the halves of smiles / perhaps the sweetest; for how

often the master’s preliminary brushstroke, upon the

provisional page more fruitfully leaps up than, later,

the more controlled outline does on the ready background:

So do you, O unsayable presence, smile forth

your morning’s descent and freedom into the ever-

accepting mirrors

Forever, O nymph, how long / I have marveled at you, amazed,

though you never stepped into my sight from out of the closed-in tree—.

I am the time that is passing—you are the youngest age,

all that you asked from the gods has remained here, forever new.

Dein ist die Wiese, sie schwankt noch jetzt von dem Sprunge,

jenem mit dem du zuletzt in die Ulme verschwandst.

Einst in der christlichen Früh. Und ist nicht, du junge,

Dir
unser erstes Gefühl in den Frühling gepflanzt.

Eh uns ein Mädchen noch rührt, bist du die gemeinte

………. Braun’s

……… an den sonoren

trockenen Boden des Walds

                     trommelt das Flüchten des Fauns

Dies ist das schweigende Steigen der Phallen

Von meiner Antwort weiß ich noch nicht

wann ich sie sagen werde.

Aber, horch eine Harke, die schon schafft.

Oben allein im Weinberg spricht

schon ein Mann mit der Erde.

Hast du des Epheus wechselnde Blättergestalten

Wahre dich besser

wahre dich Wandrer

mit dem selber auch gehenden Weg

Yours is the meadow, even now it sways from the leap

with which you finally vanished into the elm.

Once, in the christian dawn. And our earliest hope:

for
your
sake isn’t it planted into the springtime?

Before we are moved by a girl, it is you that we think of

………. of the brown

………. on the sonorous

dried-up earth of the forest

drums the flight of the faun

This is the silent rising of the phalli

About my answer: I still don’t know

when I will bring it forth.

But listen, a harrow that already creates.

Up there in the vineyard someone, alone,

already speaks with the earth.

Have you [?ever observed] the changing leaf-forms of the ivy

Protect yourself better

protect yourself wanderer

with the road that is walking too

Laß uns Legenden der Liebe hören.

Zeig uns ihr kühnes köstliches Leid.

Wo sie im Recht war, war alles Beschwören,

hier ist das meiste verleugneter Eid.

Gather us now to hear love’s legends.

Tell us of its daring, exquisite throes.

Where it was right, all things could be summoned;

here there are mostly abandoned vows.

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? But once again it fell silent. A great sadness came 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.)

My dear friend,

late, and though I can barely manage to hold the pen, after several days of huge obedience in the spirit—, you must be told, today, right now, before I try to sleep:

I have climbed the mountain!

At last! The Elegies are here, they exist.…

So.

Dear friend, now I can breathe again and, calmly, go on to something manageable. For this was larger than life—during these days and nights I have howled as I did that time in Duino—but, even after that struggle there, I didn’t know that
such
a storm out of mind and heart could come over a person! That one has endured it! that one has endured.

Enough. They are here.

I went out into the cold moonlight and stroked the little tower of Muzot as if it were a large animal—the ancient walls that granted this to me.

(To Anton Kippenberg, February 9, 1922)

Affirmation of
life-AND-death
turns out to be one in the Elegies.… We of the here-and-now are not for a moment satisfied in the world of time, nor are we bound in it; we are continually overflowing toward those who preceded us, toward our origin, and toward those who seemingly come after us. In that vast “open” world, all beings
are
—one cannot say “contemporaneous,” for the very fact that time has ceased determines that they all
are.
Everywhere transience is plunging into the depths of Being.… It is our task to imprint this temporary, perishable earth into ourselves so deeply, so painfully and passionately, that its essence can rise again, “invisibly,” inside us. We are the bees of the invisible. We wildly collect the honey of the visible, to store it in the great golden hive of the invisible. The Elegies show us at this work, the work of the continual conversion of the beloved visible and tangible world into the invisible vibrations and agitation of our own nature … Elegies and Sonnets support each other constantly—,
and I consider it an infinite grace that, with the same breath, I was permitted to fill both these sails: the little rust-colored sail of the Sonnets and the Elegies’ gigantic white canvas.

(To Witold Hulewicz, November 13, 1925)

The angel of the Elegies is that creature in whom the transformation of the visible into the invisible, which we are accomplishing, already appears in its completion …; that being who guarantees the recognition of a higher level of reality in the invisible.—Therefore “terrifying” for us, because we, its lovers and transformers, still cling to the visible.

(To Witold Hulewicz, November 13, 1925)

“There is really
everything
in the old churches, no shrinking from anything, as there is in the newer ones, where only the ‘good’ examples appear. Here you see also what is bad and evil and horrible; what is deformed and suffering, what is ugly, what is unjust—and you could say that all this is somehow loved for God’s sake. Here is the angel, who doesn’t exist, and the devil, who doesn’t exist; and the human being, who does exist, stands between them, and (I can’t help saying it) their unreality makes him more real to me.”

(“The Young Workman’s Letter,”
this page
)