Selected Poems by Rainer Maria Rilke

Translated by Bernhard Frank

END OF AUTUMN ^[i]

For some time now it’s plain

that everything rearranges,

something occurs and exchanges,

and murders and gives pain.

So day to day displays

the gardens as they mellow;

from the yellowing to the yellow

a gradual decay:

How long the path has seemed.

Now down these lanes of trees,

with emptiness everywhere,

almost as far as the far off seas

I see skies leaden, bare

and filled with uncertainties.

THE SIRENS’ ISLAND ^[ii]

Nightly, after all their day’s travail,

since his gracious hosts had asked about

his journeys and sojourns, he will regale

them softly with his yarns: and yet without

suspecting how they started, and at which

bold word they turned to see, like him, in those

calm, blue island-studded seas how rich

the golden shimmer of that island glows,

just the sight of which evokes the scent

of danger, well removed from far more common

rage and wrath, where it was often spent.

Soundlessly it overtakes the seamen,

who understand that sometimes song will soar

from that golden island’s boundary,

and who apply themselves now to the oars

as though surrounded

by the silence which within holds all

of that expanse, and at their ears insists,

as though its obverse were that very call

which no mere mortal ever can resist.

THE OUTSIDER^[iii]

Like a voyager on uncharted seas

am I to these natives forever;

their tables hold days of satiety,

and I’m consumed with travel fever.

Like the moon, devoid of population,

a world’s reflected in my face,

while they dissect every sensation,

their language teeming with clichés.

What wares I’ve brought back from my travels

compared to theirs are not the same:

in their exalted homeland feral,

here they hold their breath in shame.

ESTRANGEMENT ^[iv]

Estrangement is a lot like rain.

It rises from the sea towards evening;

from out the various distant and foreign plains

it meets the sky, where it has always been,

and only then, from the sky, falls on the town.

Rains down in the hours when dawn alighted,

and when every lane turns towards the morrow,

and when the bodies which, left unrequited,

go their separate ways, let down, in sorrow;

and when those folks who cannot stand each other

are made to share a bed and sleep together;

that’s when estrangement flows with the rivers...

THE BLIND MAN ^[v]

Paris

Look, he walks and interrupts the town,

which in his blind-spot simply is not there,

the way a darkened crack is running down

a bright-white cup. And as reflection stirs

across the surface of an open page,

so matter’s drawn on him-quite unabsorbed.

Only his sense of touch seems out to curb

the world into so many tiny waves:

a pause, and then a certain hesitancy-

he seems to ponder whom he should select:

compliantly his hand is held erect,

festive, as in a wedding ceremony.

WOMAN GOING BLIND ^[vi]

She sat just like the others sipping tea.

Her cup and saucer held, I thought at first,

among the guests, a little differently.

And once she smiled. I found it almost hurt.

And as we presently got up all talking

and slowly, and as chance would have its jest,

through many rooms (with talk and laughter) walking,

I noticed her. She walked behind the rest.

A bit reserved, like someone who must soon

get up and sing before a goodly audience.

Across her light blue eyes, now touched with radiance,

external light lay as on a lagoon.

She followed slowly and it took some patience,

as if a something were not yet quite right;

and still: as though with minor transformation

she would no longer walk, but soar in flight.

BLUE HORTENSIA^[vii]

Like in old cans of paint the last green hue,

these leaves are sere and rough and dull-complected

behind the blossom clusters in which blue

is not so much displayed as it’s reflected;

They do reflect it imprecise and teary,

as though they’d rather have it go away,

and just like faded, once blue stationery,

they’re tinged with yellow, violet and gray;

As in an often laundered children’s smock,

cast off, its usefulness now all but over,

one senses running down a small life’s clock.

Yet suddenly the blue revives, it seems,

and in among these clusters one discovers

a tender blue rejoicing in the green.

EARLY APOLLO ^[viii]

The way sometimes through branches that are naked

a morning peeks, which is already moored

in spring: Just so his head is truly vacant

of anything to stop the songs’ allure

from striking us a nearly fatal blow;

too cool for laurel are his temples still,

nor has a single blot yet blurred his view,

and later only, out of the eyebrows, will

the garden’s long-stemmed roses sprout

whose very petals, singly and undone,

will toward the trembling mouth soon migrate down,

which silent still, is shiny and untried,

and merely sipping with a shy small grin,

as though his poesy’s piped into him.

Translator’s Note: “Crossing the English Channel”

Partly thanks to a greater understanding of the creative process, partly thanks to the proliferation of inexact rhyme usage, we have come a long way from the days when Verlaine’s “Il pleure dans mon coeur” was rendered in English as “It cries in my heart.” Nevertheless, each translator, setting out to make the rough crossing from one language to another, is still taking chances when determining his priorities. At one end of the spectrum are those translators who would settle for transferring content; at the opposite end are the often monolingual poets translating “with” a native speaker. There the perils are dual: Inaccuracies arising from the middle-man, and the poet’s converting the original into one of his own creations.

C.f. MacIntyre, a pioneer translator of Rilke who, along with actress Luise Rainer, introduced me to the poet, appeared to have a simple formula to achieve transformation from German into English: He forced the contents of each poem into a rhyming entity by interspersing it with material not found in the original. Even in recent, more sophisticated translations, monstrosities occur. Walter Arndt, in comparing translations of Rilke’s famous “The Panther,” accuses J. B. Leishman of choices the “disqualify the whole enterprise” (159), and M. D. Herter Norton of “a failure to try” (160). Worse, in comparing versions of “Going Blind” (“Die Erblindende”; see “Woman Going Blind,” above) Arndt lashes out at Stephen Mitchell’s work, accusing him of ineffective rhyming (“table/painful”), of “idly” tampering with content, and of being insensitive to meter, among other things: “…Mitchell is constrained throughout by his equipment to rate the convenience of the prosodically untutored translator above the esthetic identity of the poem” (166).

Such a vituperative attack is wholly uncalled for. Translation is, at best, an imperfect art. Since the color of no two languages is the same, any effort is doomed to fall short from the start. Here is Mitchell’s final stanza of the poem:

She followed slowly, taking a long time,

As though there were some obstacle in the way;

and yet: as though, once it was overcome

she would be beyond walking and would fly. (166)

Yes, “taking a long time” is flabby for “und sie brauchte lang”; “some obstacle” for “etwas,” being gratuitous, poses some obstacle indeed-call it “inorganic language”; and “once it was overcome” for “nach einem Übergang” is merely clumsy. The final line evokes the unfortunate image of Mary Poppins sailing over the rooftops. Yet Arndt’s own translation is hardly unflawed. The very opening “Sie sass so wie die anderen beim Tee” becomes “She sat at tea just like the others. First”. Here the rhythm is immediately violated by the “First”-part of a new sentence that should not have begun until line two. The moral is that ultimately we must all fall short of perfection.

My own theory of translation derives from Verlaine’s dictum concerning all poetry: “De la musique avant toute chose.” The music of the poem (or, given that no two languages sound the same, the rhythm, at least) must remain intact. We can recognize a piece by Mozart or a poem by Rilke by its rhythms, and we should be able to do the same with a translation-that being the litmus test. As for the content-its language, in English, must be organic to the poem as a whole; “seamless is a term (from Rilke’s “The Angels”) that might be apt. Lastly comes the rhyme, for Rilke’s lyric poetry without it ceases to be Rilke’s lyric poetry. Here is where the hard labor comes in: turning, molding, softening the lines until they acquiesce, until they become plastic and flowing, their syntax comfortable in their adopted new language.

These then, to recap, are the three magic wands of translation: Rhythm, meaning depicted faithfully in organic language, and rhyme capping a fluid syntax.