Was bleibt mir denn von dem
was ich hier war? Das ists ja, daß ich sterbe.
Hat sie dirs nicht gesagt, da sie dirs auftrug,
daß jenes Lager, das da drinnen wartet,
zur Unterwelt gehört? Ich nahm ja Abschied.
Abschied über Abschied.
Kein Sterbender nimmt mehr davon. Ich ging ja,
damit das Alles, unter Dem begraben
der jetzt mein Gatte ist, zergeht, sich auflöst—.
So führ mich hin: ich sterbe ja für ihn.
Und wie der Wind auf hoher See, der umspringt,
so trat der Gott fast wie zu einer Toten
und war auf einmal weit von ihrem Gatten,
dem er, versteckt in einem kleinen Zeichen,
die hundert Leben dieser Erde zuwarf.
Der stürzte taumelnd zu den beiden hin
und griff nach ihnen wie im Traum. Sie gingen
schon auf den Eingang zu, in dem die Frauen
verweint sich drängten. Aber einmal sah
er noch des Mädchens Antlitz, das sich wandte
mit einem Lächeln, hell wie eine Hoffnung,
die beinah ein Versprechen war: erwachsen
zurückzukommen aus dem tiefen Tode
zu ihm, dem Lebenden—
Da schlug er jäh
die Hände vors Gesicht, wie er so kniete,
um nichts zu sehen mehr nach diesem Lächeln.
Alcestis
Then suddenly the messenger was among them,
tossed into the bubbling wedding feast
like a new ingredient. But they kept on
drinking, and didn’t feel the god’s
secret entrance, for he held his godhead
as closely to him as a wet mantle,
and seemed to be like any one of them
as he passed through. But suddenly
one of the guests looked up while talking,
and saw the young master at the table’s head
no longer reclining but as if snatched aloft,
and mirroring everywhere, with all his being,
an alienness that addressed him horribly.
And with that, as though the mixture cleared,
there was silence; with just some dregs
of murky noise on the floor, and a sediment
of falling babble, already reeking
with the smell of hollow, stagnant laughter.
And then they recognized the slender god,
and as he stood there, full of his mission
and unentreatable, —they almost knew.
And yet, when it was uttered, it was
beyond all knowing, impossible to grasp.
Admetus must die. When? This very hour.
But he broke through the shell of his fright
and stretched his hands out from it
in order to bargain with the god.
For years, for just one year more of youth,
for months, for weeks, for a few days,
ah, not days, then for nights, for only one,
for one night, for just this one: for it.
But the god denied him, and he screamed aloud,
screamed it out, held nothing in, screamed
the way his mother screamed out in childbirth.
And she stepped toward him, an old woman,
and his father also came, his old father,
and both stood there, old, decrepit, perplexed,
beside the screamer, who saw them—as if
never before so near—broke off, gulped, and said:
Father,
Do you care so much about these last few drops,
these dregs that make it hard for you to swallow?
Go, pour them out. And you, old woman,
Mother,
why are you still here: you’ve given birth.
and he held them both like sacrificial beasts
in a single grip. Then suddenly he let go
and pushed the old couple away, inspired, beaming,
breathing hard and calling: Creon, Creon!
And nothing else, nothing but that name.
But in his features stood that other thing
he didn’t say, namelessly expectant,
as he held it out glowingly to the young friend,
his beloved, across the bewildered table.
The old (it stood there), look, are no ransom,
they’re used up and wretched and almost worthless,
but you, you in all your beauty—
But then he saw his friend no longer.
He dropped back, and she came forth instead,
looking even smaller than he knew her,
and light and sad in her pale bridal dress.
All the others are just her avenue,
down which she comes and comes—: (soon she’ll be there
in his arms, which open painfully).
But as he waits, she speaks; though not to him.
She speaks to the god, and the god listens to her,
and all hear, as it were, only in the god:
No one can substitute for him. No one but me.
I am a substitute. For no one is at an end
like I am. For what remains to me of what
I was here? Dying is my whole life now.
Didn’t she tell you, when she dispatched you here,
that the bed waiting there inside for me
belongs to the underworld? Haven’t I already
said good-bye? Good-bye after good-bye.
No one dying ever said more of them. Haven’t I
already gone, so that everything, buried under the man
who’s now my husband, dissolves, disappears?
So lead me away: I’m already dying for him.
And like the wind veering on high seas,
the god approached her almost like one dead,
and was suddenly far from her husband,
to whom, in a small veiled sign,
he tossed the hundred lifetimes of this earth.
The one fell stumbling toward the pair,
and grasped at them as in a dream. But already
they had neared the entrance, where the women
crowded weeping. One last time he saw
the girl’s face, turning around
with a smile, shining like a hope
that was almost a promise: to come back
from the depths of death fully grown
to him, the living—
At that he threw his hands
before his face, as he knelt there,
in order to see nothing more beyond that smile.
Geburt der Venus
An diesem Morgen nach der Nacht, die bang
vergangen war mit Rufen, Unruh, Aufruhr,—
brach alles Meer noch einmal auf und schrie.
Und als der Schrei sich langsam wieder schloß
und von der Himmel blassem Tag und Anfang
herabfiel in der stummen Fische Abgrund—:
gebar das Meer.
Von erster Sonne schimmerte der Haarschaum
der weiten Wogenscham, an deren Rand
das Mädchen aufstand, weiß, verwirrt und feucht.
So wie ein junges grünes Blatt sich rührt,
sich reckt und Eingerolltes langsam aufschlägt,
entfaltete ihr Leib sich in die Kühle
hinein und in den unberührten Frühwind.
Wie Monde stiegen klar die Kniee auf
und tauchten in der Schenkel Wolkenränder;
der Waden schmaler Schatten wich zurück,
die Füße spannten sich und wurden licht,
und die Gelenke lebten wie die Kehlen
von Trinkenden.
Und in dem Kelch des Beckens lag der Leib
wie eine junge Frucht in eines Kindes Hand.
In seines Nabels engem Becher war
das ganze Dunkel dieses hellen Lebens.
Darunter hob sich licht die kleine Welle
und floß beständig über nach den Lenden,
wo dann und wann ein stilles Rieseln war.
Durchschienen aber und noch ohne Schatten,
wie ein Bestand von Birken im April,
warm, leer und unverborgen, lag die Scham.
Jetzt stand der Schultern rege Waage schon
im Gleichgewichte auf dem graden Körper,
der aus dem Becken wie ein Springbrunn aufstieg
und zögernd in den langen Armen abfiel
und rascher in dem vollen Fall des Haars.
Dann ging sehr langsam das Gesicht vorbei:
aus dem verkürzten Dunkel seiner Neigung
in klares, waagrechtes Erhobensein.
Und hinter ihm verschloß sich steil das Kinn.
Jetzt, da der Hals gestreckt war wie ein Strahl
und wie ein Blumenstiel, darin der Saft steigt,
streckten sich auch die Arme aus wie Hälse
von Schwänen, wenn sie nach dem Ufer suchen.
Dann kam in dieses Leibes dunkle Frühe
wie Morgenwind der erste Atemzug.
Im zartesten Geäst der Aderbäume
entstand ein Flüstern, und das Blut begann
zu rauschen über seinen tiefen Stellen.
Und dieser Wind wuchs an: nun warf er sich
mit allem Atem in die neuen Brüste
und füllte sie und drückte sich in sie,—
daß sie wie Segel, von der Ferne voll,
das leichte Mädchen nach dem Strande drängten.
So landete die Göttin.
Hinter ihr,
die rasch dahinschritt durch die jungen Ufer,
erhoben sich den ganzen Vormittag
die Blumen und die Halme, warm, verwirrt,
wie aus Umarmung. Und sie ging und lief.
Am Mittag aber, in der schwersten Stunde,
hob sich das Meer noch einmal auf und warf
einen Delphin an jene selbe Stelle.
Tot, rot und offen.
Birth of Venus
On the morning after that fearful night,
which had passed with outcry, tumult, uproar,—
all the sea burst open once again and screamed.
And as the scream slowly closed again
and fell back from the sky’s pale daybreak
into the speechless fishes’ chasm—:
the sea gave birth.
The first sun shimmered in the hair-foam
of the wide-open wave, on whose lip
the girl rose, white, confused, and moist.
As a young green leaf stirs,
stretches, and then slowly uncurls,
her body unfolded coolly
into the untouched breeze of dawn.
Like moons the knees rose clearly
and dived into the cloud-rims of the thighs;
the calves’ thin shadows gave way,
the feet flexed and grew luminous,
and the joints came alive like the throats
of drinkers.
And in the cup of the pelvis lay the belly,
like a young fruit cradled in a child’s hand.
In its navel’s narrow chalice was
all the darkness this bright life contained.
Beneath it the small wave rose lightly
and lapped continually toward the loins,
where now and then a silent ripple stirred.
Translucent though and still unshadowed,
like a stand of birches in April,
warm, empty, and unhidden, lay the sex.
Now the shoulders’ quick scales stood
already balanced on the upright body,
which rose from the pelvis like a fountain,
and fell back lingeringly in the long arms,
and more swiftly in the hair’s cascades.
Then very slowly the face went past:
out of the foreshortened darkness of its bending
into clear, horizontal exaltation.
And behind it, the chin steeply closed.
Now, as the neck was stretched out like a water jet,
and like a flower stalk in which the sap is rising,
the arms too stretched out, like necks of swans
when they are searching for the shore.
Then the first breath entered this body’s
dim awakening, like an early morning wind.
In the tenderest branches of the vein-trees
a whispering arose, and the blood began
to murmur over its deep places.
And this wind grew on: now it threw itself
with all its breath into the new breasts
and filled them and crowded into them,—
so that like sails full of distance
they drove the light girl to the shore.
And thus the goddess landed.
Behind her,
as she strode swiftly past the youthful shores,
all morning flowers and grasses
sprang up, warm and confused,
as from embraces. And she walked and ran.
But at noon, in the heaviest hour,
the sea rose up once more and threw
a dolphin on that selfsame spot.
Dead, red, and open.
Die Rosenschale
Zornige sahst du flackern, sahst zwei Knaben
zu einem Etwas sich zusammenballen,
das Haß war und sich auf der Erde wälzte
wie ein von Bienen überfallnes Tier;
Schauspieler, aufgetürmte Übertreiber,
rasende Pferde, die zusammenbrachen,
den Blick wegwerfend, bläkend das Gebiß
als schälte sich der Schädel aus dem Maule.
Nun aber weißt du, wie sich das vergißt:
denn vor dir steht die volle Rosenschale,
die unvergeßlich ist und angefüllt
mit jenem Äußersten von Sein und Neigen,
Hinhalten, Niemals-Gebenkönnen, Dastehn,
das unser sein mag: Äußerstes auch uns.
Lautloses Leben, Aufgehn ohne Ende,
Raum-brauchen ohne Raum von jenem Raum
zu nehmen, den die Dinge rings verringern,
fast nicht Umrissen-sein wie Ausgespartes
und lauter Inneres, viel seltsam Zartes
und Sich-bescheinendes—bis an den Rand:
ist irgend etwas uns bekannt wie dies?
Und dann wie dies: daß ein Gefühl entsteht,
weil Blütenblätter Blütenblätter rühren?
Und dies: daß eins sich aufschlägt wie ein Lid,
und drunter liegen lauter Augenlider,
geschlossene, als ob sie, zehnfach schlafend,
zu dämpfen hätten eines Innern Sehkraft.
Und dies vor allem: daß durch diese Blätter
das Licht hindurch muß. Aus den tausend Himmeln
filtern sie langsam jenen Tropfen Dunkel,
in dessen Feuerschein das wirre Bündel
der Stabgefäße sich erregt und aufbäumt.
Und die Bewegung in den Rosen, sieh:
Gebärden von so kleinem Ausschlagswinkel,
daß sie unsichtbar blieben, liefen ihre
Strahlen nicht auseinander in das Weltall.
Sieh jene weiße, die sich selig aufschlug
und dasteht in den großen offnen Blättern
wie eine Venus aufrecht in der Muschel;
und die errötende, die wie verwirrt
nach einer kühlen sich hinüberwendet,
und wie die kühle fühllos sich zurückzieht,
und wie die kalte steht, in sich gehüllt,
unter den offenen, die alles abtun.
Und was sie abtun, wie das leicht und schwer,
wie es ein Mantel, eine Last, ein Flügel
und eine Maske sein kann, je nach dem,
und wie sie’s abtun: wie vor dem Geliebten.
Was können sie nicht sein: war jene gelbe,
die hohl und offen daliegt, nicht die Schale
von einer Frucht, darin dasselbe Gelb,
gesammelter, orangeröter, Saft war?
Und wars für diese schon zu viel, das Aufgehn,
weil an der Luft ihr namenloses Rosa
den bittern Nachgeschmack des Lila annahm?
Und die batistene, ist sie kein Kleid,
in dem noch zart und atemwarm das Hemd streckt,
mit dem zugleich es abgeworfen wurde
im Morgenschatten an dem alten Waldbad?
Und diese hier, opalnes Porzellan,
zerbrechlich, eine flache Chinatasse
und angefüllt mit kleinen hellen Faltern,—
und jene da, die nichts enthält als sich.
Und sind nicht alle so, nur sich enthaltend,
wenn Sich-enthalten heißt: die Welt da draußen
und Wind und Regen und Geduld des Frühlings
und Schuld und Unruh und vermummtes Schicksal
und Dunkelheit der abendlichen Erde
bis auf der Wolken Wandel, Flucht und Anflug,
bis auf den vagen Einfluß ferner Sterne
in eine Hand voll Innres zu verwandeln.
Nun liegt es sorglos in den offnen Rosen.
The Bowl of Roses
You saw anger flare, saw two boys
ball themselves up into a something
that was pure hatred, rolling on the ground
like an animal attacked by bees;
actors, towering exaggerators,
raging horses crashing down,
casting their gaze away, baring their teeth
as if their mouths were peeling from their skulls.
But now you know how that’s forgotten:
before you stands this full bowl of roses,
which is unforgettable, and filled to the brim
with that utmost of being and bending,
offering up, lacking power to give, standing here,
that might be ours: for us too the utmost.
Noiseless life, endless opening out,
space being used, without space being taken
from that space which adjacent things deplete,
existence almost without outline, like unpainted ground
and pure within-ness, so much strange tenderness
and self-illumination—out to the very edge:
is somewhere something known to us like this?
and then like this: that a feeling arises,
because flower petals touch flower petals?
And this: that a single one springs open
like a lid, and beneath lie only eyelids,
all closed, as though they had to sleep
tenfold, to quench a visionary power.
and this above all: that through these petals
light must penetrate. From the thousand skies
they slowly filter that drop of darkness
within whose fiery glow the tangled bunch
of stamens becomes aroused and stands erect.
And the movement in the roses, look:
gestures with such tiny angles of vibration
that they’d remain invisible, if their rays
did not fan out into the universe.
Look at that white one which has blissfully unfolded,
and stands there in its large open petals
like a Venus upright in her mussel shell;
and that blushing one, which turns around
as if embarrassed to one that’s cool,
and how the cool one unfeelingly withdraws,
and how that cold one stands, wrapped in itself,
among the open ones, which are shedding everything.
and what they shed: the way it can be
either heavy or light—a cloak, a burden,
a wing, a mask, it all depends—
and how they shed it: as in a lover’s presence.
What can’t they be: wasn’t that yellow one,
lying there hollow and open, the rind
of a fruit in which that same yellow,
more concentrated and orange-red, was juice?
and was its bursting-open too much for this one,
since in the air its indescribable pink
has taken on the bitter aftertaste of violet?
And that cambric one, isn’t it a dress,
the chemise still clinging to it, frail
and breath-warm, both of them cast off
in the morning shadows by the old woodland pool?
And this one, opalescent porcelain,
fragile, a shallow china cup
and full of small shining butterflies,—
and that one, containing nothing but itself.
And aren’t all that way: simply self-containing,
if self-containing means: to transform the world outside
and the wind and the rain and the patience of spring
and guilt and restlessness and muffled fate
and the darkness of the evening earth
and even the changing and flying and fleeing of the clouds
and the vague influence of the distant stars
into a handful of inwardness.
It now lies carefree in these open roses.
Notes
Sappho to Alcaeus
The poem takes its cue from an exchange between Sappho and Alcaeus recorded by Aristotle in his Rhetoric (I.ix.20). Rilke paraphrases it in a letter of 25 July 1907 to his wife: “Alcaeus was a poet, who on an antique vase stands before Sappho with head lowered and lyre in hand, and one knows that he has said to her: ‘Weaver of darkness, Sappho, you pure one with the honey-sweet smile, words throng to my lips, but a shame holds me back.’ And she: ‘Had you a wish in you for noble and beautiful things, and not base matters on your tongue, you would not have lowered your eyes in shame and would have rightly spoken.
Abishag
“And when the king was old and burdened with years, he could not grow warm, even though they covered him with clothes. Then his servants said to him: ‘Let there be sought for my lord the king a young girl, a virgin, who will stand before the king and care for him and sleep in his arms and warm my lord the king.’ And they searched for a beautiful girl throughout all the lands of Israel, and found Abishag from Shunam, and brought her to the king. And she was indeed beautiful, and she cared for the king and served him. But the king knew her not.”
L’Ange du Méridien
The poem describes the “Angel with the Sundial” on the facade of the Chartres cathedral. The name Rilke gives it in the poem’s title is not the one it is commonly known by, and seems to be a deliberate thematic gesture on his part. The statue’s common French designation is “L’Ange au cadran solaire”; Rodin refers to it throughout his book on the French cathedrals as “L’Ange de Chartres” or simply “L’Ange,” and Rilke himself describes it in a letter of 26 January 1906 to his wife as merely “a slim weatherbeaten angel which holds a sundial out in front of it.”
Tanagra
a city of ancient Greece, and the origin of a group of small clay figures preserved in the Louvre. Writing of them to his wife (26 September 1902), Rilke remarked: “And then Tanagra. It is the source of imperishable life.”
Resurrection
Rilke provides a tentative gloss on the last stanza of the poem in a letter to Hedwig von Boddien (10 August 1913): “Eric and Ulrica Dorothea are brother and sister of the thirteen sons; because they were the youngest to die, the place of precedence is reserved for them. That the others are kept waiting for them is to be explained by the fact that they are buried not in the family tomb, but in a church in Flanders, where during times of unrest death accosted them. The father, therefore, cannot wake them; they must rise from the grave on their own. Certainly it will take time for them to emerge from their quietly accepted slumber and adjust themselves to this new condition; nor will they, in their childish equanimity and surprise, be possessed by the same zeal as the adults for this resplendent new turn in their life here or in the beyond.”
Quai du Rosaire
The poem plays throughout on the identity of Bruges as “Bruges la morte,” a famous and thriving medieval city which in its wane—due in part to the loss of its natural harbor—became a symbol of mutability and the transience of human achievement.
Procession of the Virgin
Rilke explained the word in a letter of 25 July 1907: “Made out of gold (chrysos, Greek) and ivory (elephas), and used of the statues of Phidias, which according to the texts were made of these things: here the expression should help to evoke suddenly, at a stroke, the white-gold aspect of the procession.”
Translation copyright © 1984 by Edward Snow
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