Candice wrote:

>Now, tell me this: Has your translation of the Elegies been a
>ravishing experience? (Pricked by Briar Rainer?!) And, if so, is
>it why your posts on this thread have drawn a connection--and a
>real one, it seems to me--between (shattering) love and poiesis?
>I'd like to think so, but that's probably just because I'm such a
>romantic ("oh thou ravished bride of Duino...")--

Totally with you on the Elegies, Candice; though I haven't until this
moment thought of it as _abjection_.  To be honest, probably what I felt
while translating was most commonly utter tedium, although that was often
mixed with a strange excitement.  Getting to the end was not so much
ravishing as very moving.  After all the movement and passion and longing
of the Elegies, Rilke is simply pointing to the catkins in the rain:
this, he seems to be saying, is how difficult it is to be in the world,
and this is what it means to look at a catkin...

It's hard to remember back, but certainly the Elegies struck a chord with
thinkings I was already having when I first started translating them
about five years ago.  Perhaps the most explicit thing I've written is in
Navigatio, a novella which was published by Black Pepper Press in 1997;
although I find myself circling around the idea again and again.
Navigatio is really a meditation on language and memory, but it's a bit
hard to describe because it shifts from autobiographical musings to
outandout fiction/fantasy to essay.  Here's a bit from Chapter IX -


In rare moments I can still feel this pleasure in its naive first sense,
the conviction of a leverage which could topple anything.  Writing is
possible only because this remnant of childish omnipotence persists
through all the dulling failures of adulthood.  Yet if it were not for
these shaping and devastating failures, if that omnipotence still lay
within the width of my hand, the desire to write may not exist.

	When as a child you first read a book, there are mountains and forests
and lakes, and they are all real, as real as your hand turning the pages,
more real than the narrowing world which bars your perceptions with its
prohibitions of time and space and convention:  and in the fabulous
stories which unfold before you their mysteries, the legible mysteries
which reveal the colour of a single leaf and the precise sound of a
pebble rolling in the stream of a mountain you have never seen, the
hiddenness and incomprehensibility of your life is translated into a seed
which lies beneath the surface of the warm, imagined earth, which remains
hidden and enclosed, which itself will never flower into
comprehensibility but conceals in its nascence all that is unrevealed in
the explicit fantasy of the story:  the truth which is planted there,
inexpressible in any other way.

	I cannot understand myself except through language.  This is a
misfortune:  there are better, simpler and more direct ways of
understanding.  They are the spaces of silence which we inhabit fully,
the epiphanies which are always Edenic, which language struggles so hard
to enter and, in doing so, exiles us from the garden.  And yet, in its
trespass, a poetic language retrieves the unanaesthetised reality we
inhabit at our births, and reminds us that, in its perpetual destruction
and restoration of language, in its serious play and playful seriousness,
in its derangement of dualities and smashing of unities, in its
acceptance and rejection of mortality and finitude, poetry is nothing if
it is not a making of love.

	...beauty is nothing, sang Rilke, but this terrifying beginning...   The
terror of beauty is that _everything_ is beautiful.  It is the chaotic
self, the chaotic body, the chaotic world, fragmentary, diffuse,
unassigned to meaning, against which form, an aesthetic armour, a self by
which we understand our given selves, defends itself from the chaos
within and without it.   And art contains the terror of obliteration,
which inhabits the centre of beauty.  It admits the reality of death, of
human finitude and failure, it admits that the world is not us and that
we do not control it.  This admission is love:  the voluntary
renunciation of self-tyranny, the ascension to the place of ordinary
beauty, which redeems nothing.


Best

Alison










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