I am ambivalent about translation & have not well received most Englishings
of Rilke that I've seen - but today I was re-reading (couldn't remember a
thing!) Jean Gebser's book *Rilke und Spanien* in which he shows how Rilke
began to emancipate the adjective from its ornamental and perspectival
functions after experiencing El Greco in Toledo & quotes this poem, which I
had forgotten, to be honest, with its "an gestern begonnenem Fenster". So I
had a go at it, trying to capture the rhythms and the sheer weirdness of
this meditation. It's not coincidental that this version sort of alludes to
a famous poem by Ungaretti, or that the poem itself should remind one of the
beginning of Hölderlin's "Brod und Wein". See what you think.
mj
The immense night
R.M.Rilke
Often I wondered at you, stood at window yester begun-with,
stood and bewondered you. Still the new town was there
as if refused me , and the as yet not won-over landscape
darkling away as if I were not. The closest things didn't
make the effort to make clear sense to me. Down by the lantern
the alley surged upwards: I saw its strangeness.
Yonder a room, empathisable, illumined by lamplight -,
soon I took part in it; they felt that and let down the shutters.
Stood. And then a child wept. I knew the mothers
all round in the houses, what they can do, and knew
at the same time all weeping's inconsolable reasons.
Or a voice sang and reached just a little
out beyond expectation, or downstairs there coughed
some old man full of reproach as if his body were right
against the more lenient world. Then the hour struck -,
but I counted too late, it fell and passed by me. -
Like a lad, a stranger there, who when they finally let him
can't catch the ball anyway, and can't play any
game that the others practise on one another so lightly,
stands there looking away, where to? - I stood, all of a sudden
grasping that you are dealing with me, playing, grown-up
Night, and wondered at you. Where the towers
were angered, where with averted fate
a town stood round me, and unguessable mountains
lay in conflict with me, and in the approaching environs
famishing strangeness surrounded the random flaring
of my emotions -: then it was, you High One,
not a disgrace for you to know me. Your breath
went over me. Your smile, spread over spacious
gravity, entered me then.
________________________________
From bier to pit
And be shut in it
Then lies my house upon my nose
And all my care for this world goes.
Anon.
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