Authors: William H. Gass

Reading Rilke (29 page)

how even Sorrow, in the midst of lamenting, is determined to alter,

to serve as a thing, or fade in a thing—to escape

into beauty beyond violining. These things whose life

is a constant leaving, they know when you praise them.

Transient, they trust us, the most transient, to come

to their rescue; they wish us to alter them utterly,

within our invisible hearts, into—so endlessly—us!

Whoever we may finally be.

You earthly things—is this not what you want,

to arise invisible in us? Is not your dream

to be one day invisible? Earth!—things!—invisible!

What, if not this deep translation, is your ardent aim?

Earth, my loved one, I will. Believe me.

You need no more of your springtimes to win me.

Already one is more than my blood can endure.

Beyond all the words I can speak I am yours,

as I’ve been from the beginning. Always, you were right,

and your holiest thought’s been of death, our most intimate friend.

But look—I live. Oh, on what? Neither childhood nor

future grows less. Abundant existence

wells up in my heart.
⁹

THE TENTH ELEGY

Someday, released at last from this anguished soul-searching,

may I sing an extolling song to the assenting Angels;

may not even one of the firmly struck hammers of the heart

land upon a slack, uncertain, or broken string;

may my weeping face make me more radiant,

each tear glistening like a new bloom:

how precious to me then my tormented nights will be, and how deep my regret

that I didn’t more willingly kneel to you,

inconsolable sisters, more willingly lose myself in your flowing hair.

We squander our sorrows. How we look along their bitter lengths

searching for an end, and see not their secret.

But they are our serious winter trees, our dark evergreens,

one season of our inner year—not just a season,

but soil, place, village, storehouse, home.

Yet, alas, how strange are the streets of the City of Pain,

where, amid the noise raised against noise that we mistake for stillness,

a stout figure swaggers, cast in inanities’ mold:

itself the gilded din, and decaying memorials.

Oh, how completely would an Angel crush underfoot their market of cheap comforts,

with the church at its side, purchased ready-made,

as swept, as shut, as disappointing as a post office on a Sunday.

The outskirts, though, are always swirling with carnival.

Elevating swings! Daring jugglers and exciting High Divers!

And the shooting galleries with their lifelike ducks,

targets which will fall in a clatter of tin

when a lucky shot happens to hit one.

Encouraged by the crowd, he waddles after more prizes:

booths that can satisfy any kind of curiosity

are drumming their drums and crying their wares.

Especially worth seeing, but for adults only: coins in copulation,

right there onstage, money’s metal genitals rubadubdubbing.

Educational, and sure to encourage multiplication …

Oh, and

just outside that tent, behind the last billboards,

plastered with posters for “Todlos,”

the dark bitter beer so sweet to the addicted,

so long as they swallow it while chewing on fresh distractions—

and just at the back of the billboards, right behind them, is …
reality
.

Children are playing; to one side, earnest,

in patchy grass, lovers are holding each other,

and dogs are doing nature’s business.

The young man is drawn farther on; perhaps he loves a young Lament …

He follows her into the meadows. She says:

We live out there. A long way …

Where? And the young man follows. He’s moved by her manner: her shoulders, her neck—

maybe she comes from a noble family? Still, he leaves her,

turns back, looks around, waves … What’s the use?

She’s a Lament.

Only those who died young, in their first stages

of timeless serenity, scarcely weaned,

follow her lovingly. She waits and befriends the girls.

Gently shows them what she’s wearing. Pearls

the shape of tears, and patience’s fine-spun veils.

She walks with the young men in silence.

But there in the valley where they live,

one of the older Laments answers the youth’s questions:

Long ago, she says, the Lamentations were a powerful clan.

Our fathers worked the mines in that mountain range.

Among humans, sometimes, you can still find a polished lump of primal pain,

or a piece of petrified rage amid the slag of an ancient volcano.

Yes, that would have come from there. We used to be rich.

And gently she guides him through the immense land of Lamentation,

shows him temple columns or the ruins of castles

where the Lords of Lamentation wisely ruled

the country long ago. Shows him the tall weeping trees,

shows him fields flowering with griefstrife

(which the living only know as becalmed leaves);

shows him sorrow’s pastured herds—and sometimes

a startled bird, cutting across their gaze,

loops the first letter of its lonely cry.

At evening she leads him to the graves of the elders,

the seers and sybils who prophesied and warned.

But with night coming on, they move more slowly,

and soon the tomb, whose stone, awash with

moonlight, rises to watch over all, confronts them.

Brother to the Nile’s sublime Sphinx, the silent chamber’s secret face.

And they are stunned by the crowned head that has quietly formed—

forever—the features of man

on the scale of the stars.

His eyes can’t take it in, his mind still reeling from recent death,

but their gaze frightens an owl from behind the stone crown.

And the bird, with slow swooping strokes, brushes the statue’s fuller cheek

until that touching faintly speaks,

in death’s different hearing,

as though on the facing pages of an open book

an unutterable shape were shaped.

And higher, the stars. New ones. The stars of Pain’s Land.

Slowly the Lament names them: “There, look:

there’s the
Rider
, the
Staff
, and they call that bigger

constellation
Garland of Fruit
. Then, farther on,

toward the Pole:
Cradle, Path, Puppet, Window, The Burning Book
.

But in the southern sky, clear as lines on the palm of a blessed hand,

the brilliantly glowing ‘M’

that stands for Mothers …”

But the dead youth must go on, and silently the elder Lament

leads him as far as the gorge

where the true Source of Joy

shines in the moonlight.

Solemnly she names it and says: “For men

it is the stream which bears them on.”

They stand at the foot of the range,

and there she embraces him, weeping.

Alone he climbs the Mountains of Primal Pain.

And not once does his step echo from

Destiny’s soundless path.

Yet if the eternal dead were to wake an image in us,

look, they might be pointing to the catkins

hanging from empty hazels, or they might remind us

of the rain that falls on the dark earth in early spring.

And we, who have always thought

of happiness as
ascending
,

would feel the emotion

that almost undoes us

when a happy thing
falls
.
¹⁰

NOTES

Lifeleading

1
.
Life of a Poet: Rainer Maria Rilke
, by Ralph Freedman. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995, 129.

2
. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1941; reprinted by Octagon Books, New York: Octagon Books Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971. More recently (1988), Peter Lang has published Beatrice Bullock-Kimball’s monograph,
The European Heritage of Rose Symbolism and Rose Metaphors in View of Rilke’s Epitaph
.

3
. Capri, ca. New Year’s Day 1907.

4
. Paris, June 27, 1906.

5
.
My Sister, My Spouse: A Biography of Lou Andreas-Salomié
. New York: Norton and Co., 1962, new ed. 1974, 186, 270.

6
. New York: Fromm Intl., 1984, 73.

7
.
Rilke: A Life
, by Wolfgang Leppmann. New York: Fromm International, 1984, 75.

8
. Freedman,
Life of a Poet
, 113.

9
. Quoted by H. F. Peters in
Rainer Maria Rilke: Masks and the Man
. Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press, 1960. Reprinted by Gordian Press, NY, 1977, 10.

10
. Freedman,
Life of a Poet
, 373.

11
. “Parting,” Paris, early 1906.

12
. From “The Book of Poverty and Death,” which is Book III of
The Book of Hours
, 1903.

13
. From “Turning-Point,” Paris, 1914.

14
. “Autumn,” Paris, Sept. 11, 1902.

15
.
“Autumn Day,” Paris, Sept. 21, 1902.

16
. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996.

17
. “To Music,” a gift to Frau Hanna Wolff after a private concert at her home, Munich, Jan. 11 or 12, 1918.

18
. “The Lace,” II, Capri, ca. Feb. 10, 1907.

19
. “Buddha,” Meudon, end of 1905.

20
.
Phases of Rilke
, Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1958, 72.

21
.
The Romantic Rebellion
, New York: Harper and Row, 1973, 353, 4.

22
. “The Panther,” Jardin des Plantes, Paris, 1903.

23
. From “The Fourth Elegy.”

24
. Last entry in Rilke’s pocket book, Val-Mont, Switzerland, mid-December 1926.

Transreading

1
. Meudon, Winter 1905–6.

2
. See Michael Hamburger’s “Brief Afterthoughts on Versions of a Poem by Hölderlin,” in
Translating Poetry
, edited by Daniel Weissbort. Iowa City: Univ. of Iowa Press, 1989, 51–6.