Jeder Engel ist shrecklich

I have long been a fervent admirer of Rilke, a taste in which I don't find many companions in England - though Sonnets to Orpheus seem slightly known.  My favourite work is Duino Elegies, and my translation is wonderful, made in the 1930s by J B Leishmann and Stephen Spender no less ("now dated", Amazon says - how dare they?), and it's in a parallel text, so I can read the German aloud, savouring the strength, the music and the rhythm of it (one example below).  It's quite wonderful - but it's also about 50 pages long without the orignal text, so tiny extracts are all I can manage today.  This is not - quite - a German Waste Land, but it was published in the same year, 1922, and it's in the same sort of country, but less concrete, more philosophical, troubled in the eternal rather than the diurnal.  My post title is not in today's examples, but is the first line of the second elegy - Every angel is terrible.  Here then are three extracts from Rainer Maria Rilke's Duino Elegies.  (The translations are, in these extracts, by A S Kline, whose complete translation is freely available).

(from the start of the first elegy ... )

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the Angelic

Orders? And even if one were to suddenly

take me to its heart, I would vanish into its

stronger existence. For beauty is nothing but

the beginning of terror, that we are still able to bear,

and we revere it so, because it calmly disdains

to destroy us. Every Angel is terror.

And so I hold myself back and swallow the cry

of a darkened sobbing. Ah, who then can

we make use of? Not Angels: not men,

and the resourceful creatures see clearly

that we are not really at home

in the interpreted world. Perhaps there remains

some tree on a slope, that we can see

again each day: there remains to us yesterday’s street,

and the thinned-out loyalty of a habit

that liked us, and so stayed, and never departed.

(and the start of the fourth …)

O trees of life, O when are you wintering?

We are not unified. We have no instincts

like those of migratory birds. Useless, and late,

we force ourselves, suddenly, onto the wind,

and fall down to an indifferent lake.

We realise flowering and fading together.

And somewhere lions still roam. Never knowing,

as long as they have their splendour, of any weakness.

(and a passage from the fifth elegy, in German first, then in translation … )

Du dann, Liebliche,
du, von den reizendsten Freuden
stumm Übersprungne. Vielleicht sind
deine Fransen glücklich für dich -,
oder über den jungen
prallen Brüsten die grüne metallene Seide
fühlt sich unendlich verwöhnt und entbehrt nichts.
Du,
immerfort anders auf alle des Gleichgewichts schwankende Waagen
hingelegte Marktfrucht des Gleichmuts,
öffentlich unter den Schultern.

You, then, beloved,

you, that the loveliest delights

silently over-leapt. Perhaps

your frills are happy for you –

or the green metallic silk,

over your firm young breasts,

feels itself endlessly pampered, and needing nothing.

You, market fruit of serenity

laid out, endlessly, on all the quivering balance scales,

publicly, beneath the shoulders.

Comments

[Mr Cornflower]

I first came across Rilke in a parallel translation by Stanley Mason ("A German Treasury" University of Salzburg 1995) and was immediately captivated. He was I believe a man of strong but idiosyncratic religious temper, and in his short poem Der Schwan he compares our daily life - the ungainliness, the struggle - with the waddling of a land-bound swan, which is transfigured and redeemed on entering its natural element, as we will be - he hoped - in heaven:

Und das Sterben, dieses Nichtmehrfassen
jenes Grunds, auf dem wir taeglich stehn,
seinem aengstlichen Sich-Niederlassen -

in die Wasser, die ihn sanft empfangen
und die sich, wie gluecklich und vergangen,
unter ihm zurueckziehn, Flut um Flut;
waehrend er unendlich still und sicher
immer muendiger und koeniglicher
und gelassener zu ziehn geruht.

And dying, this ungainly loss of grace
of feet that cannot find their daily ground,
is like his anxious settling on the face

Of waters that receive him gently and
beneath his presence happily disband
and from his passage smoothly slide away
while he, the growing master of the scene,
ever more sure and ever more serene,
ever more kingly glides upon his way.

[sorry I can't manage either umlauts or textlinks but it is worth following up]

[Fresh Ink Books]

I have the same edition of The Duino Elegies and I love them, and all of Rilke's writing. Thank you for featuring these. It was a lovely thing to come across first thing in my day.