Ahead of All Parting Page 12

  Rustic Chapel

  How calm the house is: listen! But up there, in the white chapel, where does that greater silence come from?—From all those who, for more than a century, have come in so as not to be out in the cold and, kneeling down, have been frightened at their own noise? From the money that lost its voice falling into the collection box and will speak in just a small cricket-chirp when it is taken out? Or from the sweet absence of Saint Anne, the sanctuary’s patron, who doesn’t dare to come closer, lest she damage that pure distance which a call implies?

  “Farfallettina”

  Shaking all over, she arrives near the lamp, and her dizziness grants her one last vague reprieve before she goes up in flames. She has fallen onto the green tablecloth, and upon that advantageous background she stretches out for a moment (for a unit of her own time which we have no way of measuring) the profusion of her inconceivable splendor. She looks like a miniature lady who is having a heart attack on the way to the theater. She will never arrive. Besides, where is there a theater for such fragile spectators?… Her wings, with their tiny golden threads, are moving like a double fan in front of no face; and between them is this thin body, a bilboquet onto which two eyes like emerald balls have fallen back …

  C’est en toi, ma belle, que Dieu s’est épuisé. II te lance à la flamme pour regagner un peu de sa force. (Comme un enfant qui casse sa tirelire.)

  Le Mangeur de Mandarines

  Oh quelle prévoyance! Ce lapin entre les fruits. Pense! trente sept petits noyaux dans un seul exemplaire prěts à tomber un peu partout et à faire progéniture. II a fallu que nous corrigions ça. Elle eût été capable de peupler la terre cette petite Mandarine entětée qui porte une robe si large comme si elle devait encore grandir. Mal habillée en somme; plus occupée de multiplication que de mode. Montre-lui la grenade dans son armure de cuir de Cordoue: elle éclate d’avenir, se retient, dédaigne.… Et laissant entrevoir sa lignée possible, elle l’étouffe dans un berceau de pourpre. La terre lui semble trop évasive pour faire avec elle un pacte d’abondance.

  It is in you, my dear, that God has exhausted himself. He tosses you into the fire so that he can recover a bit of his strength. (Like a little boy breaking into his piggy bank.)

  The Tangerine-eater

  Oh what foresight! This rabbit of the fruit-world! Imagine: thirty-seven little pits in a single specimen, ready to fall every-which-way and create offspring. We had to correct that. She could have populated the whole earth—this little headstrong Tangerine, wearing a dress too big for herself, as if she intended to keep on growing. In short: badly dressed; more concerned with reproduction than with style. Show her the pomegranate, in her armor of Cordova leather: she is bursting with future, holds herself back, condescends.… And, letting us catch just a glimpse of her possible progeny, she smothers them in a dark-red cradle. She thinks earth is too evasive to sign a pact of abundance.

  FÜR VERONIKA ERDMANN

  Daß solcher Auftrag unser Auftrag werde,

  wieviel Gehorsam, wieviel Frohn.

  Ach, zwischen unseren Zeilen singt die Erde

  und reißt uns weiter vom Geräusch zum Ton.

  Oder ist es der Widerstand, der besser

  in uns den gültigen Vollzug erzieht?

  Der Liebendste: ein Mörder ohne Messer?

  Und das Bedrohteste des Lebens: Lied?

  FOR VERONIKA ERDMANN

  That such a mission may become our mission,

  how much obedience, how much joy.

  Between our lines the earth is singing with us

  and sweeps us on from noise to melody.

  Or is it opposition that must drive

  us to create a valid Thing?

  Is love: a murderer without a knife?

  And is the most endangered species: song?

  ELEGIE

  an Marina Zwetajewa-Efron

  O die Verluste ins All, Marina, die stürzenden Sterne!

  Wir vermehren es nicht, wohin wir uns werfen, zu welchem

  Sterne hinzu! Im Ganzen ist immer schon alles gezählt.

  So auch, wer fällt, vermindert die heilige Zahl nicht.

  Jeder verzichtende Sturz stürzt in den Ursprung und heilt.

  Wäre denn alles ein Spiel, Wechsel des Gleichen, Verschiebung,

  nirgends ein Name und kaum irgendwo heimisch Gewinn?

  Wellen, Marina, wir Meer! Tiefen, Marina, wir Himmel.

  Erde, Marina, wir Erde, wir tausendmal Frühling, wie Lerchen,

  die ein ausbrechendes Lied in die Unsichtbarkeit wirft.

  Wir beginnens als Jubel, schon übertrifft es uns völlig;

  plötzlich, unser Gewicht dreht zur Klage abwärts den Sang.

  Aber auch so: Klage? Wäre sie nicht: jüngerer Jubel nach unten.

  Auch die unteren Götter wollen gelobt sein, Marina.

  So unschuldig sind Götter, sie warten auf Lob wie die Schüler.

  Loben, du Liebe, laß uns verschwenden mit Lob.

  Nichts gehört uns. Wir legen ein wenig die Hand um die Hälse

  ungebrochener Blumen. Ich sah es am Nil in Kôm-Ombo.

  So, Marina, die Spende, selber verzichtend, opfern die Könige.

  Wie die Engel gehen und die Türen bezeichnen jener zu Rettenden,

  also rühren wir dieses und dies, scheinbar Zärtliche, an.

  Ach wie weit schon Entrückte, ach, wie Zerstreute, Marina,

  auch noch beim innigsten Vorwand. Zeichengeber, sonst nichts.

  Dieses leise Geschäft, wo es der Unsrigen einer

  nicht mehr erträgt und sich zum Zugriff entschließt,

  ELEGY

  to Marina Tsvetayeva-Efron

  Oh the losses into the All, Marina, the stars that are falling!

  We can’t make it larger, wherever we fling ourselves, to whatever

  star we may go! In the Whole, all things are already numbered.

  So when anyone falls, the perfect sum is not lessened.

  Whoever lets go in his fall, dives into the source and is healed.

  Is all of life then a game, a meaningless fluctuation

  of sameness, nowhere a name, nowhere a lasting achievement?

  Waves, Marina, we are ocean! Depths, Marina, we are sky.

  Earth, Marina, we are earth, a thousand times April, like larks

  that a song bursting out of them flings into invisible heights.

  We begin it as joy, and already it wholly exceeds us;

  suddenly the force of our weight bends the song down to lament.

  Yet isn’t lament really a younger, descending joy?

  Even the gods below want to be praised, Marina.

  So innocent are gods, they listen for praise like children.

  Praising, my dearest—let us be lavish with praise.

  Nothing really belongs to us. We put our hands lightly around

  the necks of unbroken flowers. I saw it on the Nile, in Kom Ombo.

  Just so, Marina, the kings offer up the gifts they renounce.

  As angels draw marks as a signal on the doors of those to be saved,

  we, though we seem to be tender, stop and touch this or that.

  Ah, how remote already, how inattentive, Marina,

  even in our innermost pretense. Signalers: nothing more.

  This silent commerce, when life is no longer willing

  to endure one of our kind, when it seizes him in its grip,

  rächt sich und tötet. Denn daß es tödliche Macht hat,

  merkten wir alle an seiner Verhaltung und Zartheit

  und an der seltsamen Kraft, die uns aus Lebenden zu

  Überlebenden macht. Nicht-Sein. Weißt du’s, wie oft

  trug uns ein blinder Befehl durch den eisigen Vorraum

  neuer Geburt.… Trug: uns? Einen Körper aus Augen

  unter zahllosen Lidern sich weigernd. Trug das in uns

  niedergeworfene Herz eines ganzen Geschlechts. An ein Zugvogelziel

  trug er die Gruppe, das Bild unserer schwebenden Wandlung.

/>   Liebende dürften, Marina, dürfen soviel nicht

  von dem Untergang wissen. Müssen wie neu sein.

  Erst ihr Grab is alt, erst ihr Grab besinnt sich, verdunkelt

  unter dem schluchzenden Baum, besinnt sich auf Jeher.

  Erst ihr Grab bricht ein; sie selber sind biegsam wie Ruten;

  was übermäßig sie biegt, rundet sie reichlich zum Kranz.

  Wie sie verwehen im Maiwind! Von der Mitte des Immer,

  drin du atmest und ahnst, schließt sie der Augenblick aus.

  (O wie begreif ich dich, weibliche Blüte am gleichen

  unvergänglichen Strauch. Wie streu ich mich stark in die Nachtluft,

  die dich nächstens bestreift.) Frühe erlernten die Götter

  Hälften zu heucheln. Wir in das Kreisen bezogen

  füllten zum Ganzen uns an wie die Scheibe des Monds.

  Auch in abnehmender Frist, auch in den Wochen der Wendung

  niemand verhülfe uns je wieder zum Vollsein, als der

  einsame eigene Gang über der schlaflosen Landschaft.

  avenges itself, kills. For the fact that its strength can kill

  was plain to us all from its delicacy and restraint

  and from the curious power that transforms us from living beings

  into survivors. Non-being. Do you remember how often

  a blind command would carry us through the icy

  waiting-room of new birth?… Us?—a body of eyes

  under numberless lids, refusing. Carried the down-

  thrown heart in our breast, the heart of a whole generation.

  To a goal as welcome as the South is for migrating birds,

  it carried the soaring image and plan of our transformation.

  Lovers were not, Marina, are not permitted to know

  destruction so deeply. Must be as if they were new.

  Only their grave is old, only it ponders and darkens

  under the sobbing tree, remembering all that has been.

  Only their grave collapses; they are supple as reeds;

  what bends them too far, rounds them into rich garlands.

  How they blow about in the May wind! From the midst of the Ever,

  in which you breathe and surmise, the moment has shut them out.

  (Oh how I understand you, female flower on the same

  imperishable stalk. How wildly I scatter myself into the night air

  that in a moment will touch you.) The gods long ago

  learned to dissemble halves. We, drawn into the cycle,

  filled ourselves out to the whole, like the disk of the moon.

  Even in the time of waning, in the weeks of our gradual change,

  nothing could ever again help us to fulfillment, except

  our own solitary course over the sleepless landscape.

  Für Erika, zum Feste der Rühmung

  Taube, die draußen blieb, außer dem Taubenschlag,

  wieder in Kreis und Haus, einig der Nacht, dem Tag,

  weiß sie die Heimlichkeit, wenn sich der Einbezug

  fremdester Schrecken schmiegt in den gefühlten Flug.

  Unter den Tauben, die allergeschonteste,

  niemals gefährdetste, kennt nicht die Zärtlichkeit;

  wiedererholtes Herz ist das bewohnteste:

  freier durch Widerruf freut sich die Fähigkeit.

  Über dem Nirgendssein spannt sich das Überall!

  Ach der geworfene, ach der gewagte Ball,

  füllt er die Hände nicht anders mit Wiederkehr:

  rein um sein Heimgewicht ist er mehr.

  [Dove that ventured outside]

  To Erika, for the festival of praise

  Dove that ventured outside, flying far from the dovecote:

  housed and protected again, one with the day, the night,

  knows what serenity is, for she has felt her wings

  pass through all distance and fear in the course of her wanderings.

  The doves that remained at home, never exposed to loss,

  innocent and secure, cannot know tenderness;

  only the won-back heart can ever be satisfied: free,

  through all it has given up, to rejoice in its mastery.

  Being arches itself over the vast abyss.

  Ah the ball that we dared, that we hurled into infinite space,

  doesn’t it fill our hands differently with its return:

  heavier by the weight of where it has been.

  Notes

  The German text in this book is that of the standard edition (Sämtliche Werke [SW], Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1955–1966), except for two lines in the Fifth Duino Elegy, where I have followed the Thurn und Taxis manuscript and the first edition.

  Letters excerpted and translated in these notes can be found in the following collections (except where otherwise indicated):

  Briefe aus den Jahren 1902–1906. Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1930.

  Briefe aus den Jahren 1907–1914. Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1933.

  Briefe aus Muzot, 1921–1926. Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1937.

  Briefe. Wiesbaden: Insel Verlag, 1950.

  Rainer Maria Rilke und Marie von Thurn und Taxis: Briefwechsel. Zürich/Wiesbaden: Niehans & Rokitansky Verlag und Insel Verlag, 1951.

  Rainer Maria Rilke/Lou Andreas-Salomé: Briefwechsel. Wiesbaden: Insel Verlag, 1952.

  Rainer Maria Rilke/Katharina Kippenberg: Briefwechsel. Wiesbaden: Insel Verlag, 1954.

  Briefwechsel mit Benvenuta. Eßlingen: Bechtle Verlag, 1954.

  Briefe an Sidonie Nádherný von Borutin. Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1973.

  Briefe an Nanny Wunderly-Volkart. Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1977.

  FROM THE BOOK OF HOURS (1905)

  I began with Things, which were the true confidants of my lonely childhood, and it was already a great achievement that, without any outside help, I managed to get as far as animals. But then Russia opened itself to me and granted me the brotherliness and the darkness of God, in whom alone there is community. That was what I named him then, the God who had broken in upon me, and for a long time I lived in the antechamber of his name, on my knees. Now, you would hardly ever hear me name him; there is an indescribable discretion between us, and where nearness and penetration once were, new distances stretch forth, as in the atom, which the new science conceives of as a universe in miniature. The comprehensible slips away, is transformed; instead of possession one learns relationship [statt des Besitzes lernt man den Bezug], and there arises a namelessness that must begin once more in our relations with God if we are to be complete and without evasion. The experience of feeling him recedes behind an infinite delight in everything that can be felt; all attributes are taken away from God, who is no longer say able, and fall back into creation, into love and death. It is perhaps only this that again and again took place in certain passages in the Book of Hours, this ascent of God out of the breathing heart—so that the sky was covered with him—, and his falling to earth as rain. But saying even that is already too much.

  (To Ilse Jahr, February 22, 1923)

  [I live my life in widening rings] (Berlin-Schmargendorf, September 20, 1899)

  [I am, O Anxious One. Don’t you hear my voice] (Berlin-Schmargendorf, September 24, 1899)

  [I find you, Lord, in all Things and in all] (Berlin-Schmargendorf, September 24, 1899)

  FROM THE BOOK OF PICTURES (First edition, 1902; second edition, 1906)

  Lament (Berlin-Schmargendorf, October 21, 1900)

  Autumn Day (Paris, September 21, 1902)

  Evening (Undated: 1902/1906; perhaps Sweden, autumn 1904)

  The Blindman’s Song (Paris, June 7, 1906)

  This and the following three songs are part of a ten-poem cycle called The Voices.

  To want to improve the situation of another human being presupposes an insight into his circumstances such as not even a poet has toward a character he himself has created. How much less insight is there in the so infinitely excluded helper, whose scatteredness become
s complete with his gift. Wanting to change or improve someone’s situation means offering him, in exchange for difficulties in which he is practiced and experienced, other difficulties that will find him perhaps even more bewildered. If at any time I was able to pour out into the mold of my heart the imaginary voices of the dwarf or the beggar, the metal of this cast was not obtained from any wish that the dwarf or the beggar might have a less difficult time. On the contrary: only through a praising of their incomparable fate could the poet, with his full attention suddenly given to them, be true and fundamental, and there is nothing that he would have to fear and refuse so much as a corrected world in which the dwarfs are stretched out and the beggars enriched. The God of completeness sees to it that these varieties do not cease, and it would be a most superficial attitude to consider the poet’s joy in this suffering multiplicity as an esthetic pretense.

  (To Hermann Pongs, October 21, 1924)

  The Drunkard’s Song (Paris, June 7/12, 1906)

  The Idiot’s Song (Paris, June 7, 1906)

  The Dwarf’s Song (Paris, June 7, 1906)

  FROM NEW POEMS (First Part, 1907; Second Part, 1908)

  Do the New Poems still seem so impersonal to you? You see, in order to speak about what happened to me, what I needed was not so much an instrument of emotion, but rather: clay. Involuntarily I undertook to make use of “lyric poetry” in order to form not feelings but things I had felt; every one of life’s events had to find a place in this forming, independently of the suffering or pleasure it had at first brought me. This formation would have been worthless if it hadn’t gone as far as the trans-formation of every accidental detail; it had to arrive at the essence.

  (To “une amie,” February 3, 1923)