Original by Ranier Maria Rilke - Translated by Lore Confino
THE FOURTH ELEGY
O Trees of Life, when is your Winter?
We are not attuned; not like the knowing
migrant birds. Too late, and left behind,
we force ourselves in sudden haste upon the winds
and then down on same uncaring pond.
In fullest bloom we know our withering.
Yet, somewhere still roam lions in the glory
of their prime, untouched by fear of their decline.
But we, when quite decided on one course,
already feel drawn towards the other.
Conflict is ever close. Even intimate lovers
forever transgress their boundaries, who pledge
each other wide open space, hunting and home.
And so, to open our eyes, in lightning sketch,
this ground of contradiction is prepared for us,
painstakingly, explicitly, that we may see.
Still we are blind to inner feelings,
know only what forms them from outside.
Who has not sat in dread before the curtain
of his heart? It rises. .the stage is set for: Parting.
Easy to understand: That familiar garden, revealed
and trembling slightly. Then only ...in comes the Dancer.
Not that one. Enough! however nimbly he may move,
it is disguise, and he becomes an Urban Man,
steps through his kitchen, walks around his rooms.
I cannot bear these half-filled masks.
Far better the puppet. Full, at least. I will suffer
the stuffed body and the strings, and the set face
made for show. I am here. Ready and waiting...
Even if the lights go down; even if they tell me:
That's all. Even if only emptiness drifts
from the stage in breath of greyness; even if not
one of my silent ancestors is left to sit with me: No woman No
longer even the boy with the squint
in his brown eyes. I shall stay all the same.
There is always something I can watch.
Am I not right? Father, you had a bitter taste
of life on my account: that turbid, first ferment
of my compulsion, as I grew up. You tasted it again,
and yet again, and troubled by the after-taste
of so much unknown destiny, you peered into
my clouded, unsure gaze. You, Father, who are often
since you died, watchful inside of me, and anxious
within my hope. You offered up your own serenity –
those realms of serenity of the dead, for my tiny
bit of Fate. Am I not right? And all of you,
who loved me for that spark of love I had for you,
from which I always turned aside, because the space
I so loved in your eyes passed into cosmic Space,
and you were gone...
...am I not right, then,
when overcome by longing, to wait before
the puppet stage ...no, to stare with such expectancy,
that in the end, to compensate my gaze, an Angel's called
and plays his part; who wrenches up those puppets
on the stage. Angel and Puppet: now, at last, a play!
Fusion of all we constantly divide by merely
being here. Now only can arise in our seasons
transforming change, within the wheel of change.
Now can the Angel play his part above us, and beyond us.
Regard the dying: might they not suspect how full
of pretence is all we undertake. Nothing is what it is.
O childhood hours, measured out in more than past
remembrances, and free of our future.
We grew of course, and strove at times to grow
up fast, half to please those, who had nothing else
in life than being fully grown. And left alone,
we were happy with all lasting things, and lingered
in the margin between real world and play,
in the place which was created from the first
for unblemished happening.
Who will show us the true child? Who sets
it in the Constellations, and places
the staff to mark distance in its hand?
Who makes the child death from grey bread
that hardens, or leaves it in
the rounded mouth, like the core of some
sweet apple? ...Easy enough to understand
the murderer's act, but this:
to contain death, the whole of death,
death even before life, gently, without anger,
is beyond words.