Original by Ranier Maria Rilke - Translated by Lore Confino
THE FIFTH ELEGY
Dedicated to Bertha Koenig
Tell me, but who are they, these travellers,
more fugitive, even than we? Who seem driven, urged on
from the very beginning, by an ever demanding will –
but whose ...whom to please?
which wrings and swings them, flings them,
bends them, throws them and catches them back.
And they come tumbling down
as if out of lubricated, smoother air,
on to the threadbare carpet, worn thin from constant leaping:
this lost carpet in space, stuck on like a plaster,
as if suburban sky had done injury to earth.
And no sooner there,
upright and on show: Destiny's capital letter...
even the strongest men are seized again, and rolled
in sport, relentlessly grasped, as Augustus the Strong,
at table, might toy with a tin plate.
Ah, and around this centre,
the rose of spectators blooms and sheds
its petals: around this pestle, the pistil
caught by its own pollen dust,
brings forth its show fruit, yet again, quite unawares,
sparkling with surface gloss
of artificiality.
There stands the old weight-lifter,
now withered and wrinkled, and only fit
to drum, shrunk into his massive skin,
as if it once housed two men; one already
dead and buried, and he had outlived
the other, deaf, and befuddled, at times,
alone in his widowed skin.
But there is the young man, looking as if
he was son of neck and nun,
sturdy, full of brawn and simple-mindedness.
o you,
who were given to suffering that was small still,
once for a plaything, in one
of its long periods of healing...
You, feeling the impact, as only unripe
fruit know, when you fall a hundred times daily,
bruised, from jointly built framework
of motion, which quicker than water, in minutes,
passes through lent, summer and autumn,
and bounce against the grave.
In moments, during brief pause, a tender look
across to your mother (herself rarely tender)
steals into your face, but this timid,
tentative glance passes fleetingly from face
into body, and is lost. Again, the man claps his hands
for the leap... and before ever you feel
pain grow keener or closer to your racing heart,
the sting in the soles of your feet masks
the spring of your own arising, and brings a few quickly
chased tears to your eyes. And even then...
the smile...!
Angel! o take it, pluck it, this small-blossomed herb.
Find it a vase and preserve it well. Place it among
the joys not yet given us. In beautiful urn, laud it
with florid, flowering inscription: Subrisio saltat.
And you, lovely one,
above you, silently, arousing pleasures
pass you by. Perhaps your fringes are happy
for you, or the green metallic silk, bodice-tight
over your young breasts, feels boundlessly spoiled,
and lacks for nothing. You, who are constantly
in the changing scales of balance, passive displayed
show-fruit, in the hands of shouldering men.
Where, oh where, is the place - I carry it in my heart,
where they still failed to accomplish, where they fell
off each other like ill-mated creatures,
where weights were still heavy;
where plates toppled off vainly spinning sticks.
And suddenly, into that effort-laden nowhere,
suddenly, the inexplicable moment, when the sheer
too-little, mysteriously changes
into the empty too-much,
where the many-numbered account
adds up to nil.
Squares, o the square in Paris, the forever showplace,
where Madame Lamort, the milliner,
takes the restless earth paths, the endless ribbons,
loops then, winds then and fashions them
into new bows, ruches, flowers, rosettes;
artificial fruit all untrue of colour...
for the cheap winter hats of fate.
........................................
Angel: if there were a place, somewhere, unknown to us,
and there, on ineffable carpet, lovers who never did find
fulfilment here with us, performed their daring,
high trapeze act of the heart...their towers of delight,
on ladders, where floor never was, leaning
against each other, trembling,
and came to do it...
ringed by an audience of countless, silent dead:
would not those dead, then, cast their last,
their closely hoarded, ever-kept-secret, eternally
valid coins of happiness before that pair,
at long last truly smiling, upon that carpet,
...stilled at last?