Original by Ranier Maria Rilke - Translated by Lore Confino
THE NINTH ELEGY
Why, in the event, we can pass the brief span
of our lives as laurel, shaded a little darker
than all the other green, ripple-edged along each leaf,
as if touched by the smi1e of a passing breeze -
why then must we live as mortals, striving to avoid Destiny,
whilst yet yearning for Destiny.
... Oh, not for happiness,
that hasty gain soon overtaken by approaching loss;
not for curiosity, not to engage the heart
that might beat within laurel ...
but because being here means much, and because it seems
we are needed by everything around us;
by this fleeting World, which touches us so strangely.
Us, the most fleeting. Once only, Each and all just once.
Once and no more. And we too, one time, only once, and never again.
But to have lived that one time, even if only once,
to have been human and mortal, is irrefutable.
And so we exert ourselves, wanting to achieve,
wanting to contain Life in our mere hands, in eyes
too full of seeing, in hearts wanting for words.
Desire to become it. To whom might we give it?
Above all, we wish to keep Life forever!
Alas, into that other realm, what can we take with us?
Not the art of seeing, we were so slow in learning.
Nothing that happened here. Nothing at all.
That leaves our sorrows. It leaves before all else
the burden of life, the long encounters of love,
all the unsayable. And later, under the stars? What of them,
they are better unsayable. For even the traveller, come down
from mountain to valley below, brings no handful
of secretive earth, he bears a word revealed him:
the enzian, speaking in pure colour of yellow and blue.
Can it be, we are here, perhaps, just to say: House,
Bridge, Fountain, Gate, Jug, Fruit Tree, Window?
Or reach higher, to say Column, say Tower ... but to say,
understand, to name those things which they never
at heart, intended to be. Might not this secretive World
cunningly use lovers, forever urging then on,
so that each, and every thing, might find rapture
in the bounty of their feelings?
Threshold: what might it mean to two lovers,
to step across their own, much used threshold, wearing
it a little; they too, after the many before them,
and those yet to come ... mean little?
Here is the Age of the sayable: here its home.
Speak and avow. More than ever before, the values
we know and live by are lost, thrust aside and replaced
by action without image; action encrusted, yet ready
to break from its shell, as soon as it outgrows
the old and sets new limits for itself.
Our own heart lives and beats between
hammer and hammer; as our tongue
lives between its teeth, and still,
and yet, continues to praise.
Let Angels hear you praise the World, ours,
not the unsayable. You cannot impress him
with things sublimely felt. You are a mere novice
in the universe, and his feelings far surpass yours.
Hence, show him something simple, given shape,
fashioned by us, under our hands,
in our eyes. Tell him these things. His amazement
will surpass yours, the day you watched the rope maker
in Rome, or the potter by the Nile. Show him
how happy a thing can be, how pure and ours;
how even lamenting sorrow chooses to become manifest,
take on shape: serve as a thing, or die in a thing –
and transcend thereafter as melody from the violin.
All these things, whose own existence is upheld
in mortal life, understand that you praise them.
Transient, they look to us, the most transient,
for salvation: want to be taken into our hidden heart,
trusting to be transformed - o evermore –
in ourselves, no matter what our destiny.
Earth, is it not this, your desire? Invisibly
to arise in us? Is it not your dream, one day
to be invisible? Earth visible no more!
If not transformation, what is your pressing call?
Earth, beloved, I shall. Oh, believe it!
No need for more of your Springtimes to win me
to you... one, one alone, is too much for blood
to endure. From the first, I have been yours, unnamed,
pledged from afar. You, who were right, always;
you, who have given us death, familiar and ours,
your sacred inspiration.
See, I am alive! What lives in me?
Nor childhood nor future diminish ...
countless being wells up in my heart.