Rainer Maria Rilke

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Baladine Klossowska, “Rilke leaning on a small sofa at Muzot”. Watercolor with a poem by Rilke inscribed above : “Der Gram ist schweres Erdreich”, september 1922.
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Die Sonette an Orpheus
II


Und fast ein Mädchen wars und ging hervor
aus diesem einigen Glück von Sang und Leier
und glänzte klar durch ihre Frühlingsschleier
und machte sich ein Bett in meinem Ohr.

Und schlief in mir. Und alles war ihr Schlaf.
Die Bäume, die ich je bewundert, diese
fühlbare Ferne, die gefühlte Wiese
und jedes Staunen, das mich selbst betraf.

Sie schlief die Welt. Singender Gott, wie hast
du sie vollendet, daß sie nicht begehrte,
erst wach zu sein? Sieh, sie erstand und schlief.

Wo ist ihr Tod? O, wirst du dies Motiv
erfinden noch, eh sich dein Lied verzehrte?—
Wo sinkt sie hin aus mir?... Ein Mädchen fast....


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Rainer Maria Rilke

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Rainer Maria Rilke
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The Fourth Elegy

Trees of life. When is your winter. Human
beings don’t cohere. Are not prompted in the blood
like migrant birds. Overtaken, late, we take off abruptly
into the wind and crash on some lost lake of ice.
To flower and to fade meet in us.
Altogether elsewhere, lions roam, unaware of weakness.

But we, intent upon one thing,
are already pulled into another. We’re
split. Aren’t lovers, ever more deeply inside each other, actually
doing solitary, confined by those cave-drawings
that promise vastness, hunting and firelight?
Elaborate gradations of background are laid down
to highlight the moment, the actual, living contour of emotion,
known only if at all by what shapes it from outside.

Who has not sat, bang to rights before the curtains of the heart.
They part; the stage is set for a farewell. You’ve been there.
The eternal garden, swaying a bit. Then the Dancer. He has to be
kidding. Music fails to disguise a jowly bourgeois, groping at midnight
in his fridge. You sad Muppet. It’s the incompleteness of deception
I can’t stomach. Give me paint, shell and wires. At least dolls are
whole. Here. I’m waiting.

And if the lights go out, and I’m told that that’s that,
even if gray drafts of emptiness are billowing towards me from the stage,
even if not a single soul among my Dead wants to sit next to me-
not that cobwebbed woman, not that boy with the motionless brown eye-
I’ll sit here anyway. It’s cool. Isn’t that right,
you, to whom life tasted so bitter after you took a sip of mine,
Father – who, as I grew up, kept on sipping, the taste of such a
strange future so disturbing- you, who have trembled so often
for my well-being since your death, relinquishing that calm
that the Dead do tend to bang on about, their loud insistence on a quiet life,
traded for my little chunk of Destiny? Hmm?

Am I right or am I right, and you others, would I be correct
in thinking you loved me
for my small beginnings of love for you from which I always
turned away because the intervals in your features grew and changed
into Cosmic Space, and you were gone? So I’ve got to do
the right thing, stay put in my seat, in front of the curtain, no,
gaze so intensely that some Angel will have to rush in from the wings
to match my offer, and jiggle those puppets into life.
Angel and Puppet. En fin de compte, a real play.

Then what we habitually keep separate, but live inside,
can merge. Then will arise from our seasonal lives the
Transformation. Altogether elsewhere, the Angel plays.
The dying must see how unreal and full of pretence everything we do is,
here where nothing is allowed to become itself.
O childhood hours, when more than the Past lay
behind Figures and streamed from the head of the Future.
Impatient to be grown-up, we felt our bodies growing,
half for the sake of those who didn’t have much left
except grown-upness. Yet were, playing by ourselves,
enchanted with duration, and would stand in blissful space
between World and Toy, at a point established from the outset
for things to happen.

Who shows the child as he is? Installs her in the zodiac
or sets the wand of distance in her hand? Who makes their death
out of grey bread that turns hard or leaves it in their open mouths,
so like the ripe applecore... Murder is easily grasped.
But, that death, death entire, and before life has even begun,
can be so softly held to the heart without turning
away from life, that is wholly inexpressible, is
something else again.

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Behind the Seen

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Mermen. Russian lubok. circa 1866
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این جا پشت پرده ی رندان

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Rainer Maria Rilke (4 December 1875 – 29 December 1926)

What is required of us is that we love the difficult and learn to deal with it. In the difficult are the friendly forces, the hands that work on us. Right in the difficult we must have our joys, our happiness, our dreams: there against the depth of this background, they stand out, there for the first time we see how beautiful they are.

— Selected Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke (1960)

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Samuel Beckett: April 13, 1906 – December 22, 1989

“I grow gnomic. It is the last phase.” - The Letters of Samuel Becket 1929–1940 (2009), p. 209

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From an interview Beckett granted to a French newspaper:
- I never read philosophy.
- Why not?
- I don’t understand it.
[…]
- Why did you write your books?

- I don’t know. I’m not an intellectual. I just feel things. I invented Molloy and the rest on the day I understood how stupid I’d been. I began then to write down the things I feel.

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Robert Bly, poet, translator (Tomas Tranströmer, among others), masculinity guru, abysmal taste in neckties and waist-coats:

Born Dec. 23, 1926 - 83 today!

Driving through Minnesota During the Hanoi Bombings - Robert Bly

We drive between lakes just turning green;
Late June. The white turkeys have been moved
A second time to new grass.
How long the seconds are in great pain!
Terror just before death,
Shoulders torn, shot
From helicopters. “I saw the boy
being tortured with a telephone generator,”
The sergeant said.
“I felt sorry for him
And blew his head off with a shotgun.”
These instants become crystals,
Particles
The grass cannot dissolve. Our own gaiety
Will end up
In Asia, and you will look down in your cup
And see
Black Starfighters.
Our own cities were the ones we wanted to bomb!
Therefore we will have to
Go far away
To atone
For the suffering of the stringy-chested
And the short rice-fed ones, quivering
In the helicopter like wild animals,
Shot in the chest, taken back to be questioned.

Robert Bly, “Driving through Minnesota During the Hanoi Bombings” from Selected Poems. Copyright © 1967 and renewed 1995 by Robert Bly. Reprinted with the permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

Photo by Chris Felver

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Juan Ramón Jiménez, Spanish Nobel Laureate of Literature (1956), was born Dec. 24, 1881 (d. 1958). An advocate of ‘pure poetry’ Jiménez was awarded the Nobel “for his lyrical poetry, which in Spanish language constitutes an example of high spirit and artistical purity”…

Nonetheless, Jiménez also wrote erotic verse about his poetic alter ego dallying with a number of nuns…

Three verses

Sister! We stripped off our ardent bodies
In endless and senseless profusion….
It was autumn and the sun - don’t you remember?
Added sweet sadness to the white splendour of our abode
Sister Pilar, are your eyes still so black?
And your mouth so fresh and red?
And your breasts…? How are they?

Oh, do you recall how you would come into my room late at night, calling to me like a mother, telling me off like a child?

When she fled, in a flight of deranged wimples,
from the impetuous will of my desire
she would seek shelter in a corner, like a cat …
but her nails were sweeter than my kisses.

— Juan Ramón Jiménez

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Matthew Arnold (Dec. 24, 1822 - 1888), Victorian poet with spectacular sideburns, was the type of writer who liked to chastise and instruct the reader on contemporary social issues… Not surprisingly he also had an influential career as a critic.

A Caution to Poets

What poets feel not, when they make,
A pleasure in creating,
The world, in its turn, will not take
Pleasure in contemplating. (1867)

Photo of Arnold, 1863

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Charles Olson reading at an art museum, San Francisco, CA, US - February 1957, LIFE

Poet-giant and giant poet, Charles Olson, was born Dec. 27, 1910, and robbed from us prematurely by cancer in 1970.

Charles Olson, Song 1, from The Songs of Maximus

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Daniil Kharms (Dec. 30, 1905 – 1942) was an early Soviet-era surrealist and absurdist poet, writer and dramatist. He signed his name in Latin alphabet as Daniel Charms…

Splendid photo of Kharms, plus unknown - possibly Alisa Poret

Kharms text:

“Once Orlov overate on mashed peas and died. And Krylov, having found out about it, died too. And Spiridonov died on his own accord. And Spiridonov’s wife fell off the cupboard and died too. And Spiridonov’s children drowned in the pond. And Spiridonov’s grandmother took to drink and went off panhandling. And Mikhailov stopped combing and got sick with dandruff. And Kruglov drew a lady with a whip and lost his mind. And Perehrestov was wired 400 roubles and therefore acted with such self-importance that he got fired from his job.

These are all decent people, but they just can’t get on in life on a firmfooting.”

Daniil Harms (Incidences #2)

Transl: Roman Turovsky - Source

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Rainer Maria Rilke

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Rilke With his wife Clara

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راینر ماریا ریلکه

فارسی : رضا براهنی

از " غزل هایی برای اُورفه"ه

و به تقریب دوشیزه ای بود که از آن هماهنگی یکتای سرود و چنگ قدم بیرون گذاشت
و با شکل دوشیزه اش بر من ظاهر شد
و در اعماق گوشم بستری برای خود گسترد

و در من خوابید
و خوابش همه چیز بود:ه
درخت های ترسناک، و فاصله هایی که چندان عمیق احساسشان کرده بودم
که می توانستم لمسشان کنم، و در چمنزاران در بهار
همه ی شگفتی هایی که چنگ در قلبم انداخته بودند

او جهان را خوابید [ سراسر یک جهان را با خوابش در خواب برد]ه
او که خدا را آواز می خواند
چگونه آن خواب ، آنهمه کامل بود که دیگر نمی خواست هرگز از آن بیدار شود؟ه
ببین: بیدار شد و خوابید.ه

مرگ او حالا کجاست ؟ آه ، پیش از آنکه سرودت به خاکستر بدل شود؟ه
آیا این مضمون را کشف خواهی کرد؟ه
به کدام سو ناپدید می شود؟ه
به تقریب ، یک دوشیزه ...ه

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