Day 14: "The Duino Elegies" Rainer Maria Rilke (translation by Gary Miranda)

[druidspell]

Someday, leaving the grim vision behind,
may I celebrate and praise assenting angels!
May I strike the keys with precision, and may none
of the heart's hammers fall on slack or uncertain
or breaking strings. May the tears that stream down
my face make me more radiant, and may those
that are less conspicuous bloom.

And how I will cherish you then, you nights
of grieving, sisters I couldn't console.
How I wish I had gone on my knees more freely,
surrendered myself more loosely to your loosened hair.
Sorrows -- how we waste them! How we keep looking ahead
at their sad length, to see if maybe they'll end.
When really they're nothing more than our winter foliage,
our dark evergreen, just one of the seasons
of our hidden year -- and not only season,
but setting, settlement, campground, the place we live.

But the real city of pain -- how strange the streets
are there-- the steady roar that passes for stillness,
the swaggering crumbling monument to Confusion,
cast from the mold of inanity, and painted gold.
How an angel would trample to dust their marketplace
of comforts, just alongside the ready-made
purchased church, as clean and shut and bewildered
as a post office on Sunday. And on the outskirts,
circling the town like a border, is the town fair.
Roller coasters of Freedom! High-divers and jugglers
of Enthusiasm! And the lifelike shooting galleries
where Luck is dressed to kill, and where the targets
fall over with a tinny sound when a marksman
happens to hit one. Then, leaving the cheers,
he staggers on to try his luck elsewhere;
for the booths are calling all the curious,
the barkers are barking, the drums drumming.
And then there's the real treat -- for adults only:
the sex-life of money! the anatomical techniques --
and not just for amusement! The genitals of gold --
everything, the whole works, the real facts!
Educational! Guaranteed to increase fertility!

Oh but just beyond all this, behind the last billboard,
the one with the ads for "Deathless", the bitter beer
that beer-drinkers find sweet as long as they munch
on plenty of fresh distractions -- just behind
that billboard, right in back of it, everything's real!
Children are playing and lovers are holding each other --
over there, seriously, in the sad-looking grass
where the dogs obey their nature.

The young man walks on, still drawn by something --
perhaps by the love of some young Sorrow.
He follows behind her into the meadow. She says:
It's still far; we live way out there...
Where?
But the young man follows. He's stirred by the way
she carries herself. Her shoulders, her neck --
perhaps she comes from a line of nobility.
Still, he leaves her, he turns around, looks back,
waves... What's the use? She's a sorrow.

Only those who die young follow her lovingly,
and they only in the earliest stage of eternity,
when they're being weaned from earth. She waits
for the girls and becomes their friend, gently
showing them what she wears: the pearls of grief
and the finely spun veils of patience.
With the boys she merely walks, silent.

But later, in the valley where they live,
one of the older Sorrows answers the boy's questions.
Once, she says, we were a great family, we Sorrows.
Our fathers worked the mines deep in those mountains.
Even still, among humans, you'll sometimes find
a polished fragment of primeval pain or,
from an old volcano, a petrified slag of anger.
Yes, that came from up there. Once, we were rich.

And she leads him lightly through the broad countryside
of Sorrow, shows him the temple columns or the ruins
of those castles where the lords of Sorrow once ruled
the land wisely. Shows him the tall trees of tears
and the fields where sadness blossoms, known to the living
only as tender leaves; shows him the herds of grief
as they graze. And sometimes a bird gets frightened
and breaks across their line of vision, spelling out
the long written word of its lonely cry. In the evening
she takes him out to the graves of the elders
of the House of Sorrows, the sibyls and the prophets.
But as night comes on, they wander more slowly,
and after awhile that other tombstone, the moon, rises
and watches over everything, brother to the one that watches
over the Nile -- the Sphynx -- with a face like a secret chamber.
And they marvel at that head with its regal corona,
marvel at how, quietly and forever, it has set
a human face on the scale of the stars.

Dizzy from just having died, he can't quite focus it.
But her glance scares an owl up behind the corona's rim.
And the bird, slowly brushing the moon's cheek
at the roundest and ripest curve, faintly traces
on the new hearing powers of the dead boy,
as on the pages of an open book, the indescribable outline.

And higher, the stars. New ones. The stars
of the land of grief. She names them slowly: "There, look --
The Horseman, The Rod. And that fuller constellation
is called The Wreath of Fruit. And further over,
toward the pole: Cradle, Path, The Burning Book,
Doll, Window. And in the southern sky,
pure as if held in the palm of a sacred hand,
the clear, brilliant 'M', which stands for Mothers..."

But the dead boy must go on. Silently, the older Sorrow
brings him as far as the wide ravine where,
there in the moonlight, it shimmers: the Spring of Joy.
She names it reverently, adding: "In the human world,
it is an enduring stream."
They stand at the foot of the mountains
and she embraces him, weeping.

Alone, he climbs to the mountains of primeval pain,
and not once do his footsteps make a sound
as he follows his soundless fate.

And yet if the endlessly dead were to try to awaken us,
to tell us what it's like, they'd point perhaps
to the catkins of the leafless hazel, those small flowers
that hang down, or maybe they'd mean the rain
that falls to the black earth in early spring --

and we, because we always think of happiness as rising,
would feel an emotion very close to alarm,
the one we always feel when a happy thing
falls.