Full Throttle
after Rilke
Could we but quit the beating hours, the numbers,
thrash through bushes with the ardency of hunters,
their calls, the yelping hounds,
coolness showering us with joy, the morning breezes,
till we feel the newness, the touch that frees us
one morning out in the open.
Such radiance was meant for us, buoyancy, arabesques.
Not this staring in a room, another night’s numbness,
another numb, determined day.
They crush so closely forever: this is what life rightly is
since the creature is alive — each step by step by step Yes
till the deathblow comes its way.
* * * * *
Hand
after Rilke
Look at the little mouse
baffled and afraid
in the room, lying
for twenty heartbeats
in a hand, a person’s hand, one
held out freely, firmly,
to keep it safe.
Though now
on the window sill,
free, it holds fast in fear
of itself and everything
that surrounds it, such
strangeness, the universe
it’s incapable
of understanding.
How puzzling — a hand
even when it intends
to save. Even in
the most benevolent
hand, there was still
money, and there is more
than enough of death.
* * * * *
We
after Rilke
These nights, hand-wrung, twisted,
We tumble from haunt to haunt;
And where lovers distill like dewdrops,
We each are a lodestone plummeting.
* * * * *
When
after Rilke
When will, when will it, when will it all suffice —
the plaints and prattles? Was there never one person
who mastered putting words together? Why keep trying?
Are we not, we humans, are we not beaten
senseless by books, endlessly, like bells struck in bell jars?
When between two books a hushed heaven shines,
or at evening an artless patch of earth, you should rejoice.
Louder than thunderstorms, louder than oceans,
humans have been clamoring … what amplitudes of quietness
must abide in infinite space, since still the shrieking
people hear the crickets chittering. Into the ethereal
we scream at, it is the star that glitters on silently for us.
If only the farthest, the most ancient fathers would answer,
and we, hearing them, the first — at last! — human listeners.
/ / / / /
Daniel Tobin on his translations
These four versions of late poems by Rainer Maria Rilke seek to “carry over” the great German poet’s intentions both vitally and formally into English language poems that are deeply resonant with the originals though nonetheless resound as credible poems in the target language. I say versions, because as the term implies these are “turns” on Rilke’s poems, just as the word “translation” literally means “to carry over.” They are not, emphatically, “imitations” in Robert Lowell’s use of that term, in which whole stanzas may be added in a more extensive conversation with the original. “Full Throttle” is a version of “Vollmacht,” “Hand” is a version of “Die Hande,” and “We” is a version of the poem that begins “Wir, in den ringenden Nachten …” Finally, “When” is a version of an untitled poem that begins “… Wann wird, wann wird, wannn wird …”