Cool translation of Rilke

On this blog, we take poetry seriously.
Listen, we do politics (slam Bush every chance we get, which is plenty); we like books, sex, weird stuff and deep thoughts (philosophy, Theory, feminism); we show naked people (do let me know where I can corral nekkid guys -- non-porn -- to add to the women), and that about covers it.
But when we find a cool translation of Rilke, like this one, we get so excited, we could stick our dick in it. These lines are terrifically clear, straightforward, and beautiful:

For beauty is only a step
removed from a burning terror we barely sustain,
and we worship it for the graceful sublimity
with which it disdains to consume us.

How's that? Fuck me with an urn. The translator is John Waterfield, who has a doctorate in English literature from Oxford University. He has lived for a number of years in Germany, and is deeply immersed in German culture. He has spent most of his life as a music teacher, and is now working full time as a translator. His book of poems, 'Lost Children', was published in 2001. Why, he asks -- I will speak in my own person now -- was I drawn to the Duino Elegies? Because they are so imbued with the consciousness of loss. With the tragic sense of inevitable separation which is an unavoidable concomitant of life on this beautiful, breathing and fragile planet. I could not have come to appreciate this so deeply, had my wife not died, aged 33, of cancer in 1985. I have written of that in my poems, and elsewhere; it does not seem appropriate to say more about it here. Rilke, I believe, was fully open to the suffering of life, as few human individuals have been -- perhaps Gustav Mahler was another -- without ever giving way to the self-centredness of self-pity. What he personally suffered, in terms of his individual life, was transmuted, universalised. It became part of what is meant by being human. That is the point where we can meet him. That is the meeting point for all of us.
The slayer and the slain
have nothing to explain
and nothing to deny.
Tell me why, tell me why.
We will meet each other eventually, the perpetrator and the victim, the slayer and the slain, the exploiter and the exploited -- meet each other in the blue zone, or is it the ultraviolet, the place anyway where there can be no dissembling of intentions, and everything is exactly as it is -- and we will see that we were one all along, that we are all human, that nothing divides us. I believe this will come, with the certainty of sunrise.

SOUNDS LIKE a cool guy, as if this translation isn't all the evidence you need. Rilke brings the sublime home, that's what he does -- and Waterfield helps us get this immeasurably, in English, a language foreign to Rilke, in which he sounds perfectly at home in this magnificently magisterial -- and yes, simple -- translation.

THE FIRST ELEGY

Who, if I cried, would hear me, of the angelic
orders? or even supposing that one should suddenly
carry me to his heart – I should perish under the pressure
of his stronger nature. For beauty is only a step
removed from a burning terror we barely sustain,
and we worship it for the graceful sublimity
with which it disdains to consume us. Each angel burns.
And so I hold back, and swallow down the yearning,
the dark call heard in the cave of the heart. Alas,
who then can serve our need? Not angels, not human
beings; and even the sly beasts begin to perceive
that we do not feel too much at home
in our interpreted world. Perhaps we can call on
a tree we noticed on a slope somewhere
and passed in our daily walk – the streets
of a city we knew, or a habit’s dumb fidelity,
a habit that liked our space, and so it stayed.
Oh, and the night, the night – when the wind full of emptiness
feeds on our features – how should she not be there?
– the long desired, mild disenchantress,
sure disappointer of the labouring heart.
Is she kinder to lovers perhaps? No, they hide from her,
seeking security in an embrace.
Haven’t you grasped it yet? Throw from your arms the nothing that
lies between them
into the space that we breathe as an atmosphere –
to enable the birds, perhaps, in new zest of feeling
to hurl their flight through the expanded air.

Yes, the springtimes needed you. Stars now and then
craved your attention. A wave rose
in the remembered past; or as you came by the open window
a violin was singing its soul out. All this
was a given task. But were you capacious
enough to receive it? Weren’t you always
distracted with expectation, imagining
these hints the heralds of a human love? (Where will you keep her,
the loved one – you with your vast strange thoughts
always coming and going, and taking up too much houseroom.)
If you feel longing, though, sing of the lovers, the great ones;
who has adequately immortalized
their alchemy of the heart? The unrequited -
you envied them almost, finding them so much more
loving than the physically satisfied. Begin, then,
the praise of what can never be praised enough.
Consider: the hero maintains an identity,
even his last stand merely a last occasion
for self-assertion – a kind of ultimate birth.
But lovers Nature takes to herself again
as if she lacked resources
to do it a second time: exhausted and fulfilled.
Have you pondered enough on Gaspara Stampa – that any girl
whose lover jilts her can take that life as a model
and think: I could be like her?
Shouldn’t at last these ancient familiar sorrows
bear feeling fruit in our lives? Isn’t it time
to free ourselves from the loved one, and bear the tension
as the arrow endures the tensed string – to gather its forces
and spring to a state of being that is more
than it could ever be? It is death to stand still.

Voices; voices, and echoes. Listen, my heart, as only
saints listened of old, till the giant summons
lifted them from the ground – but they went on kneeling,
impossibly, and stopped the ears of the heart.
That was their way. Don’t think, though, that you could endure
God’s voice – far from it. But listen for the whisper,
the wind that breathes out of silence continuing news.
Those who died young: their fate a picture
you saw on speaking tablets at Rome or Naples
or in Santa Maria Formosa, where a few bare words
spoke volumes.
What do they want of me? That I should gently
undo the apparent injustice of their deaths:
that last hindrance to their spirits’ progress.

Strange it is, to inhabit the earth no longer,
to have no more use for habits hardly acquired –
roses, and other things of singular promise,
no longer to see them in terms of a human future;
to be no more all that we nurtured and carried
in endlessly anxious hands, and to leave by the roadside
one’s own name even, like a child’s broken doll.
Strange, not to have wishes any more.
To see, where things were related, only a looseness
fluttering in space. And its hard, being dead,
and takes much difficult recapitulation
to glimpse the tiniest hint of eternity.
The living, though, are too ready to posit a border
between two states of being: a human mistake.
Angels, it’s said, are often uncertain
whether they traverse the living or the dead. The eternal current
pours through both worlds, bearing all ages with it,
and overpowers their voices with their song.

They finally need us no longer, the early departed:
they grow beyond earthly things, as a child mildly
outgrows the mother’s breast. But we, left standing
before closed doors – we from whose living sorrow
blessedest growth can spring – where should we be
without them?

Think again of the story
how at Linus’ departing a boldly tentative music
pierced, for the first time, the soul’s blank grief;
and in that startled vacuum from which an almost godlike
boy exited for ever, the air fell
into that intermittent pure vibration
which for us mortals is rapture, and comfort, and help.