“The sunken” (L/S) is a literal translation but it is unidiomatic; “unripe spirits” (M) and “unripe ones” (R) involve a particular reading of the text; whilst “the interred” (L/S) and “spirits, entombed” seem to imply that these “Versunkenen” have remained in the lower depths rather than have reached the surface. The spaces that we have made our own must be “frighteningly vast” (MC) “terrifyingly great” (R), “da sie Jahrtausende nicht unseres Fühlns überfülln”. O the happiness of the midge. reached the depths continue to seek the earth. würbest du wohl, nicht minder –, daß, noch unsichtbar, The stanza begins with verbs of movement and substantives of change (“Wandel”) and concludes with a single sentence centred on the repetition of two key terms: “sehen” and “Alles”. / How often since have you out-distanced the one / you loved, breathing, breathless after the joyous / chase, going nowhere but into freedom?” (MC). Assertive temporal motifs dominate this section of the stanza, and they are supported by apodictic statements that tell us that we live on the wrong side of responsive experience. (How terribly big they must be, / when, with thousands of years of our feeling, they’re not / overcrowded. where you felt the presence of Being. If this is the case, then “understands” is perhaps the more appropriate translation rather than “grasp” or the unidiomatic “absorb”. / Our era builds for itself vast storehouses of power, and formless / like the straining forces it wrests thrillingly from everything. Does the lover reach the angel’s knee? wie der spannende Drang, den er aus allem gewinnt. after all, neglect these spaces, these bountiful spaces Nächte, sondern die Sterne, die Sterne der Erde. And it falls apart. We are / all this! Knowledge may have been displaced, may even be invisible, but nonetheless exists, waiting to transform us inwardly. Or someone / dies and becomes it. To be dead at last and know them infinitely, / the stars: then how, how, how could we forget them! Or that some animal, mutely and serenely, looks through us. The simple “note” or “notes” (the plural suggesting the upbeat of “auf”, which supports the sense of active annunciation) is probably the most appropriate. The literal translation, which gives us “being here is glorious”, is a flat verbal formulation (with almost holiday-postcard connotations), which loses the existential weight of the German phrase. So, after all, we have not / failed to make use of the spaces, these generous spaces, / these, / our spaces. The phrase has been translated as “straining energy” and “straining forces”, both of which put the emphasis on the exertion of this “Drang”. / Temples he knows no longer. One solution is to expand the pronoun into a clause, as in “all living things” (R/S), but this involves a specific reading of the text. / But we so lightly forget what our laughing neighbour / neither confirms nor envies. The sunken are always seeking / earth again. / What is really out there we only know / by looking at the countenance of creatures. For how, how, how to forget them!” (L/S), “Not only all the dawns of summer –, not only / how they change themselves into day and shine with beginning. with silence a day of pure affirmation. The former simply means “local” or “nearby” (R). It is possible that what is being described here is the anticipation rather than the fact of death. / Forever turned to the created, we see / in it only reflections of the free realm / we darken with our very presence. / Do not take this to be wooing, / Angel, even if it were! / Yes – where one still stands, a thing prayed to once, / worshipped, knelt before – it holds, just as it is / and it passes into the outwardly invisible. Our life / passes in transformation. this call now it had been made? In that case, “throughout” is a possible alternative translation. For ourselves, / we want to make it visible – though the most / evident happiness goes unrecognised / unless we can transform it – and that is within” (MC). Angel, / I’ll show it to you as well – there! In its place comes self-realisation within the womb, the place where small beasties (described here, perhaps, in mock ironic fashion) disport themselves. It spills from us. Angel / there! / Turned back to face creation’s face, we see / the mere reflection of the free reaches, / which we have darkened. The general sense of this line is that we humans are bereft of that “pure” integrity in our contact with the world that animals enjoy. It is like an outstretched / arm, my call. / For even the next is far for mankind. Here, his praise is not directed toward some transcendent deity but rather toward the world and all that is ‘sayable’ about it. Or an animal / mutely, serenely, looks us through and through. Even “Mädchen”, girls who have emerged from the literal graves of their deaths in the preceding stanza into the moral graves of city life, are open to “Hiersein”. not only, after the late thunderstorm, the breath Almost, as if by mistake, it opens itself to them, to one behind the other … But neither can. – In your vision, it will stand, Als Kind, verliert sich eins im Stilln an dies und wird, Denn nah am Tod sieht man den Tod nicht mehr. Es zerfällt. / Temples are no longer known. he turns, stops, lingers –, / so we live here, forever taking leave” (M), “Who swivelled us like this, so that whatever / course we take we have the air of someone / who is departing? The stanza concludes with lines that circle around the tropes of “sehen” and “Alles” where, for once, repetition is not sterility but the confirmation of being in the world. The simple “other” is an alternative translation. / didn’t she reach your knee –? First the small / questioning notes intensified all around / by the sheltering silence of a pure, affirmative day. The poet’s purpose, then, is to bear witness to this unity, and, in a sense, ‘unify’ the world through the posture of praise by which we take the visible world into our consciousness and come to recognise an essential inner unity amid the very real brokenness that marks its ‘outer’ form. We are – oh, great one – will you proclaim / what we can achieve? Translations include: “With all its eyes the creature-world beholds / the open. “Vergehender” and “fremd”, however, problematise this positive image. Free from death. / Here, all is distance; there, it was breath. Die Adern voll Dasein. ein stummes, aufschaut, ruhig durch uns durch. These are words that stake out the spatial parameters of selfhood, announcing a theme that moves back and forth between the external world of inauthenticity (the product of modernity) and the internal realm of authenticity (that lies as a possibility within the individual). Although forever turned to face Creation, we see nothing but the mirror image of what Rilke terms “des Frein”. of power, formless, like the charged force is not sufficient for such praising. all the stars: then, how, how, how could we forget them! als Fallen, rings um ihren freien Ausgang. that were ours. Sterne zu sich aus gesicherten Himmeln. – This once stood amongst people, / in the midst of Fate, the annihilator, in the midst / of our Not-Knowing-Where-Next, like an existence, and curved / stars down to it out of their sure heavens. But these are both too precise and too technical, and do not capture the broad, if vague expanse of time that “Weilen” conjures up. His work as a poet, as he had come to understand it, was to affirm a unity in this world, in the midst of the apparent fragmentation and loss that seemed an overwhelming pressure during this period. ganz eine Stunde, ein mit den Maßen der Zeit kaum “Saying farewell” and “forever in farewell” are not really resonant enough to communicate these qualities of the word. We arrange it. It begins with the assertive conditional “wäre”, which introduces a concept that runs throughout the Elegies but one that is not always explicitly formulated: consciousness (“Bewußtheit”): mit seinem Wandel. / For to each was granted an hour, – perhaps not quite / so much as an hour – some span that could scarcely be / measured / by measures in time, in between two whiles, when she really / possessed an existence. by night – did she reach no further than your knee? The lovers impede one another’s perception of openness, and we too, caught within over-interpreted modes of perception, also fail to see it. Is it “sie” (the spaces) or the “Jahrtausende” (the thousands of years)? forgetting almost that it is a suffering creature