James Owens – From the French of R. M. Rilke
«Mais il est plus pur de mourir»
—Comtesse de Noailles
1.
Tout cela pourrait changer: jamais plus
ce regard que les choses intimes
aiment…..Ce qui arrive, le pourrais-tu
faire? Ce qui tombe par soi-même,
le pourrais-tu jeter? Mon héréditaire
main? Dis! Tu connais la colère,
tu trembles souvent pour être après
d’un calme étrange qui m’inquiète….
Est-ce moi qui t’arrête? Tu sais
caresser….Mais dans la caresse,
ce trop de douceur qui dans l’autre s’enfonce
n’est-ce point du meurtre déjà qui sans cesse
renonce? Il n’y a qu’une vitre qui nous sépare,
à peine, de la rapide méprise soudaine
du pharmacien qui verse l’abîme,
de l’énorme dépense avare
du crime. Elle est par trop
notre parente, la mort. Le flot
de la vie qui s’accélère,
c’est déjà elle: la mort-mère.
Vois l’index de l’enfant et son pouce,
cette tenaille si douce
que même le pain s’en étonne.
Cette main, toute bonne,
a peut-être tué l’oiseau
et frisonne
de son ultime sursaut.
Sa brusque négation de fouine
qui l’empêcherait, qui l’empêche?
Il y a une brèche
dans notre cœur en ruine.
“But it is purer to die”
—Comtesse de Noailles
1.
All this could change: never again
this look that intimate things
cherish …. Whatever happens, could you
cause it? What falls on its own,
could you throw it? My hereditary
hand? Speak! You know rage —
often you tremble, then show
a strange disquieting calm….
Is it I who stops you? You know
how to caress…. But in the caress,
that over-softness that sinks into the other,
is there not already murder in ceaseless
renunciation? Only a window glass
separates us from the rash error
of the apothecary who pours the abyss,
from the enormous, greedy expense
of crime. Death is too much
our parent. The swell
of quickening breath
is already she: mother-death.
See the finger and thumb of this child,
a vise so mild
even bread is astonished.
This so-gentle hand
perhaps has strangled a bird
and shivered
as it struggled and perished.
This brisk, weasel negation,
who could hold that back, make it stop?
There is a gap
to our heart in ruin.
2.
N’osez pas les nommer! De Demi-Dieux à peine
à notre bouche obscure sont permis….
Et l’âme même d’insistance pleine
ne connaît que cet Ange indécis
qui peu à peu s’érige sur le bord
de nos souffrances: clair, fatal et fort,
ne défaillant jamais et sans vertige,
mais malgré tout, lui-même, être-lige
d’un inconnu et souverain accord.
Lui, Majuscule, Lettre verticale
du mot que, lentement, nous défaisons;
borne d’airain de notre vie natale,
mesure anonyme de ces monts
qui forment une chaîne dans le coeur
en sa partie abrupte et sauvage….
Statue du port, phare de l’abordage,
et, pourtant, des naufrages contempteur!
Vivre par lui, c’est notre but ultime,
entre l’enfance lente et le crime,
vivre par lui dans un élan si vrai,
que sa rigueur de roche qui se tait
finit par changer de silence…..pour
taire un consentement….
2.
Do not dare name them! Demigods at best
are permitted to our mouths’ darkness ….
and even should a strong soul insist,
it knows only that indecisive Angel
who slowly erects himself on the ledge
of our suffering: fatal, strong, and bright,
never wavering, daring the height,
but, after all, himself the liege-vassal
to an unknown and sovereign accord.
He, Majuscule, vertical Letter
of the word that slowly unmakes
our animal life, bronze border,
nameless measure of those peaks
that form a chain in our heart’s
most broken and savage parts….
Port statue, boarding light,
yet spurning the shipwreck‘s threat!
Our final goal is to live in him,
between slow childhood and crime,
to live through him in so true
an impulse that silence might undo
his speechless, rocky rigor….
to silence an agreement ….
3.
Renoncez, pieux clients! Les cierges allumés
n’ont plus le pouvoir de remuer les ombres
dans ces visages peints et rajustés qu’encombre
l’indifférent vernis de vétusté.
Renoncez doucement à demander l’avis
de ces partants que la prière offusque;
il leur a bien fallu des coeurs plus brusques
pour être de leurs cris ravis.
Renoncez à ce marchandage doux.
Mais en vous-mêmes, tout au fond de vous,
quel cimetière! Que de Dieux absous,
congédiés, oubliés, hors d’usage,
que de prophètes, que de mages
abandonnés par votre désir fou.
Vous avez dépeuplé les cieux immenses.
Et les dryades privées de leur chance,
sont rentrées dans les arbres et n’avancent
que dans la sève, versant pleurs et pleurs…
Les sources se renient, et les fleurs
brisées par de distraites violences,
déformées par de vagues inventeurs
qui les excitent à outrance,
fleurissent sans se dire…..Tout a peur
de vous: pauvres tueurs des abondances!
3.
Give up, pious clients! The candles’ rays
will no longer brush back the shadows
from those painted faces where they pose,
weighted with decay‘s indifferent glaze.
Softly renounce asking their advice,
offering prayers that offend the departed;
only the blunter-hearted
would be ravished by such cries.
Give up this sweet haggling after grace.
But deep in yourselves, in your private mire,
what a cemetery! How many gods abased,
dismissed, forgotten, out of fashion,
and many a prophet, many a magician,
abandoned by your fitful desire.
You have depopulated the vast skies,
and dryads robbed of their happy chance
have retreated and move among the trees
only as veins of sap, pouring tears on tears ….
The springs deny themselves, and flowers
broken by absent-minded violence,
deformed by the careless inventors
who tease them beyond their natures,
blossom without speaking … Everything fears
you, poor killers of abundance.
4.
Sur la crête du coeur hésitant:
quel sourire que de la bouche
s’empare de celui qui hésite!
Quelle lenteur inédite
dans ce sourire. Quel chant
supprimé, dans ce sourire. Autant
de sérieux, autant de limite
que d’affranchissement.
Autant de fuite que de retour.
Quel sourire! On le dirait provocant.
n’était-il pas, dans sa double audace,
trop complet, trop absent
pour avoir quiconque en face.
4.
Hesitating on the heart’s crest:
what smile seizes the mouth
of he who hesitates!
What unexpected slowness
in that smile. What suppressed
song, in that smile. As much
limit and gravity
as release, as much flight
as return. A smile you might call
provocative, were it not,
in its double audacity,
too absent, too complete
to confront anyone at all.
Author’s Statement on Beauty
Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote, “The feeling of the world as a limited whole is the mystical feeling.” While I can’t claim to fathom Wittgenstein’s fathomless dictum, it is where my mind goes when asked to comment on beauty, because beauty is mystical in the strict sense — that is, it is knowable by direct experience that inspires awe and fascination, without necessarily being susceptible to definition — and also involves the notion of limit. Only that which comes to an end is beautiful. Beauty — whether it be the caress of wind through tall grass or the abstract and particular shape of a marriage — happens by asserting (when we create) or recognizing (when we contemplate) energy and form against and within the creeping inevitability of dissolution. This is not pessimistic. We are in the frame of this limited whole, and we cling to beautiful things. This is the one possibility of joy.
James Owens‘s most recent book of poems is Mortalia (FutureCycle Press, 2015). Some of his earlier translations from R.M. Rilke’s French have appeared in jmww, Literature and Culture, and Ezra: An Online Journal of Translation. He earned an MFA at the University of Alabama and lives in Indiana and northern Ontario. More at: circumstanceandmagic.blogspot.com.
Rainer Maria Rilke was a Bohemian-Austrian poet and novelist, “widely recognized as one of the most lyrically intense 20th Century poets”, writing in both verse and highly lyrical prose. Several critics have described Rilke’s work as inherently “mystical”. His writings include one novel, several collections of poetry, and several volumes of correspondence in which he invokes haunting images that focus on the difficulty of communion with the ineffable in an age of disbelief, solitude, and profound anxiety.