"No, we don’t accomplish our love in a single year
as the flowers do; an immemorial sap
flows up through our arms when we love. Dear girl,
this: that we loved, inside us, not One who would someday
appear, but
seething multitudes; not just a single child,
but also the fathers lying in our depths
like fallen mountains; also the dried-up riverbeds
of ancient mothers-; also the whole
soundless landscape under the clouded or clear
sky of its destiny-: all this, my dear, preceded you.
And you yourself, how could you know
what primordial time you stirred in your lover. What
passions
welled up inside him from departed beings. What
women hated you there. How many dark
sinister men you aroused in his young veins. Dead
children reached out to touch you . . . Oh gently, gently,
let him see you performing, with love, some confident daily
task,-
lead him out close to the garden, give him what outweighs
the heaviest night . . . . . .
Restrain him . . . . . ."
~Rainier Maria Rilke, excerpt from Third Elegy, Duino Elegies
In 1912, Rainer Maria Rilke received an invitation from Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis-his longtime patron and closest friend-to stay at Duino Castle, a picturesque fortress just north of Trieste, Italy. There, while standing atop a cliff overlooking the Adriatic Sea, Rilke claimed to hear the following line: “Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angelic orders?” That evening, the poet immediately set to work, turning these words into the opening lines of what would eventually become the Duino Elegies.
For the next decade, Rilke would engage in an arduous cycle of labor characterized by violent and sporadic bouts of literary creation. It was not until 1923 that the Duino Elegies emerged in their totality: a collection of ten intensely religious metaphysical poems informed by the anxieties, traumas, and fragmentations brought on by war and modern life. Yet even as they address the interplay between suffering and beauty in human existence, the Elegies nevertheless project a hopeful vision of a more peaceful world. In the century since its creation, Rilke’s seminal work has inspired generations of artists, providing a direct launching point as well as informing broader ruminations on humankind’s fleeting moments of contact with transient, sublime beauty.
I am reading from the Stephen Mitchell translations with Johann Johannsson's exquisite track," Good Night, Day" from his Orphee album and images that include a sculpture from Camille Claudel (Rilke used her lover, Auguste Rodin, as a muse writing a monograph of his work), the opening sequence from Resnais' Hiroshima Mon Amour, and scenes from Tarkovsky's The Mirror. The playlist thus far: • The Duino Elegies by R...
20 окт 2024
