This Translation Tuesday, we bring you a meditation on aloneness in the form of introspective poetry by Rainer Maria Rilke, elegantly translated from the German by Wally Swist. Grappling with the immense and unspeakable, The Solitary and The Lonely One are indicative of the Austrian poet’s diverse repertoire on disbelief and mysticism. Read on and ruminate.
The Solitary
Like one who sailed on strange seas,
so I’m with the eternal natives;
the full days stand on their tables,
but to me the disgrace is full of figure.
A world reaches into my face,
which may be uninhabited as the moon,
but they leave no desire alone,
and all their words are occupied.
The things that I took far with me,
look rare, compared to yours—:
in their great home they are animals,
here they hold their breath in shame.
The Lonely One
No: there shall be a tumble out of my heart,
and I shall stand at its edge:
where there is nothing else, pain once more
and the unspeakable once more in the world.
Another thing in the immensity,
which becomes dark and light again,
one last longing face
in the never-to-be-satisfied,
another utter face on stone,
willing to its inner weights,
that the expanses that silently destroy it,
force it to be ever happier
Translated from the German by Wally Swist
Rainer Maria Rilke was an Austrian poet and novelist. He is most renowned for his collections of poetry, written toward the end of his life, Duino Elegies (Duineser Elegien) and Sonnets to Orpheus (Die Sonette an Orpheus), as well as the posthumously collected Letters to a Young Poet (Briefe an einen jungen Dichter).
Wally Swist (b. 1953) is the author of Huang Po and the Dimensions of Love (Southern Illinois University Press, 2012), which was selected by Yusef Komunyakaa as co-winner in the 2011 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition. He was the 2018 winner of the Ex Ophidia Press Poetry Book Prize, by a unanimous decision of the judges, for his collection A Bird Who Seems to Know Me: Poetry and Haiku about Birds and Nature (Ex Ophidia Press, 2019). Recent books include Awakening and Visitation (2020), Evanescence: Selected Poems (2020), and Taking Residence (2021), published by Shanti Arts. His translations have been published in Abel Muse, Asymptote, Chiron Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, DASH Literary Journal, Eureka Street, Ezra: An Online Journal of Translation, The Montreal Review, Poetry London, The Ravens Perch: Adding Breath to Words, Solace: A Magazine of Diverse Voices, and Transference: A Literary Journal Featuring the Art & Process of Translation. A new book, L’Allegria, Giuseppe Ungaretti’s iconic first poetry collection, translated from the Italian by Wally Swist, was published with Shanti Arts in August 2023.
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