Years ago, in a time of considerable personal grief, I read Rilke in Bly’s translation. Looking again at Herbsttag, which he translates as October Day, I found I remembered it very well because of the lines:
Whoever has no house by now will not build.
Whoever is alone now will remain alone….(trans. Bly)
I had found this sense of rootlessness overwhelmingly sad when first I read the poem, but now something was different, but I wasn’t sure what.
Then, dinner with friends, my wife and I with another couple with a lovely house and an enduring marriage, and the husband and I start talking about this and that, and the Rilke poem comes up and he mentions how profoundly affected he was when he read that image, how he too felt the enormous sadness of the rootlessness, and, as we talk, I realize that my whole sense of the Rilke poem had completely changed. I had thought, naively, that the weight of his poem leaned towards the man with the house and the sadness fell on the man for whom it is too late to build. Yet the life that Rilke chose was not to build. He chose, as Bly puts it in his musings on Rilke’s life, “a city, not much money, one respectable suit, a small room, often on a noisy street because it takes money to purchase silence, meals eaten alone in a dairy restaurant, a sense of being hunted, living as an outsider, the richness all in his chest, none visible on the outside.” This is the life Rilke chose as the right life for him, though his poem makes it clear that he understands the cost of the “right life.” Perhaps the poem is about that moment of choosing, the hand of God offering ripeness and rootlessness as equal gifts, or, maybe, rather, the poem is about the moment of recognition of the choice one has made.
I read over again Bly’s translation, and I read Stephen Mitchell’s translation,
and, finally McIntyre’s translation. None of them would do for me. So, with the help of a friend, a native speaker of German, and a German dictionary borrowed from the library after wasting two bucks on a cheap paperback I thought would do, I set out to make my own:
AUTUMN DAY
Lord, it is time. Summer was so great.
But lay your shadow now on the sundials
and free the winds over the open fields.
Command the late fruit – Be Full.
Give them just two more southern days.
Drive them into completion and chase
the last sweetness into the heavy wine.
The one who has no house now, will have no house.
The one who is alone now, will remain alone,
will lie awake, read, write long letters,
or, restless, wander, here and there,
in the streets, as the fallen leaves blow.
Well, maybe not great, but it is sort of my own, sort of my own version.
Filed under: nils peterson, poems, Poet Laureate Tagged: | Autumn, Herbsttag, Translation
