VI
We'll do better than that, I hope, though we are dealing with this German poem in an English translation. Well, actually, precisely because of that. Translation is the father of civilization, and as translations go, this is a particularly good one. It's taken from Rainer Maria Rilke: Selected Works, Volume II: Poetry, published in 1976 by the Hogarth Press in London.
It was done by J. B. Leishman. What makes it particularly good is, in the first place, of course, Rilke himself. Rilke was a poet of simple words and by and large of regular meters. As for the latter, it was so much the case with him that only twice in the course ofhis roughly thirty-year career as a poet did he seek to break away from meter-and-rhyme constraints in a decisive manner. The first time he did it is in the 1907 collection called Neue Gedichte (New Poems), in the cycle of five poems treating—to put it superficially— themes related to Greek antiquity. The second attempt, spanning with intervals the years 1915 to 1923, comprises what came to be known as his Duino Elegies. Breathtaking though these elegies are, one has the feeling that our poet got more freedom there than he bargained for. The five pieces from Neue Gedichte are a different matter, and "Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes" is one of them.
It is an iambic pentameter job done in blank verse: something that the English language feels quite comfortable with. Second, it is a straight-out narrative poem, with its exposition, development, and denouement fairly clearly defined. From the translator's point of view, this is not a language-driven but rather a story-driven proposition, and that sort of thing makes translators happy, for with a poem like this, accuracy becomes synonymous with felicity.
Leishman's performance is all the more admirable because he seems to regularize his pentameter to a greater degree than the German original offers. This brings the poem into a metric mold familiar to English readers, enabling them to observe the author's line-by-line achievements in greater confidence. Many a subsequent effort—and in the past three decades translating Rilke has become practically a fad—is marred either by attempts to produce stress for stress a metrical equivalency of the original or to subordinate this poem to the vagaries of vers libre. Whether this shows the translators' appetite for authenticity or for being comme il faut in the current poetic idiom, the distinct feature of their aspirations (often sharply argued in prefaces) is that they were not the author's. In Leishman'scase, though, we clearly deal with the translator's surrender of his ego to the reader's comfort; that's how a poem ceases to be foreign. And here it is, in its entirety.
VII
О R P H E US. E U R Y D I C E . H E R M E S
That was the strange unfathomed mine of souls. And they, like silent veins of silver ore, were winding through its darkness. Between roots welled up the blood that flows on to mankind, like blocks of heavy porphyry in the darkness. Else there was nothing red.
But there were rocks
and ghostly forests. Bridges over voidness
and that immense, gray, unreflecting pool
that hung above its so far distant bed
like a gray rainy sky above the landscape.
And between meadows, soft and full of patience,
appeared the pale strip of the single pathway,
like a long line of linen laid to bleach.
And on this single pathway they approached.
In front the slender man in the blue mantle, gazing in dumb impatience straight before him. His steps devoured the way in mighty chunks they did not pause to chew; his hands were hanging, heavy and clenched, out of the falling folds, no longer conscious of the lightsome lyre, the lyre which had grown into his left like twines of rose into a branch of olive. It seemed as though his senses were divided: for, while his sight ran like a dog before him, turned round, came back, and stood, time and again, distant and waiting, at the path's next turn,
his hearing lagged behind him like a smell.
It seemed to him at times as though it stretched
back to the progress of those other two
who should be following up this whole ascent.
Then once more there was nothing else behind him
but his climb's echo and his mantle's wind.
He, though, assured himself they still were coming;
said it aloud and heard it die away.
They still were coming, only they were two
that trod with fearful lightness. If he durst
but once look back (if only looking back
were not undoing of this whole enterprise
still to be done), he could not fail to see them,
the two light-footers, following him in silence:
The god of faring and of distant message, the traveling-hood over his shining eyes, the slender wand held out before his body, the wings around his ankles lightly beating, and in his left hand, as entrusted, her.
She, so belov'd, that from a single lyre
more mourning rose than from all women-mourners—
that a whole world of mourning rose, wherein
all things were once more present: wood and vale
and road and hamlet, field and stream and beast—
and that around this world of mourning turned,
even as around the other earth, a sun
and a whole silent heaven full of stars,
a heaven of mourning with disfigured stars—
she, so beloved.
But hand in hand now with that god she walked, her paces circumscribed by lengthy shroudings,
uncertain, gentle, and without impatience.
Wrapt in herself, like one whose time is near,
she thought not of the man who went before them,
nor of the road ascending into life.
Wrapt in herself she wandered. And her deadness
was filling her like fullness.
Full as a fruit with sweetness and with darkness
was she with her great death, which was so new
that for the time she could take nothing in.
She had attained a new virginity
and was intangible; her sex had closed
like a young flower at the approach of evening,
and her pale hands had grown so disaccustomed
to being -a wife that even the slim god's
endlessly gentle contact as he led her
disturbed her like a too great intimacy.
Even now she was no longer that blond woman who'd sometimes echoed in the poet's poems, no longer the broad couch's scent and island, nor yonder man's possession any longer.
She was already loosened like long hair, and given far and wide like fallen rain, and dealt out like a manifold supply.
She was already root.
And when, abruptly,
the god had halted her and, with an anguished outcry, outspoke the words: He has turned round!— she took in nothing, and said softly: Who?
But in the distance, dark in the bright exit, someone or other stood, whose countenance was indistinguishable. Stood and saw how, on a strip of pathway between meadows, with sorrow in his look, the god of message turned silently to go behind the figure already going back by that same pathway, its paces circumscribed by lengthy shroudings, uncertain, gentle, and without impatience.
VIII
The poem has the quality of an uneasy dream, in which you gain something extremely valuable, only to lose it the very next moment. Within the limitation of one's sleeping time, and perhaps precisely because of that, such dreams are excruciatingly convincing in their details; a poem is also limited, by definition. Both imply compression, except that a poem, being a conscious act, is not a paraphrase or a metaphor for reality but a reality itself.