from Les Quatrains Valaisans

36

Beau papillon près du sol,

à l'attentive nature

montrant les enluminures

de son livre de vol.

Un autre se ferme au bord

de la fleur qu'on respire:

ce n'est pas le moment de lire.

Et tant d'autres encor,

de menus bleus, s'éparpillent,

flottants et voletants,

comme de bleues brindilles

d'une lettre d'amour au vent,

d'une lettre déchirée

qu'on était en train de faire

pendant que la destinataire

hésitait à l'entrée.


Rainer Maria Rilke

*

36

Lovely butterfly drifting lightly,
catching nature’s attention
with an illumination
from its book of flights….

Another closes on the border
of the flower we breathe—
now’s not the time to read.
And many another,

delicate blues, scatter,
floating and fluttering,
like a love letter
in blue bits on the wind,

a letter you started and tore
to scraps, had labored over
while your lover
hesitated at the door.


(my translation)

*

Read very much of Rilke, and you start to think he can do anything. From what seems an impossibly clichéd starting place, he brings this poem, within a few short lines, to a rich and subtle image that opens out into a world of correspondences. As unsatisfying as the translation may be, I hope at least some sense of the energy of R’s creation manages to get through. The original has the strength and delicacy of fine silk.

This poem is one in a sequence of thirty-nine landscape poems, Les Quatrains Valaisans, that R wrote about the country around Muzot in the early 1920s, just about the same time he was writing Sonnets to Orpheus. The French poems share something with the Sonnets, though without the vatic frenzy (which can, let’s admit it, become a bit tiresome after a dozen or two dozen sonnets) --- they are devoted to an attention to the things of the world that allows the ordinary scene to speak its poetry.

If you are interested, another translation from the sequence is here

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I will be away for the next week, climbing trees, whispering secrets to bears, and folding swathes of the night sky like squares of brilliant laundry --- not that anyone could detect that I've been here during the past week by reading this blog....

The title of the poem below is a combination of phrases from a conversation between Paul Celan and Jean Daive. The poem's best line is stolen.

*

The world is of glass. Disappearance is within us.


These summer evenings of low clouds and heat,
the lake goes milky in the last minutes before sunset,

light clinging to the waves as the world darkens.
I don’t recognize myself in my joys. My emptiness glows….

One of the words in the dream was your name.
Unlike the others that broke open in the air

and melted like strange hail,
your name was a small red stone

shot through with silken glimmers of quartz,
still wet where it had washed on the sand.

On my palm, it seemed to tremble, but maybe
that was my pulse. Your name smelled of the deep water.

I closed it in my mouth, happy
with its small weight on my tongue,

and stepped into the waves, swimming back
into the dream, back out of the dream,

bringing you with me.

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capriccio: meta-rhyme

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The time is now propitious, as he guesses,
The meal is ended, she is bored and tired,
Endeavours to engage her in caresses
Which still are unreproved, if undesired.
Flushed and decided, he assaults at once;
Exploring hands encounter no defence;
His vanity requires no response,
And makes a welcome of indifference.
(And I Tiresias have foresuffered all
Enacted on this same divan or bed;
I who have sat by Thebes below the wall
And walked among the lowest of the dead.)
Bestows one final patronising kiss,
And gropes his way, finding the stairs unlit . . .


T.S. Eliot
from The Waste Land

*

II. Rain Towards Morning

The great light cage has broken up in the air,
freeing, I think, about a million birds
whose wild ascending shadows will not be back,
and all the wires come falling down.
No cage, no frightening birds; the rain
is brightening now. The face is pale
that tried the puzzle of their prison
and solved it with an unexpected kiss,
whose freckled unsuspected hands alit.

Elizabeth Bishop
from Four Poems


Eliot’s sonnet – embedded subtly and ironically in the sordid seduction by the “young man carbuncular” of his bored typist – lends its final rhyme, years later, to Bishop’s pretty aubade. So what? Is this a reference, an allusion? An insignificant coincidence? If our reading of a poem depends on recalling the fact that two words were also rhymed (or almost the same words – kiss / unlit, alit) in another poem, by another poet --- then that is something too flimsy for criticism to catch hold of, isn’t it? Like trying to capture the shifting fog in a picture frame.

But, of course, Bishop’s poem doesn’t depend on relating it to The Waste Land. The lovers still lie together kissing, even if we’ve never heard of Eliot. That’s as it should be.

On the other hand, there is something there, I think. If you happen to have gone through a period of Eliot-obsession, this moment in “The Fire Sermon” section of The Waste Land is indelible, and "Rain Towards Morning" rhymes with it, just as the words themselves … and Bishop seems (consciously? a trivial question…) to urge a reversal…. Not only does the final word change from “unlit” to “alit” (invoking different senses of “to light”), but, whereas Eliot’s rhyme describes a movement into darkness and separation, Bishop’s celebrates the coming of light and union. Interesting, too, that in the sonnet, the change from the full-bodied rhymes of the earlier lines to the assonance of “kiss / unlit” comes as a falling off into the mundane, a marker of disappointment. But in Bishop’s poem, after the mostly unrhymed lines of the rest of the poem, the movement into assonance is a movement into song. The value of rhyme depends on context.

And so on. But it is too much weight to bind with such a fragile string. I make too much of such small things. Probably just coincidence… And yet…. So, this reading of the two poems (this reading that happens between the two poems) becomes part of “the canon inside the canon,” as they say in seminary – because it is the other poem we are really talking about, the unspoken, unwritten other poem that glimmers distantly into being when these two are brought together in the imaginary space where they lie whispering to each other….

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all she carries within her

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Enfant en Rouge

Parfois elle traverse le village dans sa petite robe rouge,
toute absorbée à se contenir,
mais, malgré elle, on dirait qu'elle bouge
selon un rythme de sa vie à venir.

Elle court un peu, hésite, s'arrête,
fait demi-tour...,
et tout en rêvant secoue sa tête
contre ou pour.

Puis elle fait quelques pas d'une danse
qu'elle ébauche et oublie,
trouvant sans doute que la vie
trop vite avance.

Ce n'est pas tant qu'elle sorte
de son petit corps qui l'enferme,
mais tout ce qu'en elle elle porte
joue et germe...

C'est de cette robe qu'elle va se rappeler plus tard
dans un doux abandon;
quand toute sa vie sera pleine de hasards,
la petite robe rouge aura toujours raison.


Rainer Maria Rilke
La migration des forces



Girl in Red

At times she walks through the village in her little red dress,
trying hard to contain herself,
but she seems to move, nevertheless,
to some rhythm from her future life.

She runs a bit, hesitates, pauses,
half-turns back again….
dreaming, shakes her head, refuses
pro or con.

Then she sketches a few steps of a dance
that she invents and forgets,
finding life at once
moves on too fast.

It’s not so much that she might go
outside her body’s little enclosure,
but that all she carries within her
frolics and starts to grow.

Later, she will remember this dress,
when risk surrounds her life,
a sweet release—
the little red dress will always be right.


(my translation)

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the same shine everywhere

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Rustle and gleam in the understory, a breeze
lifts the little lanterns of scarlet columbine,
lit like tongues by the fire of the holy spirit
they lick up through marl and leafrot.

Lanterns. And tongues. In the other story,
under this one, we all know what the lyric wants:
they suck God through their pale green threads
and spray the divine as a yellow dust of pollen—

it’s process and ek-stasis, history and
rupture, stamen and tendril sieving
the wind, an ache for the right turn of air,
for the word that will burn the words away.

And the same shine everywhere. For instance,
on the segmented back of the five-inch, purple-black
millipede on the path, pedaling crazy bright panic
as he arcs up and over a fallen, wet twig of birch.

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on wor(l)ds and saying them

I am interviewed in the current issue of Sisif, a Romanian literary and cultural online journal. The sublime photographer-poet-blogger Roxana Ghita conducted the interview and has also translated several of my poems into Romanian. My tremendous gratitute to Roxana and to Sisif editor Cristina Licuta.

Interview: here

Translations: here

Originals of the poems: here

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