A Year with Rilke: Love Between Two People

May 30, 2011

Love Between Two People

jesters, by Paul Cézanne

No area of human existence is so burdened with conventions as love between two people. There are life-preservers of the most varied invention, life-boats and safety vests; society has fashioned rescue strategies of every description. Since it has chosen to take love as an easy pleasure, it must make it as cheap and as safe as all public amusements should be.

Rome, May 14, 1904

Letters to a Young Poet

2 comments:

stevenMon May 30, 12:55:00 PM GMT+2
"love as an easy pleasure". hmmmm. more like a point of departure that unties you from the shore of your understanding and assumptions, setting you adrift on currents as capricious and unpredictable as any ocean could offer. ultimately, a signpost pointing to the possibility of the unconditional. steven
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AnonymousMon May 30, 01:41:00 PM GMT+2
ha! steven!

i think that may have been rilke's point exactly. what we don't try to tame or pound down as a society! love is the lurid little whore that travels the gentleman's seams, undoing every crease!

xo
erin
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"Everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night."

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Go ahead, bloom recklessly!

About the Blog

We, Lorenzo and Ruth, are blog friends who, upon discovering our shared admiration for Rainer Maria Rilke's writings in a new volume of daily readings, decided to launch this blog.

Lorenzo (in Spain) has a home blog called The Alchemist's Pillow. Ruth (in the U.S.) has a home blog called synch-ro-ni-zing. Both of us also write poems and receive inspiration from Mary Oliver, Rumi, and many other poets.

We hope you will be inspired by this site, and we'd love to hear your responses in comments.

The Challenge of Translation

How can a poem written by Rilke, or anyone, be translated into another language, when a poem by its nature is a snapshot of a feeling, idea or story that also sings in lyricism, cadence, rhyme (sometimes) and other nuances that contribute to the poem intrinsically?

C. John Holcombe has thoroughly and generously explored the "problems" of translation in an article linked here, in which he explores the poem Herbsttag by Rilke. You can read fourteen versions of the first stanza by different translators, as well as a revelation of the issues of translation: word choice when there is no perfect equivalent; diction; word order (maintain the original or rearrange for effect?); rhyme; balance; and looking at the context of the poet's previous work.