A Year with Rilke: The Man Watching (I)

August 16, 2011

The Man Watching (I)

Wheat Fields in a Storm, by Vincent van Gogh

How small is what we wrestle with,
and what wrestles with us, how immense.

If we could overcome, as things are,
in a great storm,
we would grow vast and need no names.

The Book of Images

2 comments:

RuthWed Aug 17, 01:03:00 PM GMT+2
The length and breadth he manages in 33 words!
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erinThu Aug 18, 02:00:00 PM GMT+2
yes ruth. i feel like a conceptual dancer inside a black panythose body understanding the tensions in these few words.

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.