A Year with Rilke: Too Vast to Be Contained

October 27, 2011

Too Vast to Be Contained

title page angel

by Marc Chagall

We may yearn to come to rest
in some small piece of pure humanity,
a strip of orchard between river and rock.
But our heart is too vast to be contained there.
We can no longer seek it in a place
or even in the image of a god or an angel.

From the Second Duino Elegy

2 comments:

Amiya chatterjeeFri Oct 28, 07:09:00 AM GMT+2
Pure Humanity ... The essential Human beings ....Totally Uncluttered by " Civilisation"
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erinSat Oct 29, 01:53:00 PM GMT+2
then where do we reside?

in the uncontainable? in the unnameable? in the unknowable?

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.