This Translation Tuesday, we bring you a meditation on aloneness in the form of introspective poetry by Rainer Maria Rilke, elegantly translated from the German by Wally Swist. Grappling with the immense and unspeakable, The Solitary and The Lonely One are indicative of the Austrian poet’s diverse repertoire on disbelief and mysticism. Read on and ruminate.
The Solitary
Like one who sailed on strange seas,
so I’m with the eternal natives;
the full days stand on their tables,
but to me the disgrace is full of figure.
A world reaches into my face,
which may be uninhabited as the moon,
but they leave no desire alone,
and all their words are occupied.
The things that I took far with me,
look rare, compared to yours—:
in their great home they are animals,
here they hold their breath in shame.
The Lonely One
No: there shall be a tumble out of my heart,
and I shall stand at its edge:
where there is nothing else, pain once more
and the unspeakable once more in the world.
Another thing in the immensity,
which becomes dark and light again,
one last longing face
in the never-to-be-satisfied,
another utter face on stone,
willing to its inner weights,
that the expanses that silently destroy it,
force it to be ever happier
Translated from the German by Wally Swist