Realm: Translations - Subrealm: To a friend of Wera

[choco_frosh]

Silent friend from such great distances, feel
how your breath still makes this space greater.
In the beams of the darkened bellframe
let yourself ring. The thing that gnaws you down

will become a strength through its devouring.
Go in and out of metamorphosis.
What is your most painful experience?
If your drink is bitter to you, become wine.

Be, in this night of excess
sorcery, at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning of your strange meeting.

And if all that is earthly forgets you,
say to the silent earth, "I flow,"
to the swift-flowing water, speak the word: I am.

--Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus II.29 (1922)

Comments

[sovay]

If your drink is bitter to you, become wine.

This is a good translation.

[choco_frosh]

Thank you! This one's even more deliberately ambiguous than a lot of Rilke is, so finding a good translation for most of it was hard.

[choco_frosh]

(The pissy thing with translating this well is that I'm pretty sure you'd need to read all the rest of the cycle first, so that you'd have some idea of what he meant by every given word...)

[sovay]

(The pissy thing with translating this well is that I'm pretty sure you'd need to read all the rest of the cycle first, so that you'd have some idea of what he meant by every given word...)

I have read the rest of the cycle. (They were the second thing I read by Rilke, after the Duino Elegies.) I just haven't read your translation of it!