* * *

Rainer Maria Rilke

But who are they, tell me, these Travellers, even more

transient than we are ourselves, urgently, from their earliest days,

wrung out for whom – to please whom,

by a never-satisfied will? Yet it wrings them,

bends them, twists them, and swings them,

throws them, and catches them again: as if from oiled

more slippery air, so they land

on the threadbare carpet, worn by their continual

leaping, this carpet

lost in the universe.

Stuck on like a plaster, as if the suburban

sky had wounded the earth there.

                                                            And scarcely there,

upright, there and revealed: the great

capital letter of Being.........and already the ever-returning

grasp wrings the strongest of men again, in jest,

as King August the Strong would crush

a tin plate.

Ah, and around this

centre, the rose of watching

flowers and un-flowers. Round this

stamp, this pistil, caught in the pollen

of its own flowering, fertilised

again to a shadow-fruit of disinterest,

their never-conscious, seeming-to-smile, disinterest,

gleaming lightly, on surface thinness.

There, the withered, wrinkled lifter,

an old man, only a drummer now,

shrunk in his massive hide, as though it had once

contained two men, and one was already

lying there in the churchyard, and the other had survived him,

deaf, and sometimes a little

confused in his widowed skin.

And the young one, the man, as if he were son of a neck

and a nun: taut and erectly filled

with muscle and simple-mindedness.

O you,

that a sorrow, that was still small,

once received as a plaything, in one of its

long convalescences......

You, who fall, with the thud

that only fruit knows, unripe,

a hundred times a day from the tree of mutually

built-up movement (that, swifter than water,

in a few moments, shows spring, summer and autumn),

fall, and impact on the grave:

sometimes, in half-pauses, a loving look tries

to rise from your face towards your seldom

affectionate mother: but it loses itself in your body,

whose surface consumes the shy

scarcely-attempted look.....And again

the man is clapping his hands for your leap, and before

a pain can become more distinct, close to your

constantly racing heart, a burning grows in the soles of your feet,

its source, before a few quick tears rush bodily into your eyes.

And yet, blindly,

that smile........

Angel! O, gather it, pluck it, that small-flowered healing herb.

Make a vase, keep it safe! Place it among those joys not yet

open to us: on a lovely urn,

praise it, with flowery, swirling, inscription:

                                  ‘Subrisio Saltat: the Saltimbanque’s smile’

You, then, beloved,

you, that the loveliest delights

silently over-leapt. Perhaps

your frills are happy for you –

or the green metallic silk,

over your firm young breasts,

feels itself endlessly pampered, and needing nothing.

You, market fruit of serenity

laid out, endlessly, on all the quivering balance scales,

publicly, beneath the shoulders.

Where, oh where is the place – I carry it in my heart –

where they were still far from capable, still fell away

from each other, like coupling animals, not yet

ready for pairing: -

where the weights are still heavy:

where the plates still topple

from their vainly twirling

sticks.......

And, suddenly, in this troublesome nowhere, suddenly,

the unsayable point where the pure too-little

is changed incomprehensibly -, altered

into that empty too-much.

Where the many-placed calculation

is exactly resolved.

Squares: O square in Paris, endless show-place,

where the milliner, Madame Lamort,

winds and twists the restless trails of the earth,

endless ribbons, into new

bows, frills, flowers, rosettes, artificial fruits – all

falsely coloured, - for winter’s

cheap hats of destiny.

Angel: if there were a place we know nothing of, and there,

on some unsayable carpet, lovers revealed

what here they could never master, their high daring

figures of heart’s flight,

their towers of desire, their ladders,

long since standing where there was no ground, leaning,

trembling, on each other – and mastered them,

in front of the circle of watchers, the countless, soundless dead:

Would these not fling their last, ever-saved,

ever-hidden, unknown to us, eternally

valid coins of happiness in front of the finally

truly smiling pair on the silent

carpet?

The Fifth Elegy

Translated by  A. S. Kline