The Poems I Have Carried (With a Translation of 'Du im voraus' by Rainer Maria Rilke)

In my late teens, I discovered T.S.Eliot's 'The Lovesong of J.Alfred Prufrock'' Perhaps it was less a discovery and more of an inevitable introduction. My mother was taking a first-year English course at the university. She had just moved out of the family house, finding an apartment on a street that shared her name, Elizabeth. 

It was really my mother who presented the poem to me and I read the poem over and over again, the afternoons I went to see her in the summer or in the autumn evenings after school. I recall the leaves from the oak outside her window falling against the pane in the early dusk. It was her great anthology of English literature with the Constable painting on the cover. It was the first poem that awakened me to poetry. In school, whatever we read before was a means to a passing grade. In this book, I had found the first true relic of myself, a kind of first key. 

Sure, there were other poems by Browning, Whitman, and Tennyson but for someone in his teens, I felt that Eliot's poem was like a calling or perhaps, a reflection. It seemed to take on a kind of burden, that the narrator was encumbered by his own missteps and hesitation and inability to fully express himself with others, whether with his loved one or those he sat down to tea with. Yet he could relate to the nameless reader. 

I seemed to live in this poem and felt the October described, the sawdust restaurants, the evenings, seeing the arms with shawls, the women coming and going, the quiet, sepia streets that billowed. 

And also in that volume, a year later, I found Lord Byron's 'When We Two Parted' I would come back to that poem time and time again as I would Eliot's. Instead of a grander epic, only a handful of stanzas and the Great Romantic had managed to tell a tragic tell through suggestion and supposition. Who were these two who had parted and why? Well, it somehow didn't matter because the parting and the seeing each other were just as painful.

I reread the poem after breaking up with a girlfriend. I hadn't loved her tragically and soulfully but I felt our separation had a solemn meaning to it. I didn't know what to expect from her at the beginning of our relationship and the ending itself was anti-climatic. And yet I felt in some way I had let her down or not given any of it a chance, that my mind had rushed past any possibility because there was not enough for me. Or was it really, I didn't allow the 'enough' to build? I turned to Byron's poem for sympathy.

Then, when I got into wine, I had to find my Arthur Rimbaud again. 'The Drunken Boat' is the only poem I know so far that can capture the sense and wonder of inebriation, to feel you have been farther than you have been sober, that whatever thoughts you've had, they are untethered, wilder and limitless while inebriated. There is a sense of the countless in the poem, that things go on, that the horizon is just a 'word' and a 'misrepresentation' of what is. It also suggests the melancholy associated with too much wine and too much of a night. The narrator seems to recognize by poem's end that the careless and easy, godlike curiosity of childhood is richer than the one of a drunk. I feel, after every reading that the poet peaked at nineteen years of age because he knew all poetry and the poets who wrote were just offshoots of ego, that nothing could quite compare with the focused and seemingly vast imagination of childhood, that growing old, to quote Rilke, "has served no purpose."

Yet still, poetry is the lost imagination of childhood in adult life. A philosophy professor once said you are not too old to have a second childhood. Of course, this professor had three Ph.Ds and three divorces. So either he reverted to the childlike because he couldn't grow-up or because he couldn't handle anything else. 

Still, I find myself quoting him now and then, believing every time I embark on another poem, I am somehow still a child, finger painting this time with words. 

Other poems I've loved include the little known ''Black Marigolds'. Like with all great works of literature, they find you, no matter how esoteric or different. I discovered this poem at the end of John Steinbeck's Cannery Row, a mere few stanzas.

The original was written in Sanskrit by the 11th century Kasmir poet, Bilhana Kavi. Caurapañcāśikā or The Love thief is an epic poem some fifty stanzas long, a loving tribute to the woman Bilhana had an affair with. Considering his love was a princess and the father a tyrannical man, the author was imprisoned and given a death sentence. Fortunately or perhaps not, there is no real certainty whether the execution was carried out.  One story goes the king was so moved by the poem, he lifted the sentence. Another, that was he infuriated still and sent the poet to his immanent death. Like with Schroeder's cat, both possibilities play out in the mind of the well-reader.

Yet, whereas Eliot, Byron and Rimbaud are household names in the households of people familiar with the greats, the author of 'Black Marigolds' shares his talent with perhaps his most tender of translators, E. Powys Mathers. I have read other renditions but Mathers wins me over. It is the repetition of the words 'even now', his version of the Sanskrit 'adyapi' which suggest memory or looking back.

The entire poem is worth a read and it always difficult to find one stanza to isolate, to suggest as the true pinnacle or quintessential moment. It is like life: beautiful moments that cannot be remembered without the others. So yes, cannot extract a single part of the work that doesn't move me. And yes, fifty stanzas, surprisingly there is not one weak link in the chain.  

In Spanish, I love Lorca's "Horseman's Song" or 'Rider's Song' a quiet and tragic poem about a man doomed. We know nothing of his future or his past, we know what he knows and that he feels his death is coming soon. He is on his way to the Andalusian city of Córdoba but his arrival is uncertain. It is spare and perfect.

So too is Pablo Neruda's''Tonight I can write the saddest lines'. Without a doubt, one of the strongest poems about loss in that it doesn't attempt to be anything more than a simple testament. The poet remembers the bare things, his language is direct and gentle. It doesn't try to offer up allegories and metaphors, it doesn't try to challenge the reader with similes and strained references to other poems or works of literature. It is just one person saying that they have loved and that love is no longer there. 

And then perhaps my favourite poem, one I have rendered here is by the German Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke. To call him German, it would seem to limit him. He was born in what we would now be the Czech Republic. He lived throughout Europe and yes, he wrote in German but his ideas have the universal to them. Whereas Heine, Eichendorff, Morike and a host of other German authors embody their German and regional culture, Rilke transcends the local. He is not affixed to one place like Prague or Munich. In this he is like Hölderlin or Goethe, a poet that crosses borders and looks to the timeless and eternal. He shares with these two poets and humanity in general this affinity with the search for the divine. 

In one sense you could call him a metaphysical poem, in other, he is a Neo-Romantic like Stefan George but labels aside, there is yearning to the majority of his work and 'yearning' (sehnsucht) doesn't belong to one period in time or literature. One could attempt to analyze Rilke by looking at his life, donning the Freudian-cap. Perhaps there was no satisfaction in his life. Perhaps his marriage wasn't fulfilling but as Rilke once noted, one 'must live the question' and 'change one's life.' So all attempts to determine Rilke truly negate him.

Here is my translation, one I continue to work on, never quite feeling, just like the poem itself, it is complete.

Du im voraus

verlorne Geliebte, Nimmergekommene,
nicht weiß ich, welche Töne dir lieb sind.
Nicht mehr versuch ich, dich, wenn das Kommende wogt,
zu erkennen. Alle die großen
Bildern in mir, im Fernen erfahrene Landschaft,
Städte und Türme und Brücken und un-
vermutete Wendung der Wege
und das Gewaltige jener von Göttern
einst durchwachsenen Länder:
steigt zur Bedeutung in mir
deiner, Entgehende, an.

Ach, die Gärten bist du,
ach, ich sah sie mit solcher
Hoffnung. Ein offenes Fenster
im Landhaus—, und du tratest beinahe
mir nachdenklich heran. Gassen fand ich,—
du warst sie gerade gegangen,
und die spiegel manchmal der Läden der Händler
waren noch schwindlich von dir und gaben erschrocken
mein zu plötzliches Bild.—Wer weiß, ob derselbe
Vogel nicht hinklang durch uns
gestern, einzeln, im Abend?

You, just beyond,

lost beloved, never to arrive

I’m not even sure which songs will please you.

I’ve stopped looking for you in the coming

Wave of the next moment. Yet these great

Images in me - ever widening the landscape,

Cities, towers, bridges  

Unsuspecting turns in the path

And the lands forever trembling

With their intermingling gods -

All of it rising up against me and this meaning:

You, my eluding one.  

Ah, you are the gardens

I’ve seen with such

Longing. An open window

In the country house – and you nearly

Stepped out, pensively, just for me. Streets I found

You had seamlessly passed,

And sometimes the mirrors in the merchant shops,

Still joyously spinning from your reflection became startled

With mine, so unexpected. – Who knows whether the

Same bird sang through us

Yesterday, entirely alone, in the evening.