Duino Elegies by Rainer Maria Rilke Page A

aus seinem Ursprung,
    als wär er eine Seele der Etrusker,
    aus einem Toten, den ein Raum empfing,
    doch mit der ruhenden Figur als Deckel.
    Und wie bestürzt ist eins, das fliegen muß
    und stammt aus einem Schooß. Wie vor sich selbst
    erschreckt, durchzuckts die Luft, wie wenn ein Sprung
    durch eine Tasse geht. So reißt die Spur
    der Fledermaus durchs Porzellan des Abends.
    Und wir: Zuschauer, immer, überall,
    dem allen zugewandt und nie hinaus!
    Uns überfüllts. Wir ordnens. Es zerfällt.
    Wir ordnens wieder und zerfallen selbst.
    Wer hat uns also umgedreht, daß wir,
    was wir auch tun, in jener Haltung sind
    von einem, welcher fortgeht? Wie er auf
    dem letzten Hügel, der ihm ganz sein Tal
    noch einmal zeigt, sich wendet, anhält, weilt—,
    so leben wir und nehmen immer Abschied.

THE EIGHTH ELEGY
    Dedicated to Rudolf Kassner
    With all its eyes the animal world
    beholds the Open. Only our eyes
    are as if inverted and set all around it
    like traps at its portals to freedom.
    What’s outside we only know from the animal’s
    countenance; for almost from the first we take a child
    and twist him round and force him to gaze
    backwards and take in structure, not the Open
    that lies so deep in an animal’s face. Free from death.
    Only we see death; the free animal has its demise
    perpetually behind it and before it always
    God, and when it moves, it moves into eternity,
    the way brooks and running springs move.
    Â Â Â Â We, though: never, not for a single day, do we
    have that pure space ahead of us into which flowers
    endlessly open. What we have is World
    and always World and never Nowhere-Without-Not:
    that pure unguarded element one breathes
    and knows endlessly and never craves. As a child
    one gets lost there in the quiet, only to be
    jostled back. Or someone dying is it.
    For close to death one sees death no longer
    and stares out instead, perhaps with the wide gaze of animals.
    Lovers (were not the loved one there,
    obstructing the view) draw near it and marvel …
    Beyond the loved one, as if by accident,
    the realm is glimpsed … But no one
    gets beyond the other, and so World returns again.
    Always turned so fervently toward creation,
    we see only the reflection of the Open,
    which our own presence darkens. Or sometimes
    a mute animal looks up and stares straight through us.
    That’s what destiny is: being opposite
    and nothing else but that and always opposite.
    If the assured animal that approaches us
    on such a different path had in it consciousness
    like ours—, it would wheel us round
    and make us change our lives. But its existence
    is for it infinite, ungrasped, completely
    without reflection—, pure, like its outward gaze.
    And where we see Future it sees Everything
    and itself in Everything and healed forever.
    And yet, upon that warm, alert animal
    is the weight and care of an enormous sadness.
    For what sometimes overwhelms us always
    clings to it, too—a kind of memory that tells us
    that what we’re now striving for was once
    nearer and truer and attached to us
    with infinite tenderness. Here all is distance,
    there it was breath. After the first home
    the second one seems draughty and strangely sexed.
    Â Â Â Â O bliss of the tiny creatures, that live
    their whole lives in the womb that brought them forth!
    O joy of the gnat, which still leaps within,
    even when it weds: for womb is all!
    And look at the half-assurance of the bird,
    from the manner of its birth almost knowing both worlds—
    as if it were the soul of an Etruscan , released
    from a dead man sealed in a space
    that has his reclining figure for a lid.
    And how confused is any womb-born creature
    that has to fly! As if frightened
    of its own self, it zigzags through the air
    like a crack through a teacup. The way a bat’s trace
    crazes the porcelain of evening.
    And we: Spectators, always, everywhere,
    looking at, never out of, everything!
    It