[Geoff Brock]

Rainer Maria Rilke

Falling Stars

Remember falling stars? Do you recall
the way they raced like horses through the sky
and jumped the bars of wishes you and I
were quick to make – and surely we made plenty
for stars leaped everywhere, their numbers vast.
Each time we glanced above, our eyes held fast
to dazzling games they played, the hazards many.
We always felt a wholeness deep at heart
when all those shining stars had burst apart,
and felt as though we had survived the fall.


[original]

Fallende Sterne

Weißt Du noch: fallende Sterne, die
quer wie Pferde durch die Himmel sprangen
über plötzlich hingehaltne Stangen
unsrer Wünsche – hatten wir so viele? –
denn es sprangen Sterne, ungezählt;
fast ein jeder Aufblick war vermählt
mit dem raschen Wagnis ihrer Spiele,
und das Herz empfand sich als ein Ganzes
unter diesen Trümmern ihres Glanzes
und war heil, als überstünd es sie!


[trot]

Do you remember: falling stars, which
leaped across (jumped crosswise) the skies like horses
over the suddenly raised bars/hurdles
of our wishes – did we have so many? –
because it was leaping/jumping with stars, countless;
almost every look upward was wedded
to the swift risk/adventure of their games,
and the heart felt like a whole/felt a wholeness
beneath/amid this rubble of their gleam
and was whole, as though it had survived them!

[Geoff Brock]

I’ve come to my final pair of posts. It has been a real pleasure seeing so much fine work and reading so many astute comments from the Sphereans—thanks for having me! In my posts thus far, I’ve tried to create interesting pairings. But I can’t figure out what today’s two poems have in common, other than the fact that I can’t read either in the original—indeed before this I knew nothing at all about either piece. I’ll post first on this late Rilke poem, which is the most modern of the ten poems I will have discussed (indeed it’s the only 20th-century work), and I’ll end with the most ancient—a 3,000-year-old Upanishad. Call them bookends, perhaps.

Rilke wrote “Falling Stars” in 1924, two years before his death, and it feels like the poem of a man who, while not necessarily old (he was just 51 when he died of leukemia), is looking back at his life, full of wistful nostalgia for youth and hope. I enjoyed discovering this charming poem through this translation, which has nice touches throughout, though the lovely opening lines are much the strongest. They are fine as they are, though if I were forced to quibble here, I might wonder whether the translation needed to introduce a second verb (“raced”). Perhaps simply: “the way they leapt like horses across the sky / over the bars of wishes…” etc. (Stephen Collington rightly remarked that a bit more metrical variation would have been welcome in “The Cracked Bell,” and I think that goes double for this one: 10 pentameter lines and 50 iambs. I love strict frameworks, but even within such frameworks there exists endless rhythmic possibility, little explored here.)

On the other hand, I wish the rhyming were a bit stricter. I certainly have nothing against slant rhymes in general—indeed I adore them in many contexts—but I don’t care for them when they seem simply a last resort, rather than an integral part of a poem’s fabric. I find the plenty/many rhyme lacking both in terms of pure sound and in terms of the syntactical and rhetorical price the translator paid to get it: at one end, “surely we made plenty” eliminates the interrogative mood, which in the original offers, I imagine, a welcome bit of rhetorical variation; and at the other end, “the hazards many” seems forced and falls flat; the poem loses steam here and has to start again from scratch, rather than continuing to build, as the original seems to do. Perhaps the buried made/played rhyme could be brought to the surface: e.g., “were quick to make—Oh, how many we made!—”, or something similar. Also, the vast/fast rhyme on which this nifty envelope stanza hinges, though full, seems equally uninspired.

The last few lines are certainly better, but I still must quibble when I look down at the trot and see the “rubble of their gleam”—what a wonderful phrase! Some such phrase (“ruin of their splendor”?) would seem stronger and fresher than what’s in the final version. Also, though I don’t understand exactly what’s going on between the related words “Ganzes” and “heil,” I wonder if something is happening there that’s worth preserving. And finally, I think “the fall” really needs to be “their fall.”

(I feel as though I’ve been a bit harsh on this one, though I actually don’t think it’s far from being a terrific translation...)

[Stephen Collington]

I'm almost left wondering if the translation here is the work of a non-native speaker (i.e., of English). If so, then he or she is to be congratulated, for it's pretty fair work overall. But the dropping of the article ("the") in the first line is a crucial error, I think--one that it would be very improbable for a native speaker to make . . . outside of a metrical poem, that is! Because, of course, as we all know, even native speakers are sometimes tempted by such expediencies when trying to make a line scan. It's usually a mistake to do so, however, if only because it sounds awkward ("Tonto talk"). But here it actively affects the sense as well, and in a negative way.

I don't know if the poem necessarily means to refer to one specific night, but it clearly must refer to a specific time, however vaguely delimited. The defining element being, of course, the time that we (the speaker of the poet, and "du") were together. The falling stars of the poem are not any old falling stars--they are the falling stars that "we" saw together. To ask "Remember falling stars?" (no article) is to specifically exclude that possibility. (Compare, e.g., "Have you talked to kids?" and "Have you talked to the kids?" One question is a straight-up head-scratcher (who hasn't talked to kids?); the other is a perfectly natural question in any number of everyday contexts.) And so instead of placing us in the context of intimacy that the poem requires (Remember them? The falling stars--our falling stars?), the first line, as translated, just comes across as an awkward, Tonto-talkish puzzle.

Of course, the problem sorts itself out--the rest of the translation makes it clear enough what's going on. But I think the impetus of the poem is blunted somewhat by that stumble right at the starting gate. And yes, I realize that there's no article in the original. I don't have enough of a grasp of German to say what effect that absence has there, though I suspect that the rhetorical pause after "noch" rather helps smooth the way. "Do you remember: falling stars, the ones [die] / which slantwise . . . " Idiomatic English would still require a "the" before "falling," but the effect is less jarring (and confusing) all the same. At any rate, if dropping the article here was a matter of matching the German syntax, then I'd say it's a good example of why one sometimes shouldn't follow one's original too closely.

Otherwise, the image of wishes becoming hurdles that the horse-like falling stars must jump over is certainly intriguing, but I'm not sure that "the bars of wishes you and I / were quick to make" is clear enough to get the idea across consistently. (And of course, once again, one would like an article before "wishes"; ditto, while we're at it, for "dazzling games" in L7.) There's the tricky matter of the rhyme (and the preservation/translation of the original scheme is a minor tour de force here), but I'm left feeling that the best solution would still be something like "the hastily thrown-up hurdles / of our wishes" . . . Then the metaphor would be clear. But that's no solution of course. A tricky problem.

And a last nit: I wish there wasn't that awkward promotion on "had" in the last line.

Anyway, I've gone on about problems here, but for the most part they're the sort of thing that should be fixable with some creative tweaking. I think the prerequisite for that, as Geoff has noted, is just for the translator to loosen the grip of form-fidelity a little bit. It's certainly a good start on the poem. And I'm glad to have made its acquaintance here.

Steve C.

.

[Andrew Frisardi]

I’m not so sure as Steve is that the "missing" the in line 1 is a problem. In fact, native speaker though I am, I hadn’t noticed it was missing. I read it as a statement made from outside or "after" life, a generic memory: as in, “Remember [those things we called] flowers?” or “Remember [those places we called] city streets?” For me, the absence of the article gave a once-removed feel to the memory, appealing and appropriate to the context. This feel and slant of meaning strikes me as characteristic of Rilke.

Other people’s thoughts on this?

No further comments on the translation yet, other than to say that I admire it.

[David Rosenthal]

I read the opening the way Adam did and had no problem about any "missing article." In fact, without the article I think it is more wistful, and makes up for losing the rhetorical structure of the original. That is, "Do you remember: falling stars..." has a certain rhetorical feeling to it that, while lost in this translation, is better approximated without the article than with it.

Meanwhile, looking at the trot, I am inclined to agree with Geoff about "raced." The leaping/jumping imagery is so important here, I wouldn't want to dilute it. Plenty/many didn't come off too well for me either.

I think the two lines before the final line are stunningly good, but the final line made me stumble, both because of the ambiguous meter (I think "we had" is the culprit), and because it didn't seem to pay off what had been set up. Checking the trot, I see "whole" reappearing, which would have helped in the translation. But then I also noticed that the "heart's" tale had become "our" tale through translation, and I am not convinced that was an effectinve choice.

Anyway, I enjoyed it a lot, and up to the final line it was one of my favorite of the ten.

David R.

[Andrew Frisardi]

Surely the “rubble of their gleam” image at the end is crucial to this poem. It’s the poem's climax and has to be brought back into it somehow. I also think that the second question of the poem, in line 4, would be worth trying to bring back, although that seems less essential than that image at the end.

This sentence feels stilted:

Each time we glanced above, our eyes held fast
to dazzling games they played, the hazards many.

That raises the vast/fast rhyme pair, which doesn't work as well as other rhymes here (the plenty/many pair is weak as well). As for Geoff’s and Steve’s suggestion about loosening up the meter, I’d say that some variations in the form of trochees or anapests wouldn’t hurt but don’t change it too much. I like the flow of it.

Nice work on this one; it’s going to be really fine when it’s revised a bit more.

[Maryann Corbett]

Far from having any problem with the article-less "Remember falling stars?" I think it's just right.

It resonates for me. As children, we have time to look at the sky and we actually see such things as meteors and meteor showers. As adults, not so much. So if I'm asked to remember falling stars generally, I'm being asked to remember youth and childhood, a reading that colors my take on the whole poem.

"The hazards many" is a problem, and it will be tough to find a substitute for the plenty/many rhyme, but worth the effort, I think.

I do enjoy this, and it's a good example of why the work of translation is worthwhile. It makes it possible for me to take in the beauties of the poem without struggling through my feeble German.

[Adam Elgar]

This deals exquisitely with the extreme compactness of German lyric syntax, while losing remarkably little of Rilke’s light touch. That’s an achievement in itself, which makes me forgiving of the plenty/ many rhyme. I find the metrical regularity very appealing, because it seems to me that the stresses are delicately varied throughout. I feel that I can read the poem at a constantly, but gently, changing pace, evocative of the mind’s flight.

[Catherine Chandler]

My German is also very feeble, but what I could get from it and the crib leads me to say that the translation is very fine. There are a few places where it might be tweaked, but adding the definite article before the falling stars is not one of them. I disagree with Stephen that the promotion of the word "had" in the final line is "awkward". With its stress, the meaning is subtly changed. What "bothered" me most was the "plenty/many" rhyme. Other than that, one of my favorites.

[Skip Dewahl]

In L4 "Did we have so many", from the crib, is turned into the statement "surely we made plenty", and the final line refers to the heart of the couple, not the couple ("we") itself. Perhaps these are minor quibbles, perhaps not; however, rhyming "plenty" with "many" should be scrapped. Everything else is quite pleasant, nothing halting, nothing jarring to the ear, so all in all, this is very good.