Friday, February 16, 2007
Is there pleasure only in the presence of pain? Beauty beside desolation?
"Letters on Cezanne"Rainer Marie Rilke
translated by Joel Agee; Fromm International Publishing Corporation, NY; 1985
September 13, 1907 (Friday)
..." I cannot think back on any time of my life without such reproaches and worse. I believe that the only time I lived without loss were the ten days after Ruth's birth, when I found reality as indescribable, down to it's smallest details, as it surely always is. --But presumably I would not be so receptive to the splendor of these little pieces of heather stemming from the extravagance of the northern year if I hadn't just gotten over an urban summer. Perhaps, then, it wasn't completely in vain that I lived through the sort of cubicled summer where you're lodged as if in the smallest of those boxes that fit one into the other, twenty times. And you're sitting in the last one, crouching. Good God: how I labored last year; oceans, parks, woods, forest meadows: my longing for these is indescribable sometimes. Now that winter's already impending here. Those vaporous mornings and evenings are already starting, where the sun is merely the place where the sun used to be, ... and the tall gladiolas and the long rows of geraniums shout the contradiction of their red into the mist. This makes me feel sad. It brings up desolate memories, one doesn't know why: as if the music of the urban summer were ending in dissonance, in a mutiny of all it's notes; perhaps just because one has already once before taken all this so deeply into oneself and read it's meanings and made it part of oneself, without ever actually making it.
Only this ...for Sunday..."
Thank you, thank you.
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2 comments:
It's a lovely surprise for me to read your quotations from Rilke's Letters on Cézanne. I translated them twenty-three years ago, and here is evidence -- so much more meaningful than sales figures -- that they are still being read. Thank you for that!
You may be interested to know that there is a newer, revised and corrected edition, pubished by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
All good wishes,
Joel Agee
Mr. Agee, thank you so much for your careful translations of these letters. I know how important they have become to me over the years. I first read them about 20 years ago and have written about that moment in this blog, back in January.
I am grateful everyday that I have this volume. In fact, I purchased 15 or so copies the year that I first discovered it and gave them as gifts.
Rilke, he confuses me. "Letters to a young poet" distracts me from what I feel are his most inspirational moments. And here in these letters, I find an unselfconsciousness that beckons and I see more, I feel more.
Thank you for writing. I am flattered that you would take the time. Thank you for your important contribution.
Tante belle cose.
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