September: Fireweeds, Machines and the Poetry of Listening

September: Fireweeds, Machines and the Poetry of Listening
(click on photo to enlarge)
"Do you hear the New, Lord,
rumbling and shaking?
Prophets are coming
who shall exalt it."

from the First Part
of the Sonnets to Orpheus
by Rainer Maria Rilke

This week, an image of September
Ffireweed. Also: a new translation
from the German.

(click on photo to enlarge)
	"Do you hear the New, Lord, rumbling and shaking? Prophets are coming who shall exalt it." from the First Part of the Sonnets to Orpheus by Rainer Maria Rilke This week, an image of September Ffireweed. Also: a new translation from the German.

The guest poems for this week are new English translations from the work of the German language
poet, Rainer Maria Rilke (from the Rilke website, a concise hyperlinked biography).

The Sonnets to Orpheus

Rilke wrote the Sonnets to Orpheus * at his modest chateau in Muzot, Switzerland, during a period
of intense activity in February of 1922. It was to be his last published work. The sequence of 55
poems, all sharing the same basic form and divided into two parts, is characterized by a marvelously
light and quick energy. Indeed, they seem filled with the exuberance of the mountains in which they
were composed, where everything seems larger than life, colors brighter and more radiant, and
streams faster and more clear.

This then is a poetry of praise, of the air I breathe, the meadow through which I walk, the beauty
of a single windflower opening to receive the morning sun, and yes, of praise itself:

XVIII (ERSTER TEIL)

Hörst dus das Neue, Herr,
dröhnen und beben?
Kommen Verkündiger,
die es erheben.

Zwar ist kein Hören heil
in dem Durchobtsein,
doch der Maschinenteil
will jetzt gelobt sein.

Sieh, die Maschine:
wie sie sich wälzt und rächt
und uns entsellt und schwächt.

Hat sie aus uns auch Kraft,
sie, ohne Leidenschaft,
treibe und diene.

Rainer Maria Rilke

XVIII (FIRST PART)

Do you hear the New, Lord,
rumbling and shaking?
Prophets are coming
who shall exalt it.

Truly, no hearing is whole
around such noise,
and yet the machine's part
too will have its praise.

See, the machine:
how it turns and takes its toll
and pushes aside and weakens us.

Though it draws energy from us,
it, without passion,
drives on and serves.

(tr. Cliff Crego)

| view / print Picture/Poem Poster: Sonnet to Orpheus: XVIII [FIRST PART] (86 K) | or download as PDF |

| Selected Sonnets to Orpheus twenty-two poems in the order they have been featured (text only) | PDF of Six Sonnets |

* Orpheus is the musician of musicians of classical Greek mythology. He is the one
whose magical art of the lyre has the power to charm the whole of Nature—the trees,
rivers, stones and even the wild animals, into the silence of listening. Son of Calliope,
the muse of epic poetry, and a Thracian river-god (in some versions of the story Apollo),
Orpheus married the nymph Eurydice who was fated to die of a serpent bite on her heel.
In his profound grief, Orpheus follows his beloved into the underworld, and with the
sound of his lyre enchants the resident deities into consenting to her release. The one
condition which Orpheus has to meet during the ascent back to the upperworld is that
he is not to look back at Eurydice. In a brief moment of weakness, he does, however,
look back, whereby Eurydice vanishes forever without a trace.

Rejecting all women in his sadness afterwards, Orpheus is later ripped to pieces by the
Maenads. This then is the source of the famous image of Orpheus' lyre and singing head,
floating off through empty space to the island of Lesbos.

| see also the Rilke Posters |

| listen to other recordings in English and German of twelve poems from
The Book of Images at The Rilke Download Page (# Includes instructions) |

See other recent additions of new English translations of Rilke's poetry, together with
featured photographs at:

(13) August: The Gentian and the Poetry of Light and Darkness

(12) August: Water, Granite and the Poetry of Change

See also a selection of recent Picture/Poem "Rilke in translation" features at the Rilke Archive.

See also another website
by Cliff Crego:
The Poetry of
Rainer Maria Rilke

a presentation of 80 of the
best poems of Rilke in
both German and
new English translations:
biography, links, posters