Reading Wednesday - Rilke translations

I'm never reading anything of length at the right time to post about it, but I have mentioned that a friend loaned me her Don Paterson translation of The Sonnets to Orpheus, a slender turkey-red Faber, and while I am on the record as being suspicious of the freedom of Paterson's "version", his Sonnet 5 is -- well, here it is:


Raise no stone to his memory. Just let
the rose put forth each year, for his name's sake.
Orpheus. In time, perhaps he'll take
the shape of this, and then of that -- and yet

we need no other name. Orpheus, we say
wherever that song is manifest.
He comes and goes. Therefore are we not blessed
if he outlasts the flowers a few days?

But though his constant leaving is a torment,
leave he must, if we're to understand.
So even as his voice alters the moment,

he's already gone where no one can pursue;
even the lyre cannot ensnare his hands.
And yet in this defiance, he stays true ...


Here's my beloved Stephen Mitchell in contrast, being just a little bit stodgy:


Erect no gravestone to his memory; just
let the rose blossom each year for his sake.
For it is Orpheus. Wherever he has passed
through this or that. We do not need to look

for other names. When there is poetry,
it is Orpheus singing. He lightly comes and goes.
Isn't it enough if sometimes he can stay
with us a few days longer than a rose?

Though he himself is afraid to disappear,
he has to vanish: don't you understand?
The moment his word steps out beyond our life here,

he moves where you will never find his trace.
The lyre's strings do not constrict his hands.
And it is in overstepping that he obeys.

* * * * * *

I do not know where Paterson gets his ellipsis: it isn't in the German in my copy, and it reads twee to me. (I almost left it out.) He also gives it a wholly unnecessary title, "Leaving."

Both are beautiful; but trying them out loud gives the advantage to Paterson, I think, as more fluid and not less grave.

For me, Mitchell's elegant version is much more about Orpheus as the spirit of art, or inspiration; the Paterson seems more deeply infused with grief. Orpheus in the myth is the seeker (and the sacrifice), but here Orpheus is the one being mourned or sought.

Rilke is one of the forces at the back of my novel, his strange poetic cosmologies, and I think of this as the epitaph for one of my somewhat-dead characters.

Does anyone else keep hearing e e cummings in this? What with all the roses and the hands?

{rf}