radiant fracture

Autumn Day
Rainer Maria Rilke
Translated by Stephen Mitchell


Lord, it is time. The huge summer has gone by.
Now overlap the sundials with your shadows
and on the meadows let the wind go free.

Command the fruits to swell on tree and vine:
grant them a few more warm transparent days,
urge them on to fulfillment then, and press
the final sweetness into the heavy wine.

Whoever has no house now, will never have one
whoever is alone will stay alone,
will sit, read, write long letters through the evening
and wander on the boulevards up and down,
restlessly, while the dry leaves are blowing.

Autumn Day

Lord: it is time. The huge summer has gone by.
Now overlap the sundials with your shadows,
and on the meadows let the wind go free.

Command the fruits to swell on tree and vine;
grant them a few more warm transparent days.
urge them on to fulfillment then, and press
the final sweetness into the heavy wine.

Whoever has no house now, will never have one.
Whoever is alone will stay alone,
will sit, read, write long letters through the evening,
and wander on the boulevards, up and down,
restlessly, while the dry leaves are blowing.

* * * * * *

On the first of September, I traditionally post Rilke's "Herbsttag" in my beloved Stephen Mitchell's translation, above.

This is not, of course, the only translation. Here's William Gass:


Lord, it is time. The summer was too long.
Lay your shadow on the sundials now,
and through the meadow let the winds throng.

Ask the last fruits to ripen on the vine;
give them further two more summer days
to bring about perfection and to raise
the final sweetness in the heavy wine.

Whoever has no house now will establish none,
whoever lives alone now will live on long alone,
will waken, read, and write long letters,
wander up and down the barren paths
the parks expose when the leaves are blown.

* * * * * *

So was the summer just huge, or was it too long? I don't have the German to say what nuance Rilke intended for "sehr gross."

(It's a quirk of my memory that I often remember Mitchell having written "enormous" rather than "huge," despite its being much more difficult to make "enormous" scan.)

Gass' translation is from a book called Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problem of Translation, which leads me to wonder if he is being provocative. (I have not read the book.)

There are some places where Gass seems to be closer in precise sense to the original, but to my ear Mitchell's is better English poetry.

Why is that?

Well, my eye is drawn to the third line:

and on the meadows let the wind go free vs. and through the meadow let the winds throng

In both cases, the prepositional phrase is interrupting the action -- we're in the middle of a parallel structure in which the Lord is enjoined to do two things: let shadows fall on the sundials, and send the breeze into the fields.

To my ear, Mitchell's "on the meadows," with it slightly unusual syntax (we'd tend to say "in" or "through", as Gass does) feels free-flowing; Gass' longer "through" feels clunky and calls attention to the preposition rather than the meadow.

I also notice that the two translators reverse the plurals, meadow vs. wind. To me, that makes Mitchell's line sound like the wind is being figured as a lone animal turned loose in the fields. Gass' image is of a teeming number of somethings gathering. Maybe I tend to prefer Mitchell's image here since this poem is so much about solitude.

Gass' more specific verb "throng" should be more vivid -- and perhaps it is, and it does rhyme, but for me it's the wrong kind of vivid. "Go" is pretty generic, but "go free" spreads the meaning out over two words and slows it down, which I think adds to the sense of loosening in the poem. "Throng" lands this big noisy verb right at the end of the line and stops the movement.

I also think stress is playing a part here. I am no prosodist, so bear with me.

I hear "winds throng" as a final spondee (double stress) -- "WINDS THRONG." Again, that concludes a line about movement with a sense of heaviness, like tying a lead weight to the end of the line.

I tend to hear Mitchell's "wind go free" as a near-dactyl, where the heavy stress falls on "wind" and "go free" is perhaps a soft iamb, only lightly stressed. This lifts the weight from the final verb and lets the reader's voice do what it's talking about, loosen at the end of the thought / line.

In any case, when I say each line aloud to myself over and over in my solitary shed, the stress in Mitchell's version falls on "meadows" and "wind," whereas in Gass it falls on "through" and "winds throng."

(putters with Google Translate)

Am I right in thinking that Rilke's original "lass die Winde los" would be 'let the winds loose"? (Google translate has "let go of the wind" which, despite my serious poetic intentions, makes me giggle slightly.)

Happy September.

{rf}