Скачать или смотреть Rilke: Sonnets to Orpheus

This is my translation of the First of Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus, First Series. These are astonishing poems and really quite abstruse, but startling in their suggestions. It is pointless and superfluous to attempt to say what these poems mean. It's like asking what a piece of music means. Poems and music just ARE. We have to accept their being. Of course, people do and will ask for clarity of meaning. But some phenomena are just too big to be pared down to size.

And yet - I do conceive what the poem means, although my interpretation must be seen as one among a possible multitude. Orpheus' song (he charmed the trees and brutes etc - ie. he made the unconscious conscious) is like a huge and growing tree. It fills the universe. Art is a way to experience the whole of things - art as revelation, as recreation. Thus we have the 'silent' part of nature to which art gives voices. This art, as the whole creation finds expression, turns the barren wastes of time and space into a gleaming white temple, a place where the sacred becomes matter and form. And this temple (in my translation anyway) is the foot of the great tree of art, its root. Art is of course primarily form. So we have the Great Progression from the unexpressed and the weight of the inexpressible into the purity of artistic form, of song, poetry, painting, sculpture, architecture etc.

The music is Bach's Art of Fugue, the opening fugue played on the harpsichord by Sebastien Guillot in the marvellous performance available from Naxos.


Rilke: First Sonnet of the First Series to Orpheus

Da stieg ein Baum.


A rising tree, a growing tree: it shoots!
(Orpheus sings!) An auditory tree!
Sudden silence sullenly refutes
all endings. Now we might change; at last be free.

Four-footed beings of silence, here they come,
from the inner wild emerging, from their holts
of quiet, unfazed by change, unfearful; some
lift their listening muzzles: pairs with colts

pause, puzzled. Then bark and whistle and shriek;
then stop, one forepaw lifted. In the waste,
devoid of even a huntsman's hut or foot,

stands now a colonnaded temple sleek
and white. You, Orpheus, made it, and have placed
it here, of your great tree the glistening root.