Once more my deeper life goes on with more strength by Rainer Maria Rilke
Once more my deeper life goes on with more strength
by Rainer Maria Rilke
trans. Robert Bly
Once more my deeper life goes on with more strength,
as if the banks through which it moves had widened out.
Trees and stones seem more like me each day,
and the paintings I see seem more seen into:
with my senses, as with birds, I climb
into the windy heaven out of the oak,
and in the ponds broken off from the blue sky
my feeling sinks, as though standing on fishes.
I include this because Rilke uses two of my very favorite metaphors. This sense of the banks of my life being widened is one I’ve used after substantial events, this sense of a flood moving through leaving the material of who I am more capacious, widened. And I love the metaphor of “standing on fishes” for a sort of fundamental disorientation, as you can feel the sheer squishiness of bare feet on slippery.
This is the Robert Bly version from the Book of Hours, which tend to be more interpretive than the Macy and Barrows renderings (also in this archive), and reading them together shows how differently Rilke can sound in different translators' hands.
