Loss, in Translation

Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel Ordnugen?

Sometime, later this spring, we are going to move from the house we’ve lived in for a quarter century. In all that time, we’ve read, accumulated, and piled up a lot of books. Hell, I even wrote a pile of them.

Our new home has a place for an actual library—so our books will no longer malinger in every room. Still, the new library will not have room for an infinite number of books. We are forced to trim our collection.

If you love books, you know that intentionally parting with even one feels like having an amputation sans anesthesia. So far, we’ve donated twenty cartons of books (to libraries and to a favorite used book dealer). Surprisingly, our shelves don’t look like they’ve suffered radical surgery.

Mostly, we’ve eliminated duplicates, books in poor condition, and paperbacks. Yesterday, I noticed that I have two translations of Rilke’s Duino Elegies. Both books are bilingual, but the translation I prefer is a paperback. There are differences, so I intend to keep both.

The hard-cover one (translated by A. Poulin, Jr.) begins, “And if I cried, who’d listen to me in those angelic orders?” The paperback (translated by J.B Leishman and Stephen Spender) begins, “Who, if I cried, would hear me among the angelic orders?’

Maybe it’s just because I read the paper one first, but I feel its longing more directly than I do with Poulin’s translation. I cannot read German, so I can’t speak to the accuracy of the translation—but only to my perception of the translations’ poetry.

In handling the two books, I remembered that I’d written a speculative short story, years ago, that alluded to the Duino Elegies. It was included in a miscellany called Ephemera.

Who, if I Cried

“Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the Angelic orders?”(first line of Rilke’s “Duino Elegies,” found in a notebook left on a park bench)

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I know what you’re thinking: “Is this going to be one of those hokey stories that pretends to be someone else’s lost manuscript?”—and, I must confess, your suspicions are justified. The notebook ploy is totally bogus. There never was such a notebook.

In reality, the words just appeared in a dream, in one of those near-waking moments that seem incredibly significant, but fade away by the time the dreamer climbs into the shower. The words floated down to me, just as they had to Rilke, as he walked along the beach below Duino Castle. Perhaps the poet really believed that they came from some terrible angel.

Me? Not a chance.

I know they had just been drifting around in my subconscious for the past forty-odd years, waiting to serve some new purpose. But what if there had been a lost notebook on that hypothetical bench? What if it had contained nothing except that single line of poetry? What could we make of it?

First, there’s an excellent chance that our would-be diarist was young. The line reeks of the kind of yearning that only the young can carry off with any measure of believability. On the other hand, the line could have been left by another poet—but poets, like paleontologists, are just adults who never out-grew their youthful love of poetry (or dinosaurs, which amounts to the same thing). We all wrote poetry at some point in our lives (how else would we have known that we were really suffering?). However, like so many other passions, the urge to commit one’s longings to paper tends to fade over time. Whether the longings themselves fade, or simply lose their brutal newness, is another issue, one perhaps better left for some other time.

What about that single journal entry? Why might someone have chosen that particular quote… and nothing else? Was it meant to be the beginning of something larger, something so important to the journalist that he/she could not bear to lose it? And yet, lose it he/she certainly did. Was it something the journalist was barely “still able to bear,” even though “it calmly disdains to destroy” him/her? And how was it intended to answer Rilke’s existential question? Was it the beginning of a new poem? A novel? A confession of terrible angst-driven obsession?

Perhaps it was nothing more than a mnemonic device… but of what was it intended to remind the poor suffering soul? Was the mere act of writing it down sufficient to burn the reminder into the writer’s consciousness—and that’s why the notebook was left behind?

What if something else happened to cause the abandonment of the notebook? Did the source of the writer’s distress suddenly appear (for that matter, are we justified in assuming that such a source was ever involved)? Did he/she say, or do, something that made the notebook’s lone entry superfluous?

If so, perhaps the notebook wasn’t lost at all. Perhaps it was abandoned—an inconsequential bit of jetsam, tossed over the side just as the diarist was swept away.

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