From “The Duino Elegies”: The Ninth Elegy

by Rainer Maria Rilke

(translated by A. S. Kline)

Why, if it could begin as laurel, and be spent so,

this space of Being, a little darker than all

the surrounding green, with little waves at the edge

of every leaf (like a breeze’s smile) – : why then

have to be human – and shunning destiny

long for destiny?….

               Oh, not because happiness exists,

that over-hasty profit from imminent loss,

not out of curiosity, or to practice the heart,

which could exist in the laurel……

But because being here is much, and because all

that’s here seems to need us, the ephemeral, that

strangely concerns us. We: the most ephemeral. Once,

for each thing, only once. Once, and no more. And we too,

once. Never again. But this

once, to have been, though only once,

to have been an earthly thing – seems irrevocable.
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A final reminder that we will be reading and discussing Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Duino Elegies on November 22. See the SCHEDULE PAGE for more information.

The Sonnets to Orpheus

by Rainer Maria Rilke
Translated by Stephen Mitchell

Another reminder that we will be reading and discussing Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Duino Elegies on November 22. See the SCHEDULE PAGE for more information.

Rilke on Writing and What It Takes to Be an Artist

“Go into yourself and test the deeps in which your life takes rise; at its source you will find the answer to the question whether you must create.”

BY MARIA POPOVA

Even more complex and nuanced than the question of how to be a good writer, which has elicited answers from some of humanity’s most beloved authors, is the question of why be a writer at all — why, that is, do great writers write?
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Among the most memorable and invigorating answers are those sprung forth by W.H. Auden, Jennifer Egan, Pablo Neruda, Joan Didion, David Foster Wallace, Italo Calvino, and William Faulkner. But the finest, richest, truest answer of all comes from Rainer Maria Rilke(December 4, 1875–December 29, 1926) in Letters to a Young Poet (public library) — those invaluable packets of wisdom on writing and life, which Rilke bequeathed to a 19-year-old cadet and budding poet named Franz Xaver Kappus.
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Read the complete article
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A reminder that we will be reading and discussing Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Duino Elegies on November 22. See the SCHEDULE PAGE for more information.

From The Sixth Duino Elegy

by Rainer Maria Rilke


Another reminder that we will be reading and discussing Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Duino Elegies on November 22. See the SCHEDULE PAGE for more information.

From “The Duino Elegies”: The Tenth Elegy

by Rainer Maria Rilke
(translated from German by J.B. Leishman and Stephen Spender)
Someday, emerging at last from this terrifying vision,
may I burst into jubilant praise to assenting Angels!
May not even one of the clear-struck keys of the heart
fail to respond through alighting on slack or doubtful
or rending strings! May a new-found splendour appear
in my streaming face! May inconspicuous Weeping
flower! How dear you will be to me then, you Nights
of Affliction! Oh, why did I not, inconsolable sisters,
more bendingly kneel to receive you, more loosely surrender
myself to your loosened hair? We wasters of sorrows!
How we stare away into sad endurance beyond them,
trying to foresee their end! Whereas they are nothing else
than our winter foliage, our sombre evergreen, one
of the seasons of our interior year,—not only
seasons—they’re also place, settlement, camp, soil, dwelling.
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Another reminder that we will be reading and discussing Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Duino Elegies on November 22. See the SCHEDULE PAGE for more information.

From The Duino Elegies (Opening of The First Elegy)

By Rainer Maria Rilke (translated by Susan Ranson and Marielle Sutherland) from Selected Poems, Oxford World’s Classics
Other translations suggested by Bill Ellis include:

1. The Duino Elegies by Rainer Maria Rilke translated by J.B. Leishman and Stephen Spender

2. The First and Second Duino Elegies by Rainer Maria Rilke translated by Stephen Mitchell

3. The Third Duino Elegy by Rainer Maria Rilke translated by Stephen Mitchell

4. Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Duino Elegies, translated by A. S. Kline

An early reminder that we will be reading and discussing Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Duino Elegies on November 22. See the SCHEDULE PAGE for more information.

O GUARDADOR DE REBANHOS II (THE KEEPER OF SHEEP II)

Fernando Pessoa

O meu olhar é nítido como um girassol.

Tenho o costume de andar pelas estradas

Olhando para a direita e para a esquerda,

E de vez em quando olhando para trás…

E o que vejo a cada momento

É aquilo que nunca antes eu tinha visto,

E eu sei dar por isso muito bem…

Sei ter o pasmo comigo

Que tem uma criança se, ao nascer,

Reparasse que nascera deveras…

Sinto-me nascido a cada momento

Para a eterna novidade do mundo…
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Creio no mundo como num malmequer,

Porque o vejo. Mas não penso nele

Porque pensar é não compreender…

O mundo não se fez para pensarmos nele

(Pensar é estar doente dos olhos)

Mas para olharmos para ele e estarmos de acordo.
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Eu não tenho filosofia: tenho sentidos…

Se falo na Natureza não é porque saiba o que ela é,

Mas porque a amo, e amo-a por isso,

Porque quem ama nunca sabe o que ama

Nem sabe porque ama, nem o que é amar…
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Amar é a eterna inocência,

E a única inocência é não pensar…

© 1914, Alberto Caeiro (Fernando Pessoa)

From: Poesia

Publisher: Assírio & Alvim, Lisbon, 2001

THE KEEPER OF SHEEP II

My gaze is clear like a sunflower.

It is my custom to walk the roads

Looking right and left

And sometimes looking behind me,

And what I see at each moment

Is what I never saw before,

And I’m very good at noticing things.

I’m capable of feeling the same wonder

A newborn child would feel

If he noticed that he’d really and truly been born.

I feel at each moment that I’ve just been born

Into a completely new world…
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I believe in the world as in a daisy,

Because I see it. But I don’t think about it,

Because to think is to not understand.

The world wasn’t made for us to think about it

(To think is to have eyes that aren’t well)

But to look at it and to be in agreement.
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I have no philosophy, I have senses…

If I speak of Nature it’s not because I know what it is

But because I love it, and for that very reason,

Because those who love never know what they love

Or why they love, or what love is.
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To love is eternal innocence,

And the only innocence is not to think…

© Translation: 2006, Richard Zenith

From: A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe: Selected Poems

Publisher: Penguin, New York, 2006
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A final reminder that we will read and discuss The poetry of Fernando Pessoa on October 25th. See the SCHEDULE PAGE for more information.

Fernando Pessoa’s Disappearing Act

The mysterious masterpiece of Portugal’s great modernist.

By Adam Kirsch

If ever there was a writer in flight from his name, it was Fernando Pessoa. Pessoa is the Portuguese word for “person,” and there is nothing he less wanted to be. Again and again, in both poetry and prose, Pessoa denied that he existed as any kind of distinctive individual. “I’m beginning to know myself. I don’t exist,” he writes in one poem. “I’m the gap between what I’d like to be and what others have made of me. . . . That’s me. Period.”

In his magnum opus, “The Book of Disquiet”—a collage of aphorisms and reflections couched in the form of a fictional diary, which he worked on for years but never finished, much less published—Pessoa returns to the same theme: “Through these deliberately unconnected impressions I am the indifferent narrator of my autobiography without events, of my history without a life. These are my Confessions and if I say nothing in them it’s because I have nothing to say.”

Read the complete article
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We will read and discuss the poetry of Fernando Pessoa on October 25th. See the SCHEDULE PAGE for more information.

When in Rome …

Arthur Hugh Clough‘s long poem Amours de Voyage is about failure, misreading and cowardice in love. Julian Barnes salutes Matthew Arnold’s overshadowed friend.

One hundred and sixty years ago today, on 18 April 1849, a 30-year-old English poet wrote to his mother from Rome. British writers had been coming here on a regular basis for a century and more. In 1818 Shelley found its monuments “sublime”. The following year the city “delighted” Byron: “it beats Greece – Constantinople – every thing – at least that I have ever seen.” And in 1845 Dickens arrived, later telling his biographer John Forster that he had been “moved and overcome” by the Colosseum as by no other sight in his life, “except perhaps by the first contemplation of the Falls of Niagara.”
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The young English poet was in good spirits, and happier than at any previous time in his adult life. The great early crisis of his life – one mixing religious belief and employment, and causing him to resign his fellowship at Oxford – had passed; a post at University College London, awaited him in the autumn. He was a classicist as well as a poet, and so we might expect Rome to produce the effect it had on his many literary predecessors. But neither the city of the ancient Romans nor the city of the modern Popes impressed him. He wrote to his mother: “St Peter’s disappoints me: the stone of which it is made is a poor plastery material; and, indeed, Rome in general might be called a rubbishy place; the Roman antiquities in general seem to me only interesting as antiquities, and not for any beauty … The weather has not been very brilliant.”

Read the complete article
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A final reminder that on September 27 we will be reading and discussing Great Narrative Poetry of the Victorian era.

Another reminder that registration for the fall sessions is now open

Another reminder that registration for the September 27, October 25 and November 22 sessions is now open. Please register online, in person or via telephone: (604) 713-1800. The Roundhouse Community Arts and Recreation Centre has expressed concern about the abrupt and striking decline in registration and attendance at the Poetry Circle sessions. This places the existence of our group in jeopardy, making registration for the fall sessions critical. Let’s keep this exceptional troop alive!