Rilke

I would like to step out of my heart and go walking beneath the enormous sky.

When I first started reading poetry, long before I met the poet, this line by Rainer Maria Rilke, the German poet, caught at my heart. During a particularly melancholy period I decided on this line as my epitaph. These days I’m not so focused on the grave all the time!

Tonight we went to a reading and launch for one of the poet’s friends who has just published a translation of Rilke’s The Duino Elegies. The reading was held in a wonderful independent bookshop, Crockatt and Powell, near Waterloo station, a bookseller of the kind that is sadly becoming increasingly rare thanks to the empires of Borders, Waterstones and Amazon. My favourite quirky touch was the assortment of intriguing and beautiful bookmarks scattered through the shelves and tables of books. And they have a blog!

We read in the tube and the bus on the way home, delving into the very accessible introduction by a German scholar, becoming absorbed in the elegies, and I wondered why I had never really followed up that first Rilke moment, why I had read bits and pieces over the years but never a whole book. This is changing as I write, I’ll be carrying this book around with me for some time. Rilke’s poetry is breathtaking, and this is a fine translation, as you might expect from a fine poet like Martyn. Even though my knowledge of German is fairly rudimentary, having the German text facing means I can both entertain myself and get a sense of the rhythm the poet intended, reading aloud on the bus like your average German-speaking literate London loony.

And how bewildered is any creature
that is womb-born and yet has to fly.
As if frightened of itself, it must hurtle
through the air the way a crack goes
through a tea-cup – so a bat’s track
streaks through the porcelain of evening. (Eighth Elegy)