The Duino Elegies

1977 version

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     THE FIRST ELEGY (1977)

1      Who, if I cried out, would hear me, among the angels’

2      orders? And put the case even that one of them should take

3      me suddenly to his heart: I would succumb to his

4      stronger existence. For the beautiful is nothing

5      but the awesome’s beginning which we just barely endure,

6      and we admire it so, because it serenely disdains

7      to destroy us. Each one of the angels is awesome.

8     And thus I preserve myself and swallow the luring call

9      of darksome sobbing. Ah, whom are we able

10    to need? Not angels, not humans,

11    and the perceptive animals readily notice

12    that we’re not so reliably at home

13     in the interpreted world. There remains for us perhaps

14    some tree on a cliff such that each day

15    we see it again; there remains for us the street of yesterday  

16    and the distorted loyalty of a habit

17    that liked being with us and so it stayed and did not leave.

18    Oh, and the night, the night when the wind full of space of the world

19    tugs at our countenances —, for whom would the night not remain, longed for,

20    gently disappointing, that laboriously awaits the

21    individual heart. Is the night easier for lovers? 

22    Ah, they only cover up their fate with each other.

23    You don’t know it yet? Cast from your arms the emptiness

24    to the spaces we breathe: that perhaps the birds

25    may feel the expanded air with more fervent flight.

26    Yes, the springtimes did need you. There were some stars that expected 

27    you’d sense them. There arose

28    a wave in the past toward you, or

29    when you passed by an opened window,

30    a violin surrendered itself. That all was a task.

31    But did you accomplish it? Were you not still

32    distracted by anticipation, as if all things were announcing

33    a woman for you to love? (Where will you shelter her,

34    now that the vast strange thoughts

35    are going and coming and often staying the night with you?)

36    But if you have longing, then sing the lovers; not nearly

37    immortal enough is their famous emotion.

38    Sing those (you envy them almost) deserted, whom you

39    found so much more loving than those who were stilled.

40    Begin again and again the never attainable praise;

41    bear in mind: the hero conserves himself, even his final 

42    downfall was only a pretext for him to exist: his last birth.

43    But the lovers are retrieved by exhausted Nature

44    back into herself, as if there were not the forces a second time to 

45    perform this. Have you commemorated Gaspara Stampa 

46    sufficiently that some maiden

47    whose beloved eluded her, at the exalted example

48    of this loving woman feels: let me become like her?

49    Should not finally these oldest sufferings

50    become more fruitful for us? Is it not time that we lovingly

51    free ourselves from our beloved and withstand it trembling:

52    as the arrow withstands the bowstring, gathered to spring forth

53    in order to be more than itself. For there is nowhere to stay.

54    Voices, voices. Hear them, my heart, as hitherto only  

55    saints have heard: such that the gigantic call 

56    raised them up off the ground: yet they still knelt, 

57    impossibly, and did not heed it:

58    that was their hearing. Not that you could endure

59    God’s voice, far from it. But hear the drifting,

60    the uninterrupted message that forms itself out of stillness.  

61    It is murmured to you now by the youthful dead.

62    Wherever you entered, did not in churches

63    in Rome and Naples their destiny serenely address you?

64    Or there was an inscription that sublimely entrusted itself to you,

65    as not long ago the tablet in Santa Maria Formosa

66    What do they want of me? I am to softly dispel 

67    the semblance of injustice that sometimes slightly

68    hinders their spirits’ pure motion.

69    To be sure, it is odd not to inhabit the earth any longer,  

70    no longer to practice hardly learned customs,

71    not to give roses and other expressly promising things

72    the interpretation of a human future;

73    no longer to be what one was in endlessly fearful hands,  

74    and to leave off even one’s own name

75    like a shattered toy.

76    Odd not to continue wishing one’s wishes. Odd

77    to see everything that once was related

78    fluttering so loosely in space. And being dead is arduous

79    and full of redoings, such that gradually one 

80    senses a trace of eternity. — But the living all make

81    the mistake that they differentiate too strictly.

82    Angels (it’s said) would often not know if they

83    walk among living or dead. The eternal streaming

84    rushes through both regions of all ages

85    along with it and oversounds them in both.

86    Finally they need us no longer, those early departed

87    one gently unaccustoms oneself to the earthly, as one

88    mildly outgrows the breasts of the mother. But we, who need

89    such great mysteries from which by sorrow so often

90    blissful advancement springs forth —: could we exist without them?  

91    Is the legend in vain that once in lamenting for Linos,

92    daring first music permeated barren rigidity;

93    that for the first time, in the startled space from which an almost godly youth 

94    suddenly stepped forth forever, the emptiness passed into that

95    vibration that enraptures us now and consoles and helps?