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Five Rose Poems by Rainer Maria Rilke
translated by Alan Orsborn
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The Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), writing in both German and French, penned 24 French poems about roses that were published posthumously in 1927 as Les Roses. The American composer Morten Lauridsen (b. 1943) selected five of these poems, composing a song cycle around them that he called Les Chansons des Roses. The fifth poem he set as his grand finale, calling it Dirait-on, “so they say.” Dirait-on is the most widely known and loved of the five musical settings. These are translations of Rainer Maria Rilke’s five rose poems as sequenced within Morten Lauridsen’s composition.
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I
We had proposed to you nonetheless
__That you fill your calyx.
Delighted with the dramatics,
__You turned daring with your largesse.
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You expanded yourself one hundred times—you’re rich enough—
__Into one bloom;
That tells the state of him in love…
__But that’s what you ever assume.
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Calyx: French calice. A pun, calice means both “chalice” and “calyx,” the botanical term for the cup-like covering of a developing flower bud.
Him: French celui: Words referring to the narrator of these poems are masculine, grammatically feminine words are used for the rose (or the woman, as the case may be).
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II
Against whom, Rose,
Have you sought to acquire
All these thorns?
Is joy so forlorn
That it dares require
This armed thing that grows
Briars?
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What threat does this prevent,
This overblown barbed wire?
Your numerous opponents
I retired,
Those that were never scared.
In spite of that, summer and fall
You still wound the care
That gives all.
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III
Of your dreams overrun,
Manifold flower within,
As watered as weepers’ skin,
You bend low before the sun.
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Your soft strength slumbers
With a tentative passion,
Unfolding tender contours
Betwixt cheek and bosom.
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IV
I am so aware of your
Being, Perfect Rose,
That my intents must seem a blur
With this party my heart throws.
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I breathe you in as if you were just,
Rose, all of life,
And I, a perfect friend to trust
A friend alike.
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Friend…friend…: French, masculine and feminine grammatical forms, respectively.
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V
Unconstraint rounds unconstraint,
Tenderness holds tenderness…
Your interior stirs in ceaseless
Self-caress, so they say;
Within yourself caressed,
Your own reflection’s light reveals
The metaphor you express
Of Narcissus fulfilled.
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Narcissus: In Greek and Roman mythology, Narcissus, unable to have contact with his own water-reflected image with which he had become obsessed, wasted away and died. The flowers that subsequently sprang from his chest bear his name.
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Original French
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1. C’est pourtant nous qui t’avons proposé (En une seule fleur)
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C’est pourtant nous qui t’avons proposé
de remplir ton calice.
Enchantée de cet artifice,
ton abondance l’avait osé.
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Tu étais assez riche, pour devenir cent fois toi-même
en une seule fleur ;
c’est l’état de celui qui aime…
Mais tu n’as pas pensé ailleurs.
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2. Contre qui, rose
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Contre qui, rose,
avez-vous adopté
ces épines ?
Votre joie trop fine
vous a-t-elle forcée
de devenir cette chose
armée ?
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Mais de qui vous protège
cette arme exagérée ?
Combien d’ennemis vous ai-je
enlevés
qui ne la craignaient point.
Au contraire, d’été en automne,
vous blessez les soins
qu’on vous donne.
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3. De ton rêve trop plein
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De ton rêve trop plein,
fleur en dedans nombreuse,
mouillée comme une pleureuse,
tu te penches sur le matin.
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Tes douces forces qui dorment
dans un désir incertain,
développent ses tendres formes
entre joues et seins.
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4. J’ai une telle conscience de ton (La rose complète)
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J’ai une telle conscience de ton
être, rose complète,
que mon consentement te confond
avec mon cœur en fête.
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Je te respire comme si tu étais,
rose, toute la vie,
et je me sens l’ami parfait
d’une telle amie.
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5. Abandon entouré d’abandon (Dirait-on)
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Abandon entouré d’abandon,
tendresse touchant aux tendresses…
C’est ton intérieur qui sans cesse
se caresse, dirait-on ;
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se caresse en soi-même,
par son propre reflet éclairé.
Ainsi tu inventes le thème
du Narcisse exhaucé.
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Alan Orsborn lives in Washington state.
Most interesting and educational. I would guess most people make no connection between Narcissus in mythology and the flower. In Texas our roses are gorgeous this time of year. Thank you, Alan.
You’re very welcome. Working on these poems made me want to plant a rose garden.
These are lovely. Though I can’t comment on the translation per se, I very much enjoy your creative and beautiful rhymes, like nonetheless/largesse/; calyx/dramatics; slumbers/contours; tenderness/ceaseless, which seem to reflect the intent of the original rhyme scheme. Like Phil, I appreciate the way you’ve tied in Narcissus with the rose’s self-caressing. And I’m thankful to have been introduced to this music, as well.
I chose the calyx/dramatics rhyme over chalice/artifice. I like calyx/dramatics better, especially because I liked dramatics better than artifice. I hesitated because it committed that line to being about a rose exclusively with a botanical term like calyx. The rose poems are written in such a way as to be subject to various interpretation. Is Rilke writing about a rose? A woman? Both? The challenge with Rilke is to execute an accurate translation that allows the readers to come to their own conclusions.
Alan,
Well translated, well versed, well rhymed, and the final sentence in your comment reply to Cynthia is well said. In short, well done.
You are so right, James, that is the challenge. I’ve learned a lot and I’m still learning. Hopefully these poems can create a bridge for readers to not only Rainer Maria Rilke’s exquisite poetry but also to Morten Lauridsen’s sublime music.
You set yourself a real challenge of translation, Alan. The most difficult poems to translate at all are the simple ones like these with clearly meaningful imagery that crosses the boundaries of language difference. I think you are most successful with the third and the fourth of the poems. These present the multiple touches of tenderness present in Rilke’s work that harks back to innumerable French rose poems in earlier ages. In your first and second, I find the final lines not true to Rilke’s words, because of the constraints of your rhyme choices. These may be good enough to satisfy many readers of English, but even without considering the French, they strike me as rather obscure conclusions to what has gone before. In the fifth poem, you have done well with six lines, and my dissatisfaction with the concluding two is Rilke’s fault, not yours. He seems to have intended the immense leap of re-interpreting the highly developed image of the rose and the classic myth of Narcissus in tandem, and I simply find “exhauce” a failure. Your word “fulfilled” is again not quite right for it, but does offer an authentic re-interpretation. And therefore I congratulate you on making something of it in your own way.
Lauridsen’s music is inescapable because I live near him, and the interpreter (chorus and director) makes a big difference in the full effect of each piece. Brave work in taking on a similar challenge with these Rilke poems!
Margaret,
I very much appreciate the detailed and specific feedback from an expert such as yourself. Yes, I somewhat naively started this project not fully understanding Rilke’s polyphonic voice, only wanting to make Rilke’s poetry in Morten Lauridsen’s song cycle more widely available. As I went along, I began to understand the difficulties, slowly at first, then suddenly. I translated them in their numerical order, so it may not be surprising that you found more issues with the first two poems, and the translations seem to improve as you read along.
The third poem is the one I feel the best about in terms of my translation, and the fourth is the runner up. The fourth is also my favorite of the five (in French) but I like all of them, with the possible exception of the fifth.
The fifth poem is very strange. I’ve had several theories about it, but I currently interpret the concentric circles of the moving petals as creating a vortex (the vortex is a recurring theme in Rilke’s German poetry collection New Poems). This vortex gives rise to the rose’s reflection that in turn illuminates the rose. The rose and its reflection are joined in this transcendent light that achieve what Narcissus could not. Anyway, that’s all debatable. My other theory was this is about a lover’s quarrel and the poet is being sarcastic. I reject that interpretation now because as I have been with Rilke’s poetry more, I find he is very gentle. Nevertheless I have often wondered if Rilke would have been surprised to find that Lauridsen made the fifth poem the grand finale of his song cycle.
You may live near Morten Lauridsen in LA, but we in Washington, east and west, have small claims on him. He was born on the Palouse in the town of Colfax, and he has a house in the San Juans.
Hello Alan Orsborn,
I came across your translation of Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Five Rose Poems” and was truly moved by them. As a Bengali poet and blogger, I would love to translate these beautiful poems into Bengali and share them on my blog. Would you consider allowing me to do so while crediting you for your translation?
Thank you for your consideration!
Warm regards,
Nurul Hoque
Chittagong, Bangladesh.