Letters to a Young Exchange Student
Rilke is my new best friend. He may not be German (he's Austrian) but he is arguably the most important poet in the German language. He also wrote poems in French. Oh Rilke, you show-off!
ANYWAY, my goal is to read his "Letters to a Young Poet" in German, but of course, translating his feelings and tones are tough even for the pros. So, first I am working my way through it in English. It's sort of like a beautifully worded self-help book, which is something I can get behind. Here is a passage that acts as a big, fluffy, comforter when I am feeling especially guilty of my sadness:
“Perhaps many things inside you have been transformed; perhaps somewhere, someplace deep inside your being, you have undergone important changes while you were sad. The only sadnesses that are dangerous and unhealthy are the ones that we carry around in public in order to drown them out with the noise; like diseases that are treated superficially and foolishly, they just withdraw and after a short interval break out again all the more terribly; and gather inside us and are life, are life that is unlived, rejected, lost, life that we can die of. If only it were possible for us to see farther than our knowledge reaches, and even a little beyond the outworks of our presentiment, perhaps we would bear our sadnesses with greater trust than we have in our joys. For they are the moments when something new has entered us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy embarrassment, everything in us withdraws, a silence arises, and the new experience, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it all and says nothing.”
Don't you feel a little better too?
ANYWAY, my goal is to read his "Letters to a Young Poet" in German, but of course, translating his feelings and tones are tough even for the pros. So, first I am working my way through it in English. It's sort of like a beautifully worded self-help book, which is something I can get behind. Here is a passage that acts as a big, fluffy, comforter when I am feeling especially guilty of my sadness:
“Perhaps many things inside you have been transformed; perhaps somewhere, someplace deep inside your being, you have undergone important changes while you were sad. The only sadnesses that are dangerous and unhealthy are the ones that we carry around in public in order to drown them out with the noise; like diseases that are treated superficially and foolishly, they just withdraw and after a short interval break out again all the more terribly; and gather inside us and are life, are life that is unlived, rejected, lost, life that we can die of. If only it were possible for us to see farther than our knowledge reaches, and even a little beyond the outworks of our presentiment, perhaps we would bear our sadnesses with greater trust than we have in our joys. For they are the moments when something new has entered us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy embarrassment, everything in us withdraws, a silence arises, and the new experience, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it all and says nothing.”
Don't you feel a little better too?
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