TITLE: Creation and the Beauty of Language
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: September 02, 2010 10:07 PM
DESC: 
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BODY:
I learned today that my colleague Mark Jacobson
<A HREF="http://ghostbusters-mark.blogspot.com/">
   created a blog</A>
last spring, mostly as a commonplace book of quotes
on which he was reflecting.  While looking at his
few posts, I came across this passage from Rainer
Maria Rilke in his
<A HREF="http://ghostbusters-mark.blogspot.com/2010/05/suki-23rd-gift.html">
   inaugural entry</A>:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it;
blame yourself that you are not poet enough to
call forth its riches; for the Creator, there
is no poverty.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

There were a couple of times this week when I
really needed to hear this, and reading it today
was good fortune.  It's also a great passage
for computer programmers, who need never accept
the grayness of their tools because they have
the powers of a Creator.

I have long been a fan of Rilke's imagery and
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2009-02.html#e2009-02-09T16_31_38.htm">
   have quoted him before</A>.
I remember reading my first Rilke poem, in my
high school German IV course.  Our wonderful
teacher, Frau Griffith, had the heart of a poet
and asked those of us who had survived into the
fourth year to read as much original German
literature as we could, in order that we might
come to understand more fully what it means to
be German.  (She was a deeply emotional woman
who had escaped Nazi Germany on a train in the
dead of night, just ahead of the local police.)
I came to love Rilke and to be mesmerized by
Kafka, whose work I have read in translation
many times since.  His short fiction is often
surprising.

I do not remember just which Rilke poem we read
first.  I only remember that it showed me German
could be beautiful.  My German IV classmates and
I were often teased by classmates who studied
French and Spanish.  They praised the fluidity
of their languages and mocked the turgid prose
of ours.  We mocked them back for studying easier
languages, but secretly we admitted that German
was sounded and looked uglier.  Rilke showed us
that we were wrong, that German syllables could
flow as mellifluously as any other.  Revelation!

Later Frau introduced us to the popular music of
<A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Udo_Jurgens">
   Udo J&uuml;rgens</A>,
and we were hooked.

Recently, I ran across a reference to Goethe's
"The Holy Longing".  I tracked it down in
English and immediately understood its appeal.
But the translation feels so clunky...  The
<A HREF="http://room4truth.com/2010/08/25/the-holy-longing/">
   original German</A>
has a rhythm that is hard to capture.  Read:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
Keine Ferne macht dich schwierig, <BR/>
Kommst geflogen und gebannt,      <BR/>
Und zuletzt, des Lichts begierig, <BR/>
Bist du Schmetterling verbrannt.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

That's not quite Rilke to my ears, but it
feels right.
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