Your colleague’s goldfish, your neighbor’s cat, the panther at the zoo-these creatures truly belong on earth, whereas you are just a cosmic tourist, a hopelessly transient stranger. That is where you’ve been trying to live, and failing all along! Also, you’re glad that someone else has sensed that animals know we are frauds. The interpreted world! Translators quibble over how to handle the German phrase der gedeuteten Welt (“deciphered world” is another option), but either way, you get the gist. To use in our need? Not angels, not humans, It’s in this regulated state that you discover the higher vice of poetry: Badly out of sync with the world, you begin to rely on a daily routine to set your mind at ease. But then again, your life is absurd, and so is your “worldview.” Your agnosticism allows you to be a sensible, tolerant citizen, but certain moods do not respond to irony, sports, or single-malt scotch. You don’t believe in angels the idea is obviously absurd. You may have seen the statistic, often cited by foreign journalists and talk-show hosts, that 77% of Americans believe in such ethereal beings, but this is the first time you’re hearing about a celestial bureaucracy. Every angel is terrifying.Īngels-now, that’s something. For beauty is nothingīut the onset of terror we’re still just able to bear,Īnd we admire it so because it calmly disdains Who, if I screamed out, would hear me among the hierarchies But then you open an English version of Rilke’s Duino Elegies (say, for example, the one translated by Galway Kinnell and Hannah Liebmann): You assume that you are uniquely troubled. And yet, inexplicably, you harbor a weird affection for life in the abstract-a blue flame of gratitude for your place in the world-even when your insurance provider keeps you on hold for over an hour. Your job has recently siphoned off your last kilowatt of youth, Janet from Human Resources hasn’t replied to your Facebook missive, the bars in Flagstaff or Buffalo play the same three inane songs, and existence itself has begun to feel like a passive-aggressive feud. Pretend, for a moment, that you are having a garden-variety emotional crisis.

Along with Neruda, the Chilean bard, and Rumi, the Sufi mystic, Rilke is one of the few foreign poets to have made it big in America. Anyone who has scanned the poetry shelves of a well-stocked Barnes and Noble will have seen the name of the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke.

Duino elegies translation