Rainer Maria Rilke: Frasi in inglese

Rainer Maria Rilke era scrittore, poeta e drammaturgo austriaco. Frasi in inglese.
Rainer Maria Rilke: 234 citazioni76 Mi piace

“It seems to me that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension, which we feel as paralysis because we no longer hear our astonished emotions living. Because we are alone with the unfamiliar presence that has entered us; because everything we trust and are used to is for a moment taken away from us; because we stand in the midst of a transition where we cannot remain standing. That is why the sadness passes: the new presence inside us, the presence that has been added, has entered our heart, has gone into its innermost chamber and is no longer even there, - is already in our bloodstream. And we don't know what it was. We could easily be made to believe that nothing happened, and yet we have changed, as a house that a guest has entered changes. We can't say who has come, perhaps we will never know, but many signs indicate that the future enters us in this way in order to be transformed in us, long before it happens. And that is why it is so important to be solitary and attentive when one is sad: because the seemingly uneventful and motionless moment when our future steps into us is so much closer to life than that other loud and accidental point of time when it happens to us as if from outside. The quieter we are, the more patient and open we are in our sadnesses, the more deeply and serenely the new presence can enter us, and the more we can make it our own, the more it becomes our fate.”

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Rainer Maria Rilke libro Letters to a Young Poet

Letter Eight (12 August 1904)
Letters to a Young Poet (1934)

“The longer I live, the more urgent it seems to me to endure and transcribe the whole dictation of existence up to its end, for it might just be the case that only the very last sentence contains that small and possibly inconspicuous word through which everything we had struggled to learn and everything we had failed to understand will be transformed suddenly into magnificent sense.”

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Rainer Maria Rilke

Je weiter ich lebe, desto nötiger scheint es mir, auszuhalten, das ganze Diktat des Daseins bis zum Schluss nachzuschreiben; denn es möchte sein, dass erst der letzte Satz jenes kleine, vielleicht unscheinbare Wort enthält, durch welches alles mühsam Erlernte und Unbegriffene sich gegen einen herrlichen Sinn hinüberkehrt.
Letter to Ilse Erdmann, 21 December 1913, in Letters on Life, U. Baer, trans. (2007)
Rilke's Letters

“Not since Moses has anyone seen a mountain so greatly.”

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Rainer Maria Rilke

Quoted in Rilke's Letters on Cézanne, foreword (1952, trans. 1985)

“Young people, who are beginners in everything, cannot yet know love: they have to learn it.”

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Rainer Maria Rilke libro Letters to a Young Poet

Letter Seven (14 May 1904)
Letters to a Young Poet (1934)

“Sex is difficult; yes. But those tasks that have been entrusted to us are difficult; almost everything serious is difficult; and everything is serious. If you just recognize this and manage, out of yourself, out of your own talent and nature, out of your own experience and childhood and strength, to achieve a wholly individual relation to sex (one that is not influenced by convention and custom), then you will no longer have to be afraid of losing yourself and becoming unworthy of your dearest possession.”

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Rainer Maria Rilke libro Letters to a Young Poet

Letter Four (16 July 1903)
Letters to a Young Poet (1934)

“Love is something difficult and it is more difficult than other things because in other conflicts nature herself enjoins men to collect themselves, to take themselves firmly in the hand with all their strength, while in the heightening of love the impulse is to give oneself wholly away.”

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Rainer Maria Rilke libro Letters to a Young Poet

Letter Seven (14 May 1904)
Letters to a Young Poet (1934)

“This difficult living, heavy and as if all tied up,
moving through that which has been left undone,
is like the not-quite-finished walk of the swan.And dying, this slipping away from
the ground upon which we stand every day,
is his anxious letting himself fall—:into the waters, which receive him gladly
and which, as if happily already gone by,
draw back under him, wave after wave;
while the swan, infinitely calm and self-assured,
opener and more magnificent
and more serene, allows himself to be drawn on.”

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Rainer Maria Rilke libro New Poems

Diese Mühsal, durch noch Ungetanes
schwer und wie gebunden hinzugehen,
gleicht dem ungeschaffnen Gang des Schwanes.<p>Und das Sterben, dieses Nichtmehrfassen
jenes Grunds, auf dem wir täglich stehen,
seinem ängstlichen Sich-Niederlassen—:<p>in die Wasser, die ihn sanft empfangen
und die sich, wie glücklich und vergangen,
unter ihm zurückziehn, Flut um Flut;
während er unendlich still und sicher
immer mündiger und königlicher
und gelassener zu ziehn geruht.
Der Schwan (The Swan) (as translated by Cliff Crego)
Neue Gedichte (New Poems) (1907)

“Slowly the evening changes into the clothes
held for it by a row of ancient trees.”

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Rainer Maria Rilke libro The Book of Images

Der Abend wechselt langsam die Gewänder,
die ihm ein Rand von alten Bäumen hält.
Abend (Evening) (as translated by Cliff Crego)
Das Buch der Bilder (The Book of Images) (1902)

“The great renewal of the world will perhaps consist in this, that man and maid, freed of all false feelings and reluctances, will seek each other not as opposites, but as brother and sister, as neighbors, and will come together as human beings.”

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Rainer Maria Rilke libro Letters to a Young Poet

Letter Four (16 July 1903)
Letters to a Young Poet (1934)

“Nothing touches a work of art so little as words of criticism : they always result in more or less fortunate misunderstandings. Things aren't all so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered, and more unsayable than all other things are works of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory life.”

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Rainer Maria Rilke libro Letters to a Young Poet

Letter One (17 February 1903)
Letters to a Young Poet (1934)

“A tree ascended there. Oh pure transendence!
Oh Orpheus sings! Oh tall tree in the ear!
And all things hushed. Yet even in that silence
a new beginning, beckoning, change appeared.”

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Rainer Maria Rilke libro Sonnets to Orpheus

Translated by Stephen Mitchell
Sonnets to Orpheus (1922)

“As bees gather honey, so we collect what is sweetest out of all things and build Him. Even with the trivial, with the insignificant (as long as it is done out of love) we begin, with work and with the repose that comes afterward, with a silence or with a small solitary joy, with everything that we do alone, without anyone to join or help us, we start Him whom we will not live to see, just as our ancestors could not live to see us. And yet they, who passed away long ago, still exist in us, as predisposition, as burden upon our fate, as murmuring blood, and as gesture that rises up from the depths of time. Is there anything that can deprive you of the hope that in this way you will someday exist in Him, who is the farthest, the outermost limit?”

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Rainer Maria Rilke libro Letters to a Young Poet

Letter Six (23 December 1903)
Letters to a Young Poet (1934)

“Ideally a painter (and, generally, an artist) should not become conscious of his insights: without taking the detour through his reflective processes, and incomprehensibly to himself, all his progress should enter so swiftly into the work that he is unable to recognise them in the moment of transition. Alas, the artist who waits in ambush there, watching, detaining them, will find them transformed like the beautiful gold in the fairy tale which cannot remain gold because some small detail was not taken care of.”

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Rainer Maria Rilke

Letter to his wife, reprinted in Rilke’s Letters on Cézanne (1952, trans. 1985). (October 21, 1907)
Rilke's Letters

“How shall I hold on to my soul, so that
it does not touch yours? How shall I lift
it gently up over you on to other things?
I would so very much like to tuck it away
among long lost objects in the dark,
in some quiet, unknown place, somewhere
which remains motionless when your depths resound.
And yet everything which touches us, you and me,
takes us together like a single bow,
drawing out from two strings but one voice.
On which instrument are we strung?
And which violinist holds us in his hand?
O sweetest of songs.”

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Rainer Maria Rilke libro New Poems

Wie soll ich meine Seele halten, daß
sie nicht an deine rührt? Wie soll ich sie
hinheben über dich zu andern Dingen?
Ach gerne möchte ich sie bei irgendetwas
Verlorenem im Dunkel unterbringen
an einer fremden stillen Stelle, die
nicht weiterschwingt, wenn diene Tiefen schwingen.
Doch alles, was uns anrührt, dich und mich,
nimmt uns zusammen wie ein Bogenstrich,
die aus zwei Saiten eine Stimme zieht.
Auf welches Instrument sind wir gespannt?
Und welcher Geiger hat uns in der Hand?
O süßes Lied.
Liebes-Lied (Love Song) (as translated by Cliff Crego)
Neue Gedichte (New Poems) (1907)

“Love is at first not anything that means merging, giving over and uniting with another (for what would a union be of something unclarified and unfinished, still subordinate?), it is a high inducement to the individual to ripen, to become world, to become world for himself for another's sake. It is a great exacting claim upon him, something that chooses him out and calls him to vast things.”

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Rainer Maria Rilke libro Letters to a Young Poet

Letter Seven (14 May 1904)
Letters to a Young Poet (1934)

“Just as the creative artist is not allowed to choose, neither is he permitted to turn his back on anything: a single refusal, and he is cast out of the state of grace and becomes sinful all the way through.”

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Rainer Maria Rilke

Letter to his wife, reprinted in Rilke’s Letters on Cézanne (1952, trans. 1985). (October 23, 1907)
Rilke's Letters

“Extinguish my sight, and I can still see you;
plug up my ears, and I can still hear;
even without feet I can walk toward you,
and without mouth I can still implore.
Break off my arms, and I will hold you
with my heart as if it were a hand;
strangle my heart, and my brain will still throb;
and should you set fire to my brain,
I still can carry you with my blood.”

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Rainer Maria Rilke libro The Book of Hours

Translated by Annemarie S. Kidder
Das Stunden-Buch (The Book of Hours) (1905)

“If only we arrange our life according to that principle which counsels us that we must hold to the difficult, then that which now still seems to us the most alien will become what we most trust and find most faithful.”

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Rainer Maria Rilke libro Letters to a Young Poet

Letter Eight (12 August 1904)
Letters to a Young Poet (1934)