autumn
Lord, it's time. Summer is its peak.
Put your shadow on the sundial,
Let the wind blow through the pasture.
Let the last fruit of the branch be full;
Give the south a few more days of fine weather,
Let them mature and put them
The last sweetness was squeezed into spirits.
No one needs to build a house at this time.
At this time, whoever is lonely will always be lonely.
Wake up, read, write long letters,
Stay on the tree-lined road
Wandering and falling leaves.
Kitajima said: This is a perfect poem that is almost impeccable. However, how should we appreciate such perfection?
The first thing I met was whether the translated poem was compatible with the original poem. I have always suspected that a German poem will lose its accuracy and texture, charm and musical sense after being translated into Chinese. Obviously, after reading North Island's Rose of Time, this feeling is even stronger. Because Autumn, a poem that won Rilke the title of the greatest poet, also has very different Chinese versions, including those of Feng Zhi and Lv Yuan. However, when every translator can understand and translate his own native poetry with his own poetry, he will definitely add what he understands, so that the same poem will have a completely different effect. At the same time, I have always believed that a translator should compare the translated poem with the original poem to the relationship between the servant and the master, and must be faithful to the master's will without any derailment. However, I can understand that this is quite difficult. The poem Autumn I chose above was translated by Kosuke Kitajima, and I also read the poems translated by Feng Zhi and Luyuan. I also prefer the translation of North Island. Perhaps Kosuke Kitajima's translated poems have more charm of modern poetry and rationality of comparative cultural reflection, and maybe there will be a better version in the future. It's just a pity that poetry translation also has the problem of keeping pace with the times, and I feel the uncertainty of reading. I am a little confused, but this "Autumn Day" is enough to touch my heart.
1875 12 Rilke was born in Prague, Czech Republic. 1893 fell in love for the first time, was funded by the first lover to publish the first book of poetry, Life and Song, and broke up two and a half years later. 1897 in may, Rilke met Salome, the daughter of a Russian general. That year, she was 36 years old, older than Rilke 14 years old. Rilke fell in love with Salome as soon as he saw her, and Salome surrendered after a month's fierce attack. Salome has been his whole center for three years. Most importantly, Salome gave him the deepest love and gave him a real sense of security and self-confidence. Although the communication was interrupted at 190 1, I married the painter Clark at 1902 and met Rodin, and resumed communication at 1903. Autumn Day was written by me 1902 after I got married and went to Paris to write a biography of Rodin for a publishing house a month later. I think it was written in September. It is worth mentioning that Nietzsche's courtship to Salome was rejected, but he said that she was the smartest woman he knew at present and a good friend of Freud. She and Rilke went to see Lev twice? Tolstoy, she should be a complicated woman, and Rilke has changed a lot because of her.
In fact, Rilke was embarrassed all his life, facing great economic pressure, and spent most of his life wandering outside his hometown, looking for artistic talent. What has settled down on him is more loyalty to wandering life and self-talk with complete loneliness in his heart. During the years when Rilke was away from home, he was eager to communicate and liked to maintain his loneliness. Because of economic reasons, he can only travel to cheap inns, and he is extremely eager for country villas, celebrities and natural customs. In fact, Rilke's world is also a world full of contradictions. When he wrote Autumn Day, all he wanted was to record his feelings, but he never thought that he would be endowed with the poet's spirit like a godsend. Perhaps some poets have written tens of thousands of poems in their lifetime, all of which are mediocre. As long as you have one or two fairy-like flashes, you can really enter the ranks of high-level poets. Rilke should be such a poet. Of course, he never wrote tens of thousands of poems in his life.
Having said that, I just want to make a simple description of the autumn background, so as to better understand the eyes of the poem and touch its smooth skin. The first sentence: Lord, it's time. The first sentence in midsummer is actually a word used by Christians. This is the time, but it has obvious guiding significance. The peak of summer should refer to the madness of summer, because it is time to pave the way, and I can feel immediately that even the fierce summer is over. Put your shadow on the sundial and let the wind blow through the pasture. The sundial itself depends on the position of the shadow to locate the time, and the poet suddenly feels a little lonely with your shadow, but let the wind blow through the pasture, so that the shadow slowly spreads to a larger space and time, with obvious poetic direction from the inside out. Although the pasture blown by autumn wind is vast, the rustling wind makes the pasture sway, which is the nature of autumn in the poet's eyes. The second paragraph makes the last fruit of the branch full; Give them a few more days of fine weather in the south to mature them. It is easy to understand that the final sweetness is pressed into strong liquor, which means the process of brewing wine. The full fruit was ripened by abundant sunshine, and that urgent sentence vividly outlined the whole process, which was beyond words, leaving only a few words in my heart with infinite space. Why does the poet use a paragraph to describe the process of wine making? Isn't this the process of life growth? Isn't it the benefit given by nature and created by mankind? Isn't the poet suggesting the rhythm of life under the prosperous autumn fruit? Under the foreshadowing of two short paragraphs, a poem with great personal color suddenly roared out and entered the climax of the whole poem. Whoever doesn't have a house at this time, you don't have to build it. Whoever is lonely at this time, you will always be lonely. This is a famous sentence of the poet. It's like summing up Rilke's life's search and wandering. At this time, he can only wait and wander. How desolate it is. In the distance, his passion is wanton and restrained. Such passion touches our courage to face up to our own survival dilemma and endows us with spiritual quality for the future. Then I woke up, read a book, wrote a long letter, and kept wandering on the tree-lined road, falling leaves. Suddenly, the wandering from reading to writing brought us back to the scenes around us, and these scenes were not just the lonely talk of a wanderer? The sentence of falling leaves gives readers an ethereal and melancholy image. Seeing the falling leaves flying all over the sky in late autumn and walking alone on the path, won't there be a deeper sense of sadness? This always makes me feel that the focus plane often brings human spiritual impact with surging nature, but it ends in a calm depression.
It should be said that the whole poem adopts a progressive ladder structure, which is deliberately arranged by the poet. In the first paragraph, God and I met naturally, and in the second paragraph, the wine-making process became the medium of sentiment, and it was deduced that the poet in the third paragraph should truly express his understanding and sentiment about loneliness. The beauty of this poem lies in the well-known image combination, which makes it easy for us to walk into the poet's heart, experience and stimulate the inner loneliness, and makes us excited.
The interest that poetry can bring is to walk from one heart to another and jump and move with it. Obviously, Rilke's Autumn Day has been achieved, and it has become more and more beautiful and brilliant in the past hundred years.
20051Thursday evening, 3 October