I Have Many Brothers In The South by Rainer Maria Rilke

Yes, I am on a Rainer Maria Rilke kick. Your point? As we say here in Minnesota, one could do worse. I was going to put up "A Winter Night" by Tomas Transtrommer, but Winter beat an unusually hasty retreat. Another nice thing about this poem is that I have both the original German, and Robert Bly's translation.

Ich habe viele Brüder in Soutanen
im Süden, wo in Klöstern Lorbeer steht.
Ich weiß, wie menschlich sie Madonnen planen,
und träume oft von jungen Tizianen,
durch die der Gott in Gluten geht.

Doch wie ich mich auch in mich selber neige:
Mein Gott ist dunkel und wie ein Gewebe
von hundert Wurzeln, welche schweigsam trinken.
Nur, daß ich mich aus seiner Wärme hebe,
mehr weiß ich nicht, weil alle meine Zweige
tief unten ruhn und nur im Winde winken.


I have many brothers in the South.
Laurels stand there in monastery gardens.
I know in what a human way they imagine the Madonna,
and I think often of young Titians
through whom God walks burning.

Yet no matter how deeply I go into myself
my God is dark, and in a webbing made
of a hundred roots, that drink in silence.
I know that my trunk rose from this warmth, but that's all,
because my branches hardly move at all
near the ground, and just wave a little in the wind.


My rummaging around with BabelFish tells me that Bly is pretty much playing it straight in the translation of this poem. The only thing he left out was the German word Soutanen, meaning "cassocks," reinforcing the monastic image. By "dark", I think Rilke is trying to get at the idea of unseen, invisible, unseeable. I'm recalling the hymn "Immortal, Invisible, God Only Wise"

Immortal, invisible, God only wise,
In light inaccessible hid from our eyes,
Most blessèd, most glorious, the Ancient of Days,
Almighty, victorious, Thy great Name we praise.

Unresting, unhasting, and silent as light,
Nor wanting, nor wasting, Thou rulest in might;
Thy justice, like mountains, high soaring above
Thy clouds, which are fountains of goodness and love.



This is part of a longer poem, inside the book "The Book of Hours"