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Rainer Maria Rilke:
Eingang
Wer du auch seist:
am Abend tritt hinaus
aus deiner Stube, drin du alles weißt;
als letztes vor der Ferne liegt dein Haus
wer du auch seist.
Mit deinen Augen, welche müde kaum
von der verbrauchten Schwelle sich befrein,
hebst du ganz langsam einen schwarzen Baum
und stellst ihn vor den Himmel: schlank, allein.
Und hast die Welt gemacht. Und sie ist groß
und wie ein Wort, das noch im Schweigen reift.
Und wie dein Wille ihren Sinn begreift,
lassen sie deine Augen zärtlich los...
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Rainer Maria Rilke:
Entry
Whoever you may be:
Leave well before the night
your room where but familars you see;
last leave your home, which bars the far from sight
whoever you may be.
Then use your eyes that, weak, can barely free
themselves from looking down your worn-off sill -
and raise, extremely slowly, an endarkened tree
all up the sky: alone and slim and still.
And you have made a world. And it is grand
and like a word that may in silence grow.
And as your will its mind shall understand,
your eyes, with slow caress, shall let it go...
Is Rilke prescribing how to write a poem? Or read a poem? Is he telling the reader to develop a different and deeper way of looking at poems? Or things? Or life?
Is he taking the path of one-pointedness to non-duality; is he touching the minute point ("Pünktchen") of Master Eckhart; is he erecting a Freudian signpost to the Inner Self?
Or is he stringing along words that resonate, resonate so vibrantly that they obscure the meaning? Is he celebrating a personal apotheosis? And is he then pulling back at the last moment, so as not to spawn a new age and fry the reader's brain - and perhaps his own - in the process?
Well, yes, obviously. What did YOU think?
Technical Note: The German title "Eingang" has many meanings, among them entrance, doorway, preamble, introduction, beginning, arrival, receipt, etc.; and it also carries overtones of a spiritual turning inward. In Austrian dialect, 'eingehen' (one of the verbs to the noun 'Eingang') also means to understand (often with difficulty) or to die (miserably, like an animal).
Although Rilke was Austrian, I am sure he didn't refer to the latter. However, the title is obviously carefully chosen to reflect the position of the poem (the first in his 1902 poetry collection "Buch der Bilder") and its meaning: both its own and that for the poems to follow.
In my way of looking at things, the English terms 'preface', 'entrance' and perhaps 'beginning' come as close as any to what Rilke might have had in mind. By choosing "entry" I tried to combine them. And if this should have unduly biased the reader's search for meaning, let this Technical Note serve as an apposite reprieve for him and an appropriate penance for me...
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