Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes
By Rainer Maria Rilke
Translation by Susan Ranson and Marielle Sutherland
That was the unearthly mine of souls.
Like silent silver-ore in heavy darkness
they moved, like veins. From between the roots
the blood welled that coursed towards mankind,
as dense as porphyry in that lack of light.
Nothing else was red.
There were rock-faces there
and void forests. Bridges spanning noting,
and that vast, blind, shade-grey lake
that hung over its own distant depth
like raining sky above a landscape. Mild
and filled with patience, meadows spread away
beside the single path laid out between them
like a pale strip of bleaching cloth.
And along this one path they came.
The slender man cloaked in blue walked
ahead, dumb, gazing impatiently
in front of him. His stride ate up the path
in great torn-off bites. His closed fists
hung heavily outside the falling folds,
no longer conscious of the light lyre
growing into his left hand like the twined
rose into the branch of the olive tree.
His senses looked as though divided: while
his sight ran on ahead, like a dog,
time and again stopping, coming back,
and waiting far off at the next turn---
his hearing trailed behind him like an odour.
Sometimes it seemed to him to reach as far
behind as the footsteps of those two others
who were to follow up the great slope.
And then once more he heard only his climb's
echo behind him, and the wind of his cloak.
And yet, he told himself, there they still were,
said it aloud, and heard it die away.
There they came, the two of them, if walking
fearfully softly. Should he be allowed
to turn around, once (if looking back were not
to wreck the whole task, not yet quite fulfilled),
he would be bound to see those quiet two
who followed, treading softly and in silence:
the god of despatch and far messages,
with travel-hood above his brilliant eyes,
his slender staff held out in front of him
and a god's wings beating at his ankles;
and given into his left hand: her.
So loved that one lyre sang with more mourning
than any mourning-women; that a world
came into being made of mourning, in which
all things reappeared: wood and valley
and road and hamlet, field, river and creature;
that round this lamentation-world turned,
just as round the other earth, a sun,
and then a starred heaven, a lamentation-
heaven of silence with disfigured stars.
She was so greatly loved.
But now she walked beside this god, her steps
hampered by the long grave-wrappings,
uncertain, gentle, and without impatience.
Self-absorbed, like someone near her time,
oblivious of the man ahead, her husband,
and of the path that led up into life.
Self-absorbed. And her being-dead
was filling her like fullness.
For like a fruit of sweetness and dark
she too was full of her immense death,
which was so new she could not take it in.
This was for her a second maidenhood:
she was untouchable; her hymen, like
the newest flower at dusk, was closed, her hands
by now so unused to the hand of marriage
that even, ethereal as he was, the god's
incomparably gentle guiding touch
injured her, like too far an intimacy.
Already she was not the fair-haired girl
at times resonant in the poet's songs,
no more the wide couch's scent and island,
and in this man's ownership no longer.
She was already loosed like long hair,
relinquished like the flowing rain, freely
shared like an inextinguishable store.
She was already root.
And when the god
stopped her abruptly with the anguished words:
He has turned round--she did not take them in,
those words he spoke, and softly asked: Who?
Far off, dark before the radiance
beyond the entrance, someone stood, whose face
was indiscernible. He stood and saw
the god of despatch, on a strip of path
between the meadows, with a sorrowed look
and not a word turn and follow the figure
already walking back along the path,
its steps hampered by the long grave-wrappings,
uncertain, gentle, and without impatience. (From Oxford World's Classics: Rainer Maria Rilke Selected Poems. 2011. Translations by Susan Ranson and Marielle Sutherland. Edited by Robert Vilain. Oxford University Press: New York).
YouTube Video Description: "Based on the poem "Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes" by Rainer Maria Rilke.
Requires the use of traditional red/blue (cyan) 3-D glasses. With Lauren
Gilson and Mike Cheslik. Created by Jeremy Gillam."
