Without Lifting A Finger

Surprised I hadn't put this up long ago. Guess it's because there are so few translations on the Net and I didn't want to copy it out? Not sure. Anyway, I was thinking of this this morning and had to post it. It was written for Rilke's friend, the painter Paula Modersohn-Becker (I have been to her grave and her husband's museum). This translation is by A.S. Kline (2001); I have a copy of Mitchell's Rilke on my shelf (perhaps more "poetic," but not always closer to "authorial intent").         Requiem for a Friend I have dead ones, and I have let them go, and was astonished to see them so peaceful, so quickly at home in being dead, so just, so other than their reputation. Only you, you turn back: you brush against me, and go by, you try to knock against something, so that it resounds and betrays you. O don’t take from me what I am slowly learning. I’m sure you err when you deign to be homesick at all for any Th...

Memorial Day got me thinking along these lines. Day #1 goes to the memory (and great art) of Paula Modersohn-Becker. I suppose I first learned of her through Rilke (in his "Requiem for a Friend"). I kept "chipping away" at knowledge of her and her art. I've been to her museum in Bremen and her gravesite in Worpswede (see below); have also visited her husband Otto Modersohn's museum in Fischerhude.