"Autumn Day" by Rainer Maria Rilke

Lord, it is time. The summer was so great.

Now lay your shadow across the sundials,

And let the winds of the field run free.

Tell the last of the grapes to ripen:

give them two more days of southern warmth,

urge them to completion, and then chase

one final sweetness into the heavy wine.

He who has no house now will not build one.

He who is alone will be that way a long time.

He’ll lie awake and read and write long letters,

and, up and down along the avenues,

will wander anxiously, when brown leaves scatter.

Rainer Maria Rilke; translated by Frank Beck

At the end of August 1902, Rilke left his wife Clara Westhoff and their infant daughter Ruth in Munich and went to Paris to work on a monograph about Rodin. He found a room in a small hotel in the rue Toullier, two blocks from the Jardin du Luxembourg, which seemed to promise "thinking, rest, solitude, everything I longed for."

Rilke spent his days wondering through Rodin's studio, taking notes and talking with the artist. At 27, Rilke had doubts about his writing, and it thrilled him to see the 62-year-old sculptor so confidently and diligently at work. The nights, however, were lonely (Clara didn't join her husband until early October), and out of that loneliness, on September 21, he wrote "Herbsttag" ("Autumn Day").

I've tried to reproduce Rilke's economical German, which contains few adjectives, uses only one metaphor ("chase/one final sweetness") and moves briskly, presenting three separate scenes in just 12 lines. Since "Herbsttag" first appeared in the second edition of The Book of Images (Das Buch der Bilder) in 1906, it has become one of Rilke's most widely anthologized and translated poems.

Herr: es ist Zeit. Der Sommer war sehr groß.

Leg deinen Schatten auf die Sonnenuhren,

und auf den Fluren laß die Winde los.

Befiehl den letzten Früchten voll zu sein;

gieb ihnen noch zwei südlichere Tage,

dränge sie zur Vollendung hin und jage

die letzte Süße in den schweren Wein.

Wer jetzt kein Haus hat, baut sich keines mehr.

Wer jetzt allein ist, wird es lange bleiben,

wird wachen, lesen, lange Briefe schreiben

und wird in den Alleen hin und her

unruhig wandern, wenn die Blätter treiben.

• AUDIO: Sven Görtz reads "Herbsttag"
• RECOMMENDED: A bilingual Book of Images, with translations by Edward Snow
• "You must change your life": Rilke's best known poem
• What kind of performer was Rilke?
• An appreciation of the poem by Annette Gendler 
  
• Rilke-Handbuch: an indispensable guide to Rilke's life and work (in German)
  
• VIDEO: A film about Lou Andreas-Salome and Rilke

Rue Toullier in the 5th arrondissement is a more prosperous street today

"God speaks to each of us"

Portrait of Rilke by his brother-in-law, Helmut Westhoff (1901)

God speaks to each of us, even as he makes us,

then leads us out of the dark in silence.

And the words before we begin,

those cloud-strewn words, are these:

Sent beyond the limits of your senses,

go to the edge of your longing:

give Me clothes to wear.

Grow behind things like a fire

so that their spreading shadows

always keep Me covered.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.

Only keep going: no feeling goes too far.

Don’t lose touch with Me.

Near is that land

they call life.

You will know it

by how earnest it seems.

Give me your hand. 

"Gott spricht zu jedem nur, eh er ihn macht"

Rainer Maria Rilke, October 1899

Translated by Frank Beck

This untitled poem, whose first line in German is "Gott spricht zu jedem nur, eh er ihn macht" comes from The Book of Hours (Das Stunden-Buch), published in 1905 by Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926). It was written in Berlin, at Villa Waldfrieden, 11 Hundekehlestrasse, in the Schmargendorf district, shortly after an extended visit to Russia with Lou Andreas-Salome.

Rilke is one of the most important German-language poets of the 20th century, and no other modern poet has been more widely translated into English.

• More about The Book of Hours
• Overview of Rilke's poetry from the Poetry Foundation
• Complete text of The Book of Hours in German
• AUDIO: Rilke's encounter with Ancient Greece
• VIDEO: A film about Lou Andreas-Salome and Rilke

Berlin's Schmargendorf as it looked when Rilke lived there

Schmargendorf as it is today

"The crime was done in Granada"

Lorca in Montevideo, Uruguay in 1934

To  Federico García Lorca

I.

He was seen walking among the rifles,

and then down a long street,

leaving for the cold of the countryside

with the morning stars still bright overhead.

They killed Federico

at the break of day.

The assassins never dared

to look him in the face:

each of them had his eyes shut tight.

“God won’t save you!” they shouted,

and Federico fell dead—

blood on his clothes, lead in his back . . .

Let it be known that the crime was done in Granada

--poor Granada--in his Granada.

II. The poet and death

He was seen walking alone with her,

unafraid of her sickle.
The sun was already lighting the towers;

hammers were sounding--striking and clanging in the forges.

Federico spoke to her,

playing up to death. She was listening.

“You’ve made my verses ring, my dear,

with the clapping of your dry hands.

You’ve put ice into my song and honed

my tragedies on your scythe of silver,

so I will sing to you of the flesh you don’t have,

the eyes you have lost,

the hair that the wind took away,

the red lips where you used to kiss.

Today, as always, oh Gypsy, my death,

how good to be alone with you

in these breezes of Granada, of my Granada!"

III.

He was seen walking . . .

friends, let us make

a monument for the poet in the Alhambra

out of stone and dreams

above a fountain where the water grieves

and says to anyone who hears it:
the crime was done in Granada, in his Granada!

Antonio Machado, 1936
Translated by Frank Beck

As a teenager, Federico García Lorca (1898-1936) thought of himself primarily as a pianist. In 1916 his piano teacher, Martin Domíngeuz Berreuta, introduced him to Antonio Machado. At 41, Machado was known across Spain for a 1912 book of poems called The Castilian Country. Lorca became enthralled with Machado's work, and it helped to inspire his own first book of poems, which appeared in 1921.

Lorca was murdered by supporters of Franco on August 19, 1936. They were outraged by his homosexuality and by his political views as well, for Lorca had once said, "I will always be on the side of those who have nothing and who are not even allowed to enjoy the nothing they have in peace."

Machado wrote his impassioned response to his friend's murder shortly after hearing of it. He soon fled the fascists himself, and died three years later, just across the border, in Collioure, France.

Drawing of Antonio Machado by Leandro Oroz (1925)

• Machado's poem in Spanish

• Overview of Machado's life and works

• Lorca at the piano: accompanying the singer La Argentina in his arrangement of the folk song, 'Las Morillas de Jaen'

• Huerta de San Vicente, where Lorca wrote many of his works

• Historian Miguel Caballero Pérez on Lorca's final hours

• A study of Machado's poetry by Xon de Ros

• A study of Lorca's poetry by Stephen Roberts

• The Machado museum in Segovia

"To the sonnet with all my heart"

In one wing there is infinite flight
and in each rose an elusive scent,
like light darting from an open flame
or the blue of an unbroken sky.

As in song there is consolation,
in streaming jets a chill that pierces,
and in rough diamonds a noble gleam,
in me there is a constant yearning.

In your shape, sonnet, this pure anguish
traces, as if in a quiet pool,
all its sheer and undying wonders.

Radiant and ceaseless, your beauty
is -- like the sky seen in a fountain --
free of the limits of its borders.

"Al soneto con mi alma" by Juan Ramón Jiménez
Translation by Frank Beck

One of my favorite poets is Andalusia's Juan Ramón Jiménez (1881-1958), who was awarded the 1956 Nobel Prize. His imaginative leaps remind me of Rilke, and his work has the same insistence on confronting existence with open eyes and finding fresh ways of expressing its fundamental mysteries.

 "Al soneto con mi alma" (To the sonnet with all my heart) is Jiménez's tribute to the formal structures that make poetry possible and to the sensual world from which they spring. It appeared at the head of the poet's 1916 collection, Sonetos Espirituales (Spiritual Sonnets).

The same year Sonetos Espirituales was published, Ramón Jiménez married the Barcelona-born writer Zenobia Camprubi, and the two collaborated on many writing projects over the next 40 years. A museum in Moguer, near Huelva in southwestern Andalusia, is dedicated to the couple; there's a link to its website below.

 The sitting room at the Zenobia-Juan Ramón Jiménez House Museum in Moguer

• Ramón Jiménez reading the poem and four others from "Sonetos Espirituales"

• The Spanish poem, from Centro Virtual Cervantes

• Ramón Jiménez's best known work, "Platero and I"

• Zenobia and Juan Ramón Jiménez Foundation

         The portrait is by Joaquín Sorolla; it was painted in 1916.

"He came to see us in rain and thunder"

Hélène Grimaud and Anne-Sophie von Otter

He came to see us in rain and thunder;

my heart was timid and turned against him.
How could I know that, with every moment,
life was drawing us together?

He came to see us in rain and thunder;
his words were daring and won me over.
But did he take me? Or did I win him?
We drew close to one another.

He came to see us in rain and thunder;
now springtime comes and bestows its blessings.
My friend has left us, yet I am happy.
With every step, we go together.

Many of the lyric poems of Friedrich Rückert (1788-1866) have become classic songs in the hands of composers ranging from Schubert to Bartok.

This is one of five Rückert song settings that Clara Wieck Schumann composed in the spring of 1841, during the first year of her marriage to Robert Schumann. She was 22 (and six months pregnant), and her song is alive with all the impetuousness and tenderness of youth. You can hear Hélène Grimaud and Anne-Sophie von Otter perform it at the first link below.

As you can see, I've kept close to the cadences of the German poem, but I've used half-rhymes in place of the full ones Rückert used:

Er ist gekommen in Sturm und Regen,

Ihm schlug belkommen mein Herz entregen.

Wie konnt’ ich ahen, daß seine Bahnen

Sich einen sollten meinen Wegen.

Er ist gekommen in Sturm und Regen,

Er hat genommen mein Herz verwegen.

Nahm er das meine? Nahm ich das seine?

Die beiden kamen sich entgegen.

Er ist gekommen in Sturm und Regen,

Nun ist gekommen des Frühlings Segen.

Der Freund zieht weiter, ich seh’ es heiter,

Denn er bleibt mein auf allen Wegen.

• 
  AUDIO: Hélène Grimaud and Anne-Sophie von Otter perform the song
• The Schumann home in Leipzig where Clara wrote the song (in German)
• More about Clara Schumann (in English)

Martina Gedeck as Clara Schumann in 'Geliebte Clara' (2008)