Rainer Maria Rilke

tr. John Greening

black cat

Even ghosts can be a place your glance
grazes with a noise, but here the hardest
stare’s dissolved as soon as it confronts
fur so very black, the way a mad

person at the height of all their fury
beats against the blackness but
meeting with the soft upholstery
of their cell, loses heart, peters out.

All the looks that have been flung at her
she conceals, it seems, within herself
so that she can eye them at her leisure
mutinous and menacing before
she sleeps with them. Suddenly she’s blinked,
waking almost, face turned close to yours,
where you’re shocked to find within the yellow
amber of those stones that are her eyes
your own gaze from deep in their enclosure
like some insect long ago extinct.

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) was a poet and novelist born to a German-speaking family in Prague. In the years after his death, the significance of his work was widely recognised, and critics have focused on the themes of mysticism and personal experience in his writing. Rilke’s best known works include Duino Elegies, Sonnets to Orpheus and Letters to a Young Poet.

John Greening is a Bridport, Arvon and Cholmondeley winner with over twenty collections, most recently From the East (Renard Press). The Interpretation of Owls: Selected Poems 1977-2022 (Baylor University Press ed. Gardner) came out in 2023. He's edited Matthew Arnold, Geoffrey Grigson, Edmund Blunden, Iain Crichton Smith and a new U.A. Fanthorpe, plus several critical studies and anthologies, such as Contraflow: Lines of Englishness (with Kevin Gardner). His Goethe translations appeared in 2022 from Arc. A forthcoming Rilke will be published next year by Baylor University Press. 

John wrote the following about his translation:

This poem is from my complete translation of Rilke's ‘Neue Gedichte’ (New Poems) which will be published next year. I have tried to follow Rilke's metre and rhyme — quite a challenge given the differences between English and German poetry. You will see that I deploy half rhyme and have shadowed the original trochaic metre (tum-ti, tum-ti), the stress falling on the first syllable of most lines. I trust it doesn't sound too unnatural to iambically-attuned ears. Like many of the ‘Neue Gedichte’, this poem seems to aspire to (and then overspill) sonnet form.