The Book of Hours

For months now, I have been working for my own pleasure and devotional use on a new translation of my 2nd favorite book, The Book of Hours, by Rainer Maria Rilke. Rilke was, of course, German. And I unfortunately do not speak German. But I have found no suitable English translation of this long poem, in which the poet is a monk and icon painter desperately trying to see God in a way that his art can’t capture. Even without knowing the source language, I can tell that none of the translations I’ve found have struck the right balance of accuracy and poetic beauty (mostly, I think, because none of the translators has been a mystical Christian artist themself––not even Christian). It’s a long story, but I’ve been working very long and hard at putting together a version of Rilke’s book that is true to both the literal meaning and the tight poetic form of the original. Because this has been a process of synthesizing and shaping the translations of others, I truly don’t know the copyright rules. Very few of my lines match any one translation, so I’m beginning to think it might be safe to share a little.

Here is one of my favorite passages, in my translation. I have attached the audio of me reading it, since poetry should be both seen and heard.

The Book of Hours, Book I: The Book of Monkish Life, part 60

I was with the painters, the ancient monks, and myth-makers:
the quiet scribes who wrote the legends in stories and in runes.
I see you in my visions: wind, wood, and water,
roaring at the rim of Christendom, a land to not be consumed.

I want to utter you. I want to observe and expound,
not in red clay and gold leaf, but with ink made from the apple tree.
Not even with pearls can you begin to be bound,
and the tenderest image my mind could afford me,
you would eclipse by your mere existence: your being would confound.

I want, then, simply to say the names of your things.
I will call forth from whence they came the ancients and the kings,
but all their battles and all their deeds will merit only margin scribblings.

Because you are the ground, and our ages a season.
You look alike on the near and the far, and if indeed one 
has sown you deeper or grown you higher, their touch is just as pleasing.
You hear neither the reaper nor the sower as their footsteps cross your crown.

The Book of Hours, Book I: The Book of Monkish Life, part 61

Dear darkening ground, enduring our walls, for now content:
perhaps the cities will be allowed one more hour by your consent?
Maybe two for the churches and lonely convents?
Five hours of heartache for the toiling redeemed,
and the farmers’ chores be another seven overseen…

before you become forest again, and water, and widening wilderness
	in that hour of inconceivable distress
	when you demand your unfinished image
		back from every place it rests.

Just give me a while longer! I want to love the things
	as no one has thought to love them,
	until they’re real and worthy of a king.
	I just want seven days––only seven,
	where no one has yet set any phrases:
		seven lonely pages.

	Whoever you give the book that contains them
	will study for ages, bent over their shelf,
	until they are the tool and yours the hands
		with which you are writing yourself.