By SHARON DOLIN
—after Rilke
Yours, still the hardest face to see—
even the mirror lies, with your image
in reverse. To see into your life
you must look into the life of things:
take this brass candelabra shaped
into a circular set of stairs that,
when lit, sees into you, seizes
hold of your brokenness and
shows you all growth starts
with a wound. Think of the earth
in spring, split open by green shoots.
Translated from the German by STEVEN CRAMER
Translator’s Note:
“Night Drive” is from Departures from Rilke (Arrowsmith Press, 2023), poems that repurpose, update, or upend lyrics from Rainer Maria Rilke’s New Poems (1907/08), often leaving Rilke’s premises almost altogether.
— Steven Cramer
This July, join our summer staff in going deep with your beach reading. We’re taking on ambitious projects: books that span lifetimes, begin series, and jump between planes of existence. Here are novels for your existential angst, elegies for your crises of purpose, works to help you through your election-related anxiety—what better time than summer to disappear into a world that could take over your mental world for perhaps thousands of pages, letting you take on life’s most daunting questions?
Recommended:
A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh, My Struggle: Book I by Karl Ove Knausgaard, The Duino Elegies by Rainer Maria Rilke, My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
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