Soarele venețian în păr mi-așează
aur din alchimii desăvârșite.
Sprâncenele înalt mi-s arcuite,
asemeni punților ușoare și te
duc spre pericolul ce mut veghează,
al ochilor pe-ascuns călătorind,
peste canale, care mări cuprind
și din albastrul valurilor prind.
Cine mă vede, îmi invidiază
și câinele, pe care câteodată
în pauze, languros, mi se așează
mâna, de scrum neatinsă, inelată.
Toți craii plini de vise care vin,
de gura mea sfârșesc ca de venin.
(Rainer Maria Rilke, Curtezana)
–
Here in my hair the sun of Venice toils
to make its gold: Immortal alchemy’s
illustrious issue. And my eyebrows, see
how they, arched like bridges, silently
carry you past the danger of my coiled
eyes, which have covertly ratified
traffic with the canals, so that the tide
rises and falls and changes there. To slide
a glance my way is to detest my small
dog, because my hand, untouched by flames,
invulnerable, glittering, is said
to rest in absent moments on his head.
And youths who bear the hopes of ancient names
taste the poison of my lips and fall.
(Translation of Die Kurtisane, 1907, by Jay Scott)
–
In my experience, people who know Rilke only in translation tend to think of him as humorless. But the humorlessness is only in the translations, not the originals. I picked this poem for its leaping exaggerations and energetic sound that make it very funny. Even the rhyme scheme is funny. Don’t blame the translators too much. Rilke is tough. It’s only in recent years that some translators have been able to render a tone close to the original. This sonnet, which is excellent but not one of his greatest, took me around five weeks of hard work, and I can’t get the tone quite right either!
A rhymed translation must be loose. Where I could not reproduce an effect in the original, I tried to substitute an effect of my own. The „coiled” eyes are my invention—the reference to the serpent in Eden seemed appropriately Rilkean, no doubt due to my bad judgment. You might reasonably complain that this translation is too much mine and not enough Rilke’s. (Jay Scott)