WHEN THINGS EXUDE POETRY

“…would not, from all the borders of itself,

burst like a star: for here there is no place

that does not see you. You must change your life.”

(R.M.Rilke, from the poem “Archaic Torso of Apollo”)

Versione italiana Quando le cose traspirano poesia

Can poetry emerge from the very life of things? Do the objects or animals we commonly encounter possess their own poetic aura?

The great Rainer Maria Rilke devoted a significant part of his work and creative practice to ‘learning to see’ – sehen lernen – and to translating this new vision into poetic language.

Thus was born the Dinggedicht, the poetics of the object, which Rilke developed largely whilst frequenting the Parisian studio of the sculptor August Rodin. It starts from the premise of not imposing the inner landscape of the lyrical self upon the world, but rather of making the latter receptive, and as ‘pure’ as possible, to the voice of the objects with which it comes into contact. Used in this perspective, instead of swallowing up, categorising or mastering reality, poetic language places itself at its service and shapes itself according to the expressive needs that the object seems to manifest.

In this article, I present my attempt at a Dinggedicht, which I wrote directly in English for two reasons:

• the first, more practical and circumstantial, because it was part of the ‘homework’ for the course run by the brilliant Professor Adam Walker, which I am currently following on ‘Versed’, his online literary community.
• the second is that using a foreign language helps to open up  unusual perceptual channels and cognitive pathways, facilitated precisely by a lexicon and grammatical or syntactic structures different from our own. This can also remove some of the inhibitions or clichés that influence our poetic speech in our mother tongue. 

Here is my poem in English, ‘Chandelier’, and my own translation into Italian:

Chandelier

Dovelike glass - dovelight casts

white watery in the mirror 

undulates

Double delight - double reflex 

chandelier

On double unknown beds

shines coarse and attests 

it secretly attests 

always been there - silent echoes

chandelier

Lampadario

Vetro di colomba - lancia luce di colomba

bianca acquea nello specchio - ondula

Doppia delizia - doppio riflesso 

lampadario 

Su doppio letto sconosciuto 

splende ruvido e attesta

attesta in segreto

là è sempre stato - eco silenzioso

lampadario

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