The Elegant Variation: NOTA BENE: "THE DEEP PARTS OF MY LIFE POUR ONWARD"

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December 18, 2008

NOTA BENE: "THE DEEP PARTS OF MY LIFE POUR ONWARD"

"The deep parts of my life pour onward,
as if the river shores were opening out.
It seems that things are more like me now,
that I can see farther into paintings.
I feel closer to what language can't reach.
With my senses, as with the birds, I climb
into the windy heaven, out of the oak,
and in the ponds broken off from the sky
my feeling sinks, as if standing on fishes."

- Rainer Maria Rilke (translated by Robert Bly)

Posted at 12:26 AM in Nota Bene | Permalink

Comments

That perfectly encapsulated how life feels right now. Thanks.

Lovely group of words you have here. Cheers.

Posted by: Sean U | December 18, 2008 at 12:32 PM

My thoughts have turned to Rilke -- and Bly's Rilke -- recently as well, and it led to a post at The Chagall Position. Mostly it's about Bly's translation of the poem "October Day," but in the comments section, coincidentally, I get around to quoting those last two lines of "The Deep Parts." Bly's translations can be pretty "free" in places, but that closing line strikes me as simultaneously faithful to Rilke's original and a remarkable image in its own right in English. Bly advocated a poetics of the "deep image," and here he seems to have midwifed a very moving specimen.

http://thechagallposition.blogspot.com/2008/11/its-time-its-time.html

Posted by: EC | December 19, 2008 at 06:31 PM

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The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

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December 18, 2008

NOTA BENE: "THE DEEP PARTS OF MY LIFE POUR ONWARD"

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MY NOVEL

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TEV DEFINED

RECOMMENDED

THIS GUN FOR HIRE:
Reviews & Criticism

SECOND LOOK

Categories

The Elegant Variation

A Literary Weblog. A Guardian Top 10 Literary Blog * A Forbes "Best of the Web" Pick * A Los Angeles Magazine Top Los Angeles Blog "Really brave ... or really stupid" - NPR

December 18, 2008

NOTA BENE: "THE DEEP PARTS OF MY LIFE POUR ONWARD"

Comments

Verify your Comment

Previewing your Comment

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MY NOVEL

WORTHY READINGS

TEV DEFINED

RECOMMENDED

THIS GUN FOR HIRE: Reviews & Criticism

SECOND LOOK

Categories

A Literary Weblog.
A Guardian Top 10 Literary Blog * A Forbes "Best of the Web" Pick * A Los Angeles Magazine Top Los Angeles Blog
"Really brave ... or really stupid" - NPR

THIS GUN FOR HIRE:
Reviews & Criticism