ABSTRACT
When the seventh sonnet continues— und nun wieder erhobene zwischen die strömenden Pole fühlender Finger, die wohlzutun mehr noch vermögen, als ihr ahntet, ihr leichten, wenn ihr euch wiederfandet im Krug, langsam erkühlend und Wärme der Mädchen, wie Beichten, von euch gebend, wie trübe ermüdende Sünden, die das Gepflücktsein beging, als Bezug wieder zu ihnen, die sich euch blühend verbünden. and now lifted up again between the flowing poles of feeling fingers that more kindly minister than you had dreamt, you light ones, as you find yourself slowly cooling in the pitcher, secreting the girls’ warmth like confessions, like murky, tiring sins committed by the plucking, you commiserate with them whose life, conjoined with yours, is blooming (699) —it is once again clear that what makes a pairing of flowers and human life is their respective fragility, and thus the gentleness they necessitate and elicit. The comparability between flowers and humans—about whom Scarry has said they were “made for one another” (65)—is reaffirmed in the intimate apostrophe, the words “akin” (“verwandte”), “relation” (“Bezug”), and the final word “conjoin” (“verbünden”), but these words not only point towards an existential likeness. The poem is not interested in making an ontological argument about the comparability of girls and flowers. It is rather the ethical and sensual enactment—the gentleness—of this relation throughout lyrically dramatized, verbally articulated, formally shaped, philosophically proposed. The sonnet in all four of these dimensions is nothing if not a testimony to gentleness: its necessity, its harmony, its beauty, its deeply ontologic ground (or soil), celebrated in the blooming of girls and flowers. Every line and word desires not only to render or articulate this gentleness but tonally to embody it in the rhyme and assonances and to convey this gentleness in the allegory of cut flowers. While a translation of Rilke’s sonnet only perilously—at the cost of semantic accuracy—could imitate this tonality, I have attempted to translate Rilke’s assonances, I hope gently, into alliterations such as “weary and gently wounded,//waiting for the water.”
