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Note
on
Portrait of a Lady.
One can transmute poems through successive translations until the
original disappears. I sidled into this piece by way of Montale’s Dora
Markus. Who that lady was I didn’t know—I had translated about
twenty Montale poems but at the time knew little about his life. Dora
reminded me of various girls I knew when young. The one here is an
amalgam. They nearly always are. If my ‘Lady’ were but one person
and not a mixture, could the world contain her, or could she herself
ever settle for the world? No one escapes damage: she and her like, with
their extravagant yielding and possessing, might be wrecked the most,
even when they die young. I don’t know. It seemed likely, hence ‘It
is late. Very late.’ They burn up their time as they break in young
men. Smudgy little tarts? No, they are like Rilke’s glorious hetairai:
Flußbetten
waren sie,
For they were river beds,
darüber
hin in kurzen schnellen Wellen
and over them in short and hasty waves
(die
weiter wollten zu dem nächsten Leben) (desirous only
of the coming life)
die
Leiber vieler Jünglinge sich stürzten
bodies of many youths would hurl themselves,
und
in denen der Männer Ströme rauschten. and also in them
rivers of men would boom.
—Rainer Maria Rilke: Tombs of the Hetairai.
Note
and translation by Alan Marshfield
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