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Note on The Red Poem

If haunted is being tracked and not left alone, then lovers and engineers are haunted, and anyone with a song on their mind.  I’m haunted by the Rilke poems I’ve translated so far, The Birth of Venus (not the poem of that name in this collection) especially.  I found his last lines puzzling.  After Venus walks from the sea a carcase of a dolphin is thrown up, ‘Dead, red and open’.  I’ve put out feelers for what the academics say about it.  To me the dolphin is dead and gashed open because it’s the womb from which Venus was born.  The dolphin was sacred to Apollo, who in the Neitzschean interpretation stands for lucid detachment.  I don’t know if Rilke meant his Venus to be seeded and seeding (both sexes in one), or if to him the Apollonian preceded the Venereal—the Idea creating Creation.  But I’ve assumed here some such poetic logic or association of ideas.  A wash of ideas in the mind produces a statement.  This is obviously the case, though ‘wash’ and ‘mind’ are metaphors for what I for one do not yet well understand.

Alan Marshfield

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