Happy Thanksgiving Week!

November is in its last week, and December is fast approaching bringing with it my beloved cold winter months, which, by the way, is perhaps the main reason why I so much love this time of the year—of course, in addition to the wonderful colors of fall and the magic of the falling leaves. This very morning I was just thinking about how, in many respects, the world around us seems to be falling apart as leaves fall in autumn, and everything seems on the verge of a spectacular implosion. This immediately brought to my mind a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke titled “Autumn,” which I searched for on Google—instead of in my overcrowded library—and quickly found. In the poem, however, the twilight feeling is tempered by the surrender to the Divine contained in the last two lines:

The leaves are falling, falling as if from far up,

as if orchards were dying high in space.

Each leaf falls as if it were motioning “no.”

And tonight the heavy earth is falling

away from all other stars in the loneliness.

We’re all falling. This hand here is falling.

And look at the other one. It’s in them all.

And yet there is Someone, whose hands

infinitely calm, holding up all this falling.

The re-reading was delightful and pleasant, but even more so was… the search! In fact, I had the chance to stumble upon some very beautiful poems I had completely forgotten or didn’t know about earlier. One of them is a real pearl. It’s from Rilke’s Vergers (Orchards), his late book of poetry written in French—after the turmoil surrounding World War I, the great Bohemian-Austrian poet seemed for a while to renounce all things German, and embrace, in his own words, the “dear borrowed language”… Biographer Donald Prater writes that “he compared French to ‘a beautiful vine-ripened over the centuries’ and cultivated according to well-defined laws: a language with a clarity and sureness which his own was far from having achieved” (D. Prater, A Ringing Glass, New York: Oxford University Press, 1986, 363).

Here is the short poem in both the original French and an English translation (by A. Poulin):

Sur le soupir de l’amie

toute la nuit se soulève,

une caresse brève

parcourt le ciel ébloui.

C’est comme si dans l’univers

une force élémentaire

redevenait la mère

de tout amour qui se perd.

The whole night rests 

upon a lover’s sigh, 

a brief caress 

crosses the dazzled sky. 

As if in the universe 

an elemental power

again became the mother

of all love being lost.

What a gem, isn’t it? Thanks, Fall, for yet another wonderful gift! As a matter of fact, if it wasn’t for the above-mentioned Google search for Rilke’s “Autumn,” I probably would never have known about this little masterpiece. Even though we all know that nothing happens by chance. Never has, never will. Happy Thanksgiving Week!