Rilke Vorfrühling

The English reader might easily miss the Ton in Betonung in Rilke's "Vorfrühling" which I prefer to translate as "Now-Spring" as it is "auf einmal".

- Ton is also the distinctive layer of sediment known as "sculpting clay" although the word may have been for dried clay.  Note Rilke and sculpture.

Vorfrühling  is Februar into März.  Februa is thought to have given rise to Valentine's day as a counter to Lupercalia.  Mars corresponds to Ares, the son of Zeus and Hera - so unlike Uranos, the offspring of Gaia (in her sleep) through Eros.  With Uranos story, Erde (earth) and Raum (Himmel, heaven) part: after the events of this tale they are divided.  The sky will no longer "cover" the earth at night (cover, as in the copulation of horses, in which the stallion covers the mare.)

But there is a comic moment, as Elizabeth Bishop may have noticed (A Cold Spring). The "cow pat" [Kuhfladen, Kot] in spring may be grey (she has "cow flop".)

Note: Wege, Pfaden; English has "cowpath" but German does not.  Interestingly, Küher is Swiss for Kuhhirt - an amusing twist to calling 'Herr' as calling for one's shepherd [see: 'gott' and 'hu-']

In his French poem "Spring" [Printemps], the thread-bare gray cloud covers and then discloses the Stern [Venus was often called a star] who often is not high enough to be seen in mountainous lands.  Star is also astr- and the rose, like an Aster, is a pseudo-antherium - an "asterism", if you will, or Gestirn.  From the Mound of Venus we descend to the rose and die Scheide, labia, petals.

see:  Phänologie

The action of love, when in season, is not hidden under a grey blanket.

Note: of the empty tree and the 2nd day of the pascal "three days".  In this announced rebirth, man will simply rise from the clay.  But the story at that time is in no book - that comes far into the future.  Until that arrival, there is an empty "Buche" [see etymolgy of "book".]  In truth, in time, all of those "tidings" or "Kunden" come as later knowedge [Ankunft, Zukunft, Herkunft, kommen, kennen, Kunden, K·u·nnte.]

The "empty tree" in the Pascal story would have been a "T".  This is was divides "schreiten" from "schreien".

Psychologically, 'clay' may correspond to "intestinal chime".  Bishop has the green leaves of grass rise through the dry stool.  Cows, Kühe, shepherds, herds and variants such as the Hirschkuh of "Mariae Verkündigung" are found on many paths through Rilke's work.  The shepherd herds his flock with the arc of the artfully tossed stone - or is seen leaning on his stock.  See readily associated "Schein Scheiße Schießen" and "schreien - schriee".  With no great art, the shepherd also crouches in the field.  See: the Han outrage with the sanitary mores of the Tibetans.

Early spring is when we first walk in "mud" in the meadows and anything else that "wintered" there.  Apparently Lou Salomé first got him out and about in the fields and by-ways.

Personal note: having had occasion to administer Rorschach many years ago, I can say that many poems of Rilke can be related to one another rather as a subject may relate one card to another, either explicitly or otherwise.  See early writings of Roy Schafer on both what could be meant by "introjection" and on "color shock" in the grading of Rorschach responses.

Erotik Rilke

Erotik is not absent from Sein und Zeit: Rilke lies under so much weight, but the erotic layer is there, and although quite clearly preserved, requires to be read through a certain indirection.

Rilke Elegien / first Duino Elegy / poem markup

Over at my eclectic-pencil blog I have a note on my effort to offer Rilke's Elegies in a minimal HTML format.

The idea is that you can view and capture the German text or the HTML source and do your own work such as adding notes either to the text or to the web page.

In the days to come I will be testing a Curl poetry viewer which offers note-taking panes and translation snippets and the like.

Viewing poetry on the web so often is not 'reading' because even the F11 key leaves the 'page', well, let's say, "cluttered" with distractions.

Rainer Maria Rilke web links

Rilke web links:

• http://picture-poems.com/rilke/rilkebio.html
• http://www.cup.es/us/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9780521879439&ss=cop
• http://www.rilke.ch/links/index.html
• http://www.unix-ag.uni-kl.de/~kasparek/Rilke/

Related:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neptune_%28mythology%29
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranus_%28mythology%29

Die Dritte Elegie
[…]
O des Blutes Neptun, o sein furchtbarer Dreizack.
O der dunkele Wind seiner Brust aus gewundener Muschel.
[…]

Albert Hofstader's Heidegger

Albert Hofstader's translation of Heidegger's Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie comes with a lexicon which doubles as a partial index. We may have the National Endowment to thank for this as it was often not the norm with Indiana University Press.

Page 371 of the Lexikon offers us the Four Basic Problems of the "science" of being:

1. ontological difference
2. articulation of being
3. modifications of being and unity of concept of being
4. truth-character of being

All of these, we are told, arise from the one "question" variously posed as

What does being signifiy?
Whence can something like being in general be understood?
How is understanding of being at all possible?

What is baffling for a philosphical lexicon by a translator is that its entries are most often without the original equivalent in German.

The lectures come to us through Fritz Heidegger and F-W von Herrmann almost 50 years after they were delivered as lectures in Marburg in 1927. The German reader, without an index, had the one benefit that von Herrmann broke up many long passages into paragraphs.

On the basis that Sein und Zeit was completed in 1926, these pages offer some additions: pg 173 has Heidegger on Rilke:

Rilke versteht auch das Philosophische des Lebesbegriffes, den Dilthey schon ahnte und den wir mit dem Begriff der Existenz als In-der-Welt-sein faßten.

which Hofstader renders with

which Dilthey had already surmised

cutting the reader off from the satisfied tone of Heidegger. The distance from ahnen to vermuten would not have been lost on Heidegger if said of him and his works by another.

To ignore Heidegger's tone is to miss everything he says of Stimmung, Besinnung - especially when he speaks of concepts. In this regard, the tone taken in his letters to Jaspers is invaluable. By 1927 in Marburg Heidegger was not mincing his words as he had in the early days in Freiburg.

Jaspers is, however, absent in these lectures and receives no credit for this Begriff der Existenz. Shrewd foresight on Heidegger's part.  From the name of the lectures no one not present could guess that Kant and Aristotle figure more largely than Husserl, whom Heidegger is soon to replace in Freiburg.