Orpheus Sings IV

1.

Returning to Rilke and his emphatic unrepeatability – Jedes nur ein Mal –, my original reaction to it was to recall a very different kind of composition I used to enjoy, a bolero by Agustín Lara from the 1940s, and the pleasure of dancing to it cheek-to-cheek with some vaguely remembered girl at the Saturday evening balls of Club Ferrocarril Oeste on Cucha-Cucha Street. The lyrics went as follows:

Solamente una vez se ama en la vida, solamente una vez y nada más...
(We love only once in a lifetime, one time and no more...)

Boleros are bullshit songs, and the above is patently false: I’ve met plenty of men and women with multiple loves in their lives. And to conclude with the Ninth Duineser Elegie, my second reaction to Rilke’s Jedes nur ein Mal was that it was clearly directed against the infinite return of the same – perhaps Rilke had been laughing about it, mocking Nietzsche’s preposterous idea with Lou Andreas-Salomé? It would not surprise me. Something else, though, does surprise me: that in his third ‘Sonnet to Orpheus, I’ Rilke seems to be directly addressing my younger self about my foolish fondness for boleros. Here are the last five verses, followed by my clumsy attempt at translation:

Dies ists nicht, Jüngling, dass du liebst, wenn auch
die Stimme dann den Mund dir aufstößt, – lerne

vergessen, dass du aufsangst. Das verrinnt.
In Wahrheit singen, ist ein andrer Hauch.
Ein Hauch um nichts. Ein Wehn im Gott. Ein ...