TRANSLATION - Rainer Maria Rilke - page a month

The man from Langenau writes a letter, deep in thought. Slowly, he paints with large, earnest, erect letters:
“My good mother,
be full of pride: I bear the flag,
do not hold sorrow: I bear the flag,
hold love for me: I bear the flag--”

Then he puts the letter inside his wool coat, in the secret place, next to the rose petal. And he thinks: before long it will take on the fragrance. And he thinks: maybe, in some time, another will find it…. And he thinks: …; therefore the enemy is near.

TRANSLATION - Rainer Maria Rilke - page a month

The company is situation across from Raab, the greatest city in the northwest of Hungary. The man from Langenau rides out alone. Lowlands. Evening. The mist upon the saddle glistens through the dust. And then the moon comes up.
He sees it on his hands.
He dreams.
But out there, something screams to him.
Screams, screams,
tears him from the dream.
That is no owl. Mercy:
the only tree on the horizon
screams out to him:
You!
And he looks harder: it raises itself onto two legs. It raises a body alongside the tree, and a young woman,
bloody and naked,
lunges at him: Release me!

And he jumps off onto in the shadowy grass
and hacks through the thick knit
and he sees her image glow
and her teeth clench.

Is she laughing?

The horror.
And he sits back onto his horse
and races into the night. Bloody
laces tight in his fist.

* The second half of the first sentence I added for context. The military commander of Raab, Kristóf Lambert, thought the city indefensible against the advancing Turks, and chose to burn it down to nothing. To this day, the Turkish call it Gyor, Yanik kale ("burnt city"). Cornets Christoph Rilke must have seen it just before its demise.

TRANSLATION - Rainer Maria Rilke - page a month

At last, contact with his commander. Next to his horse the great man towers. His long hair has the sheen of iron. The man from Langenau asks nothing. He recognizes the General, swings himself down from his horse into a cloud of dust, and bows. The General has with him a letter, it must be orders from the lords. He spits: “Read that crap to me,” without moving his lips. He adds nothing; the cursing, enough. Anything more would be superfluous, authority states. That is the point. And one regards it. The young man reads and it is a long time until he reaches the bottom. Once there, he does not know any more where he is. These orders are for everyone. The sky is gone away. As the orders say, so the looming General:
“Cornet.”
And that is plenty.

TRANSLATION - Rainer Maria Rilke - page a month

A day through the baggage-train. Cursing, sun-burned, laughing--: product of the dazzling, blinding land. The motley crew of boys comes strutting. Fighting and yelling. Prostitutes board, crimson hats over their long flowing hair . Beckoning. They are servants, their black eyes like wandering night. Seizing the prostitutes with lust, the boys tear clothing. They push and squeeze to the beat of a drum. And when they sense their poaching hands feebly resisted, the drum quickens, like they are playing in a dream, rumbling, crashing… And when they finish and light their lanterns in the night, a fantastic sight: wine, shining in the whores’ bonnets. Wine? Or is it blood? --Who can really say?

TRANSLATION - Rainer Maria Rilke - page a month

Firewatch. They sit and wait.
Waiting… they’d sing of it, if weariness did not keep them silent. The red light is heavy. It falls like dust over their feet. It crawls up to the knee, illuminates folded hands. It is flightless. Their faces are in the dark. And yet, for some time now, the eyes of the small Frenchman have been illuminated. He has kissed a tiny rose, and returned it to his breast, where it now wilts. The man from Langenau has seen the rose because he cannot fall asleep. He thinks: I have no rose, none.
This, raises his voice. And he sings a dirge that the women at home sing in the fields, in fall, once the harvest is complete.

************************************************

The little Marquis says: “You seem very young, sir?”
And the man from Langenau, half in sorrow, half in defiance: “Eighteen.” Then silence.
Later, the Frenchman asks: “Do you have a bride at home, Mr. Donzel?”
“You?” comes the response from the man from Langenau.
“She is blond like you.”
And silence falls, until the German bursts: “Why the devil? Why do you sit there in your saddle and ride through this irritable land to fight Turkish, then?”
The Marquis laughs. “To return.”
And the man from Langenau becomes solem. He thinks of the blond girls with whom he used to play. Wild play. He would like to return to his house, for only the blink of an eye, only for that long, but instead only the words: “Magdalena - that I may be forgiven!”
How - ? thinks the young man. - Once again, they are unfathomable.

**************************************************

One day, in the morning, there is a rider, and then two, three, ten. All in ice, huge. Then a thousand behind them. The army.
Everyone must separate.
“Good luck, Marquis.--”
“May the Maria protect you, Mr. Donzel.”
They may never hear of one another again. And once they were friends; brothers. When once, they had one another to confide in, now they find that they cannot tell one man from another. They hesitate, falter. The haste and hoof beats resound around them. The Marquis pulls off his heavy right-hand glove. He takes out the little rose, holds a petal to the man from Langenau, like a man might break off and offer a host.
“That this may shelter you. Take care--”
The man from Langenau is astonished. He looks at the Frenchman for what seems forever. Then he slides the foreign petal under his tunic. And it swells from the billows of his heart. Horn call. He rides with the army, the donzel. He laughs sadly to himself: an unknown woman protects me.

TRANSLATION - Rainer Maria Rilke - page a month

And on into night they ride, into the same night. Again the silence. But within them, they have the words from before. The Marquis takes off his helmet. His dark hairs are smooth. The way in which they drop about his head and expand across his neck is almost womanlike. Something in the eye of the man from Langenau: off in the distance an object projects with a glint, something slender, dark. A lonesome column, half-abandoned. And later, it seems to him, it was the Madonna.

TRANSLATION - Rainer Maria Rilke - page a month

The men acquiesced their close quarters, they who originally came from all over; from France and from Burgundy, from the Netherlands, from Carinthian valleys, from bohemian towns and from Emporor Leopold himself. Their stories had all been shared - not just verbally - but each had experienced them themselves directly before they’d become stories, as though the men had all told of the same mother…

TRANSLATION - Rainer Maria Rilke - page a month

Everyone shares stories of their mother. A German officer; loud and long he says his words. Like a young girl forming a bouquet by pondering each flower’s worth, flower by flower, making a whole--: in this manner he fits his words together. For desire? To passionately suffer? All listen. The spitting stops. These men are sincere and know what they hear. Even those who know no German understand at once; can feel the words: “Abends”… “Klein war…”

TRANSLATION - Rainer Maria Rilke - page a month

The man from Langenau shifts in his saddle and says: “Herr Marquis…”
His neighbor, the small fine Frenchman, had been quick to speak and laugh for the first three days. Now he is absent. He is like a child, that must sleep. Dust comes to rest and stays on his fine white collar; he doesn’t notice it. He has become a faded bouquet in his expensive saddle.
But the man from Langenau laughs and goes on: “Herr Marquis, your eyes are the same. Certainly your mother‘s eyes are the same--”
Then, all at once, the little man comes into bloom, brushes the dust off of his collar, and is like new.

TRANSLATION - Rainer Maria Rilke - page a month

Riding, riding, riding, through the day, through the night, through the day.
Riding, riding, riding.
And the courage has worn so and the longing grown so large. Never any mountains anymore, hardly a tree. Nothing dares stand up. Unknown buildings huddle, thirsty, by a marsh stream. Nowhere a tower. And always the same picture-- Man has two eyes too many. Only at times in the dark can a man believe he knows the way. Perhaps we return day after day to the same piece of land that we painstakingly won already under the strange sun. It could be. The sun is heavy like it is at home in the middle of summer. But we took our leave in the summer. The dresses of the women shone reaching for the ground… and now we ride all day. It must be autumn by now. At least somewhere, women sadly know of us.

TRANSLATION - Rainer Maria Rilke - page a month

R. M. Rilke wrote this as a young man (age 25) in one night, 1899. Though it tells the story of a man fighting in Hungery in 1663 it gained immediate success during its 1912 publication selling 8,000 copies in three weeks. I love this work for its simplicity; Rilke was capable of fitting a lot into basic physical gestures and landscapes.

Die Weise von Lieben und Tod
des Cornets Christoph Rilke

(The Lay of the Love and Death
of Cornet Christoph Rilke)

“…the 24th of November, 1663. Otto of Rilke / of Langenau / Granitz and Zierga / travelled to Linda to collect reperations for his fallen brother Christoph who fell in the campaign in Hungary. He demanded compensation / but the Lehensreichung would give nothing / Otto of Rilke walked into the same trap his brother Christoph had (a man in a beige uniform brought him the death certificate: Cornet in the Campaign of Baron von Pirovano the Imperial etc.. All the men on horseback of the Heyershen regiments…were deceased) and returned home…”