The following piece is a German to English translation of Rainer Maria Rilke’s ‘Dolphins’ (from New Poems II; The Other Part (1908))
Those realists were happy for their kind
to thrive, content that they lived anywhere,
sharing a sense of kinship, they found signs
of their peers in the ocean’s fluid empire,
which the old sea god, with dripping tritons,
would sometimes stir to tempest and flood;
for there surfaced the creature that showed
itself to be far more than the dumb,
dull-witted breed of fish: blood of their blood,
and distantly inclined to the human.
A school of them, rolling, leaping, appeared,
seeming conscious of the glittering sea:
joyful, trusting, warm-blooded, they wreathed
the sea voyage with their brave assembly
and would sport round the ship’s prow with ease,
as if tracing the curved outlines of a vase,
heedless, blessed, never fearing injury,
now enraptured, breaching, speeding along
and diving deep as if to exchange places
with the waves that calmly bore the trireme on.
And the sailors took these newly discovered
friends into their lives of lonely hazard
and they contrived for these companions –
and believed it true – a world of gratitude,
in which they loved gods and music and gardens
and the year’s silent, deep constellations.
