
Best Scottish Poems 2007 Introduction \| The Poems \| Acknowledgements

The poems

Don Paterson

Source

Author's note

Editor's comment

Biography

Being

Silent comrade of the distances,
Know that space dilates with your own breath;
ring out, as a bell into the Earth
from the dark rafters of its own high place –

then watch what feeds on you grow strong again.
Learn the transformations through and through:
what in your life has most tormented you?
If the water's sour, turn it into wine.

Our senses cannot fathom this night, so
be the meaning of their strange encounter;
at their crossing, be the radiant centre.

And should the world itself forget your name
say this to the still earth: I flow.
Say this to the quick stream: I am.

Source

From Orpheus: A version of Rilke's Die Sonette an Orpheus (London: Faber and Faber, 2006). Reprinted with permission of the publisher.

Author's note

[extracted from the Afterword and Appendix to Orpheus]

No one could mistake the timeliness of Rilke's call to confront our own nature, to address our own endangered species – this astonishing double creature of horse and rider, singer and dancer, breath and clay, life and death, noun and verb, being and becoming, I am and I flow. How in heaven's name are we to live, now the soul we have bred into ourselves no longer has a heaven to ascend to? The word Earth is the Sonnets' heartbeat, and is offered as an answer in itself.

This is not a translation, but a version. ... Versions are trying to be poems in their own right; while they have the original to serve as detailed ground-plan and elevation, they are trying to build themselves a robust home in a new country, in its vernacular architecture, with local words for its brick and local music for its mortar. This means they must have their own course, their own process, and have to make a virtue of their own human mistakes; they will have, in other words, their own pattern of error and lyric felicity.

Editor's comment

Don Paterson's versions of other poets (notably Machado) allow him, as he says, to try on other voices. In so doing he has discovered other ranges and dimensions to his own voice. His renderings of Rilke are the best I've read, faithful to the spirit of the original yet coloured by Don's own insight and shaped by his remarkable craft. 'Being' is a crucial poem, coming as it does at the end of the whole sequence. It was essential that he get it right, and he did (big-time!). It's ironic that Don has approached the sequence from the point of a hard-won scientific materialism, yet his versions are radiant with spirituality. The final three lines have all the spare beauty of the Tao te Ching.

Biography

Don Paterson was born in Dundee in 1963. He works as a musician and editor, and teaches at the University of St Andrews. He has written four collections of poetry: Nil Nil, God's Gift to Women (winner of both the T S Eliot Prize and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize), The Eyes, and Landing Light (winner of the Whitbread Prize for Poetry and the T S Eliot Prize). He lives in Kirriemuir, Angus.