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“Telling you all would take too long …” by Rainer Maria Rilke 🇦🇹 (4 Dec 187529 Dec 1926)
Translated from the German by Alfred Poulin
Telling you all would take too long.
Besides, we read in the Bible
how the good is harmful
and how misfortune is good.
Let’s invite something new
by unifying our silences;
if, then and there, we advance,
we’ll know it soon enough.
And yet towards evening,
when his memory is persistent,
one belated curiousity
stops him before the mirror.
We don’t know if he is frightened.
But he stays, he is engrossed,
and, facing his reflection,
transports himself somewhere else.