Stephen Mitchell, Gilgamesh

If you want to become whole, let yourself be partial.

If you want to become straight, let yourself be crooked.

If you want to become full, let yourself be empty.

If you want to be reborn, let yourself die.

If you want to be given everything, give everything up.

-Lao Tzu

"Battle in the Heavens". Nicolas Roerich. 1912.

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Prayer

I have just three things to teach: simplicity, patience, compassion. These three are your greatest treasures. Simple in actions and in thoughts, you return to the source of being. Patient with both friends and enemies, you accord with the way things are. Compassionate toward yourself, you reconcile all beings in the world.

- A great thanks to Stephen Mitchell’s translation of Lao Tzu’s Tao te Ching

Archaic Torso of Apollo - Rainer Marie Rilke, tr. Stephen Mitchell

I am death, shatterer of worlds, annihilating all things.

— Vyasa, Bhagavad Gita: A New Translation, transl by Stephen Mitchell, (2002)

“the fate of mankind has overwhelmed him. / for six days i would not let him be buried, / thinking, ‘if my grief is violent enough, / perhaps he will come back to life again.’”

— gilgamesh (trans. stephen mitchell)

"As a father forgives his son, a friend his dear friend, a lover his beloved: forgive me."

Stephen Mitchell (trans.), Bhagavad Gita

RAINER MARIA RILKE “Archaic Torso of Apollo”

We cannot know his legendary head with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso is still suffused with brilliance from inside, like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could a smile run through the placid hips and thighs to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself, burst like a star: for here there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life.

Translated by Stephen Mitchell

“It seems to me that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension, which we feel as paralysis because we no longer hear our astonished emotions living. Because we are alone with the unfamiliar presence that has entered us; because everything we trust and are used to is for a moment taken away from us; because we stand in the midst of a transition where we cannot remain standing.”

― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet (translated by Stephen Mitchell)

Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom.

Mastering others is strength; mastering yourself is true power.

If you realize that you have enough, you are truly rich.

If you stay in the center and embrace death with your whole heart, you will endure forever.

-Lao Tzu

Taoist Art :: [Red Pine (translator) :: Bill Porter (author)]

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“The Master allows things to happen. She shapes events as they come. She steps out of the way and lets the Tao speak for itself.” — From: Tao Te Ching Translation: Stephen Mitchell

[alive on all channels]

(Papyrus Prisse. From the sayings of Ptah-hotep, manuscript from ca. 2000 B.C.)

‘We must die because we have known them.’ Die of their smile’s unsayable flower. Die of their delicate hands. Die of women.

Let the young man sing of them, praise these death-bringers, when they move through his heart-space, high overhead. From his blossoming breast let him sing to them: unattainable! Ah, how distant they are. Over the peaks of his feeling, they float and pour down sweetly transfigured night into the abandoned valley of his arms. The wind of their rising rustles in the leaves of his body. His brooks run sparkling into the distance.

But the grown man shudders and is silent. The man who has wandered pathless at night in the mountain-range of his feelings: is silent.

As the old sailor is silent, and the terrors that he has endured play inside him as though in quivering cages.

— Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. Stephen Mitchell, ‘We Must Die Because We Have Known Them’

Have you truly heard me, Arjuna? Has my teaching entered your heart?

— Vyasa, Bhagavad Gita: A New Translation, transl by Stephen Mitchell, (2002)

“when he heard the death rattle, gilgamesh moaned / like a dove. his face grew dark. ‘beloved, / wait, don’t leave me. dearest of men, / don’t die, don’t let them take you from me.’”

— gilgamesh (trans. stephen mitchell)

Tao Te Ching - Lao Tzu (tr: Stephen Mitchell)

Books of 2023 #13

Beowulf translated by Stephen Mitchell