Translators of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies quibble over how to handle this line of the poem, written in Rilke’s native German: “der gedeuteten welt.” It either means “the interpreted world” or “the deciphered world.” When paired with its antecedent line, the couplet reads: “we’re not very securely at home / in the interpreted world.
For contemporary purposes, it could be serviceable for us to rechristen the German word as “deciphered” in its English translation. Have the Silicon Valley transhumanists cracked the code for eternal youth quite yet, dusting off the playbook of their Soviet cosmist muses? Mystery is a modern adversary, and no matter how exciting the bobblehead creatives tell us the times are and will become, no matter if the cherry red Tesla in space does its hundredth orbit around the sun, we are bored with our deciphered world.
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