Allow your verdicts their own quiet untroubled development which like all progress must come from deep within and cannot be forced or accelerated. Everything must be carried to term before it is born. To let every impression and the germ of every feeling come to completion inside, in the dark, in the unsayable, the unconscious, in what is unattainable to one's own intellect, and to wait with deep humility and patience for the hour when a new clarity is delivered: that alone is to live as an artist, in the understanding and in one's creative work.

让你的认知静静地自我提升，它的提升和进步一样，都源自于内心深处，既不能勉强也不能催促。一切都是时至才能发生。让每个感想和每种情绪的萌芽在自身里、在黑暗中、在不能言说的地方、在不知不觉中、在个人理性所不能触碰的地方成长，并以深深的谦卑和忍耐去期待一个豁然贯通的未来时刻。这正是艺术性的生活， 无论是理解世界还是走人生路，都应该如此。

These things cannot be measured by time, a year has no meaning, and ten years are nothing. To be an artist means: not to calculate and count; to grow and ripen like a tree which does not hurry the flow of its sap and stands at ease in the spring gales without fearing that no summer may follow. It will come. But it comes only to those whose are patient, who are simply there in their vast, quiet tranquillity, as if eternity lay before them.

不要去计算时间，一年、十年都不是衡量一个人成长的刻度。艺术性的生活就是不算、不数，而是像树木一样成长、成熟，它们不会勉强地去催熟自己，只是立在春日的风雨中平静地等待着，也不去担心夏天是否会到来。夏天终是会来的，但它只会向着懂得忍耐的人走来，他们站在无边旷野里，平静而安定，好像永恒铺陈在眼前，从而眇眇之身，万念俱寂。

• 选自: <Letters to A Young Poet>给青年诗人的信
• 作者: <Rainer Maria Rilke>莱内·马利亚·里尔克【奥】
• 英译: Charlie Louth
• 中译: 冯至
• 中译微调: fantasyoo