La Palla / The Ball

This multipart work by Italian Arte Povera artist Luciano Fabro can be seen as an homage to the playful and poetic nature of art. Rilke’s poem “The Ball” can be read in two directions on the ground leading from the entrance of the museum complex to the traffic circle on Schillerplatz. In the middle of the square, there is a highly polished shiny stainless steel ball that reflects the surroundings and marks the turning point where the text loops back around. Simultaneously, it is a monumental sculptural representation of the poem — not an actual ball, but a monument to everything a ball symbolizes.

The Ball

From two cupped hands, you take the warmth away,
round thing, releasing it in free, high flight
as if it were your own. What cannot stay
in things because unburdened and too light —
too small as thing, yet thing enough that all
the far arrays will never let it glide
suddenly into us, unseen inside —
has slipped inside of you. Between your fall
and flight still undecided, you, in rising —
as if you’d brought that throw aloft with you —
capture and set it free in realizing
an arc. Then pausing high up in the blue,
as if to make a dance of your devising,
you show the players a sudden new location.
Then, waited for; that thing that each demands;
swift, artless, plain, and wholly nature;
you fall into their cup of upraised hands.

Rainer Maria Rilke, 31.7.1907, Paris
Translation: Translated by Len Krisak, Cambridge University Press