[奥地利]勒内·马利亚·里尔克/Rainer Maria Rilke
勒内·马利亚·里尔克（1875-1926），奥地利诗人。大学攻读哲学、艺术与文学史。里尔克的诗歌尽管充满孤独痛苦情绪和悲观虚无思想，但艺术造诣很高。本篇节选自他的书信集《给一位青年诗人的十封信》。
It is also good to love:because love is difficult. For one human being to love another human being:that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation. That is why young people, who are beginner sin everything, are not yet capable of love:it is something they must learn. With their whole being, with all their forces, gathered around their solitary, anxious, upward-beating heart, they must learn to love. But learning-time is always a long, secluded time ahead and far on into life, is solitude, a heightened and deepened kind of aloneness for the person who loves. Loving does not at first mean merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person（for what would a union be of two people who are unclarified, unfinished, and still incoherent）.it is a high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world in himself for the sake of another person;it is a great, demanding claim on him, something that chooses him and calls him to vast distances. Only in this sense, as the task of working on themselves（“to hearken and to hammer day and night”），may young people use the love that is given to them. Merging and surrendering and every kind of communion is not for them（who must still, for a long, long time, save and gather themselves）；it is the ultimate, is perhaps that for which human lives are as yet barely large enough.
爱，很好。因为爱是艰难的。当一个人去爱另一个人，这也许是神给予我们的最艰难、最重大的任务，是最后的考验与测试，是最崇高的工作，别的工作都不过是为此而做的准备。所以那些一切都还刚刚开始的青年们还不能去爱，他们必须要学习。必须用他们整个的生命，用一切的力量，用集聚了他们寂寞、痛苦和荣誉感的心去学习爱。在学习时期这个长久而专注的过程中，爱就会永远地铭刻心扉——深深的寂寞中孤独地等待，是为了所爱的人。爱的要义并不是什么倾心、献身，或二人的结合（那会是怎样的一种结合呢？是一种糊涂的、不负责任的、轻率的结合）。它对于个人是一种崇高的动力，是去成熟并实现自身的圆满，去完成一个世界，是为了另一个人而完成一个自己的世界，这是一个艰巨的、不可妥协的目标，用坚定的信念，向远方召唤。青年们应把爱当做他们的课业、他们工作的意义，并在其中（“昼夜不停地探索、锤炼”）使用那些给予他们的爱。至于倾心、献身以及结合，还不是他们所能做的（他们还需长时间地克制、积累），那是最后的终点，也许是我们现在还几乎不能达到的境界。