It's all world again

[all_unnecessary]

Earlier tonight, as I was looking for an Ursula Le Guin short story whose name I can't remember (in which a girl performs her coming-of-age ritual: to lie awake on top of a hill all night long under a clear sky and watch the stars in their rounds***), I came across this translation of Rilke's 8th Duino Elegy. I've never been a Rilke booster (oy is

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[proximoception]

Google says there's one called Coming of Age in Karhide in The Birthday of the World, if that's anything.

This is really something:

As if scared
by themselves, they jerk across the air, as a crack
goes through a cup: so the bat's track
through the porcelain of twilight.

Sadly, not it.

[all_unnecessary]

I have a pile of questions I should post on AskMetafilter. This'd be one of 'em. Maybe it's a boy and not a girl? Maybe the author wasn't Ursula Le Guin? Gah.

And yes! Vigorously vernacular, you could call it - compare it to other translations:

As if it is
afraid of itself, it zigzags through the air, like a crack
running through a cup. So the track
of a bat rends through the porcelain evening.

As if afraid
of itself, it darts through the air
like a crack through a cup, the way a wing
of a bat crazes the porcelain of night.

I kinda like this one (though I'd use twilight instead):

Frightened by its very self, it
cuts the air with fractured arcs,
jagged as bat tracks, cracking
the porcelain sky of evening.