14-03-05
POESIA ALEMÃ
German Poetry
Poet's Choice By Edward Hirsch
By Edward Hirsch
Sunday, October 31, 2004; Page BW12
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Mein blaues Klavier
Ich habe zu Hause ein blaues Klavier
Es steht im Dunkel der Kellertür,
Es spielten Sternenhände vier
Zerbrochen ist die Klaviatur.....
Ach liebe Engel öffnet mir |
My Blue Piano At home I have a blue piano. But I can't play a note. It's been in the shadow of the cellar door Ever since the world went rotten. Four starry hands play harmonies. The Woman in the Moon sang in her boat. Now only rats dance to the clanks. The keyboard is in bits. I weep for what is blue. Is dead. Sweet angels, I have eaten Such bitter bread. Push open The door of heaven. For me, for now -- Although I am still alive -- Although it is not allowed.
Else Lasker-Schüler
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In her moving and essential new book, After Every War, the Irish poet Eavan Boland has gathered together and translated the work of nine German-speaking women poets, all of whom wrote in the decades surrounding World War II. The title comes from the Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska, who notices with a kind of wry domestic wisdom that "After every war somebody must clean up."
The poets in this collection recognize the hard personal truths -- the intimate consequences -- of warfare. They are both witnesses and participants. Some of them I've known and admired for years, such as Nelly Sachs (1891-1970), Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973) and Else Lasker-Schüler (1869-1945), whom her friend Gottfried Benn called "the greatest lyric poet Germany ever had." Others are revelations to me, such as Elisabeth Langgässer (1899-1951), who is represented by a single devastating poem ("Spring 1946"), and Rose Ausländer (1901-1988), who sounds the ground note for the book with her poem "Motherland":
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Mutterland
Mein Vaterland ist tot
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My Fatherland is dead. They buried it in fire
I live in my Motherland -- Word
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These poets -- the others are Gertrud Kolmar (1894-1943), Marie Luise Kaschnitz (1901-1974), Hilde Domin (1909- ) and Dagmar Nick (1926- ) -- were all deeply shaped by the cataclysm of World War II. Boland has chosen a small but crucial selection of their overall work, a kind of personal anthology, that shows them to be war poets with a difference. The difference comes from being both poets and women, with all that entails.
"I had to do it -- suddenly, I had to sing./ I had no idea why," Else Lasker-Schüler cries out in her poem "In the Evening": "But when the evening came I wept. I wept bitterly."
These poets have a particular angle of witness that comes from powerlessness, from being vulnerable, injured, marginal, excluded. Most were exiles. Several of them were Jewish, which means they suffered the Holocaust. Dispossession is a key theme. They recognized what they had lost. "I am one who cannot live among my own kind," Bachmann declares in "Exile." "A stranger/ always carries/ his native land in his arms," Nelly Sachs observes in "If Someone Comes."
Here is Hilde Domin's "Exile":
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EXIL
Der sterbende Mund müht sich um das richtig gesprochene Wort einer fremden Sprache.
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The mouth dying The mouth twisted The mouth trying to say the word right in a strange language.
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There is something deeply compelling, as Boland puts it, "in the way the world of the public poet encounters the hidden life of the woman in these poems." The interplay is endlessly fascinating. I'm struck by the personal way these poets confront history, test and interrogate language, especially their mother tongue, question the efficacy of poetry, and repeatedly defend the importance of private feeling. They are dark elegists who view large historical events through a focused individual lens. Their voices seem to me as necessary today as when they wrote in the aftermath of World War II.
Here is Rose Ausländer's transfiguring elegy for her mother, "My Nightingale," which now takes its place, along with Else Lasker-Schüler's "My Blue Piano," on my shortlist of the most radiant mid-20th century poems.
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Meine NachtigallMeine Mutter war einmal ein Reh
Die goldbraunen Augen
die Anmut
blieben ihr aus der Rehzeit
Hier war sie
halb Engel halb Mensch-
die Mitte war Mutter
Als ich sie fragte was sie gern geworden wäre
sagte sie: eine Nachtigall
Jetzt ist sie eine Nachtigall
Nacht um Nacht höre ich sie
im Garten meines schlaflosen Traumes
Sie singt das Zion der Ahnen
sie singt das alte Österreich
sie singt die Berge und Buchenwälder
der Bukowina
Wiegenlieder
singt mir Nacht um Nacht
meine Nachtigall
im Garten meines schlaflosen Traumes
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My Nightingale My mother was a doe in another time. Her honey-brown eyes and her loveliness survive from that moment. Here she was -- half an angel and half humankind -- the center was mother. When I asked her once what she would have wanted to be she made this answer to me: a nightingale. Now she is a nightingale. Every night, night after night, I hear her in the garden of my sleepless dream. She is singing the Zion of her ancestors. She is singing the long-ago Austria. She is singing the hills and beech-woods of Bukowina. My nightingale sings lullabies to me night after night in the garden of my sleepless dream.
The Author reading the poem here |
(All quotations are from "After Every War: Twentieth-Century Women Poets." Translations from the German by Eavan Boland. Princeton Univ. Press. Copyright © 2004 by Eavan Boland.)
Read here the Introduction to the book, by its editor and translator, Eavan Boland.