German Poetry

Rilke is probably the single Modern poet who has resonated most with me. I have 15 volumes devoted to his work... in spite of the fact that I am dependent upon translations (I can no longer read enough German to fudge my way through). I might turn to Eliot's Wasteland or Four Quartets... as well as certain poems of Stevens, Yeats, and Frost above any single work by Rilke, but I personally find him unmatched as a whole (although Neruda might be a close second). (Which reminds me... I must read some more Rilke and Neruda this summer).

Hermann Hesse (1877-1962) is a remarkable German poet as well. Some of my favorite poems and books are written by him. One of which is the following:

Stufen

Wie jede Blüte welkt
und jede Jugend dem Alter weicht,
blüht jede Lebensstufe,
blüht jede Weisheit auch und jede Tugend
zu ihrer Zeit und darf nicht ewig dauern.
Es muss das Herz bei jedem Lebensrufe
bereit zum Abschied sein und Neubeginne,
um sich in Tapferkeit und ohne Trauern
in and're, neue Bindungen zu geben.
Und jedem Anfang wohnt ein Zauber inne,
der uns beschützt und der uns hilft zu leben.
Wir sollen heiter Raum um Raum durchschreiten,
an keinem wie an einer Heimat hängen,
der Weltgeist will nicht fesseln uns und engen,
er will uns Stuf' um Stufe heben, weiten!
Kaum sind wir heimisch einem Lebenskreise
und traulich eingewohnt,
so droht Erschlaffen!
Nur wer bereit zu Aufbruch ist und Reise,
mag lähmender Gewöhnung sich entraffen.
Es wird vielleicht auch noch die Todesstunde
uns neuen Räumen jung entgegen senden:
des Lebens Ruf an uns wird niemals enden.
Wohlan denn, Herz, nimm Abschied und gesunde!


Stages

As every flower fades and as all youth
Departs, so life at every stage,
So every virtue, so our grasp of truth,
Blooms in its day and may not last forever.
Since life may summon us at every age
Be ready, heart, for parting, new endeavor,
Be ready bravely and without remorse
To find new light that old ties cannot give.
In all beginnings dwells a magic force
For guarding us and helping us to live.
Serenely let us move to distant places
And let no sentiments of home detain us.
The Cosmic Spirit seeks not to restrain us
But lifts us stage by stage to wider spaces.
If we accept a home of our own making,
Familiar habit makes for indolence.
We must prepare for parting and leave-taking
Or else remain the slaves of permanence.
Even the hour of our death may send
Us speeding on to fresh and newer spaces,
And life may summon us to newer races.
So be it, heart: bid farewell without end.

My absolute favorite of his poems is actually "In Sand geschrieben". But i am unable to find an english translation of it. If you know one, please let me know.

I stupidly passed up the chance to purchase a volume of the collected poems of Hesse some 15 or 20 years ago... but I let it get away worried that I would not be able to read the works well enough in German (which I was far more fluent at then). I have a few thin volumes of his poetry (translated) and a few poems here or there that showed up in anthologies. I remember them as being quite good... and considering Thomas Mann's comments upon Hesse... who he saw as the far more poetic writer... and a great poet... where he was the writer of ideas... I certainly keep my eye out for further poems by Hesse.

Banquet Speech
As the Laureate was unable to be present at the Nobel Banquet at the City Hall in Stockholm, December 10, 1946, the speech was read by Henry Vallotton, Swiss Minister


http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/l...se-speech.html

The blue night has softly risen on our foreheads.

Quietly our putrid hands touch

Sweet bride!

Our countenance became pale, moony pearls

Melted in green pond-ground.

Petrified ones, we contemplate our stars.

O painful! Culprits wander in the garden

The shadows in wild embrace,

So that tree and animal sank about them in immense anger.

Soft harmonies, when we ride

through the still night in crystalline waves

A rosy angel steps from the graves of the lovers.

Hans Magnus Enzensburger


Last Supper, Venetian, Sixteenth Century

I.

As soon as I had finished my Last Supper
thirteen yards by five and a half,
a monstrous job, but rather well paid,
the usual questions came up:
What exactly are these foreigners doing here
with their halbherds? They are dressed
like Germans, or like heretics.
Do you think it is normal
to depict Saint Luke
with a toothpick in his hand?
Who put the idea into your head
to sit Moors, drunkards, and clowns
at Our Lord's table?
Do we have to put up with a dog
sniffing around, a dwarf, a parrot
and a Mameluke bleeding from his nose?
My Lords, I said, all this
I have invented for my own pleasure.
But the seven judges of The Holy Inquisition
in a flutter of red silk robes,
muttered, That's as may be.

II.

Oh, I have done better than that
in other paintings,
but nobody else can do a sky
the color of this one;
and I am pleased by these cooks
with their long butcher's knives,
by these men clad in slashed hood
trimmed with fur, in aigrets
adorned with heron feathers, in diadems
and pearl-studded turbans;
not to mention the muffled people
who have mounted the most distant rooftops
of my alabaster-faced palaces,
leaning over the parapets at a dizzy height.
What they are looking for
I cannot tell. But they do not even glance
at you, or at the saints.

III.

I have told you again and again:
There is no art without pleasure.
This is true even of the endless Crucifixions,
Deluges and Massacres of the Innocent
which you ask me to execute-
I cannot imagine why.
So when the sighs of the critics
and the subtleties of the inquisitors
and the probings of the scribes
became too much for me,
I rechristened my Last Supper
and decided to call it
A Dinner at Mr. Levi's

excerpted from The Sinking of the Titanic
translated by the author, Hans Magnus Enzensberger (1929-)


This poem reminds me somewhat of the narrative poems of Richard Howard. The artist in question was the great Venetian painter Paolo Veronese who was notorious for having painted several versions of the Last Supper in which the artist added all sorts of additional characters: clowns, drunkards, women flirting, Germans (unacceptable as Protestant enemies of the good Italian Catholics), strutting aristocrats, musicians, etc... One such painting he retitled Feast in the House of Levi to avoid further scrutiny of the Inquisition, while another became his masterpiece, Wedding at Cana:

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5018/...2c1516be_b.jpg

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5134/...e90a6a20_b.jpg

Die Verschwundenen/The Vanished -- by Hans Magnus Enzensberger

For Nelly Sachs

It wasn't the earth that swallowed them. Was it the air?
Numerous as the sand, they did not become
sand, but came to naught instead. They've been forgotten
in droves. Often, and hand in hand,

like minutes. More than us,
but without memorials. Not registered,
not cipherable from dust, but vanished—
their names, spoons, and footsoles.

They don't make us sorry. Nobody
can remember them: Were they born,
did they flee, have they died? They were
not missed. The world is airtight
yet held together
by what it does not house,
by the vanished. They are everywhere. ...{excerpt}


Translated by Rita Dove and Fred Viebahn

Among my personal favourites are such poets as Nikolaus Lenau and Annette Droste-Hülshoff.

I particularly enjoy this poem by Nikolaus Lenau because a (boy)friend of mine once sent it to me.

"Diese Rose pflück' ich hier,
In der fremden Ferne;
Liebes Mädchen, dir, ach dir
Brächt' ich sie so gerne!

Doch bis ich zu dir mag ziebn
Viele weite Meilen,
Ist die Rose längst dahin,
Denn die Rosen eilen.

Nie soll weiter sich in's Land
Lieb' von Liede wagen,
Als sich blühend in der Hand
Läßt die Rose tragen;

Oder als die Nachtigall
Halme bringt zum Neste,
Oder als ihr süßer Schall
Wandert mit dem Weste."

Translated:
"His sweet rose here oversea
I must gather sadly;
Which, beloved, unto thee
I would bring how gladly!

But alas! if o'er the foam
I this flower should carry,
It would fade ere I could come;
Roses may not tarry.

Farther let no mortal fare
Who would be a wooer,
Than unwithered he may bear
Blushing roses to her,

Or than nightingale may fly
For her nesting grasses,
Or than with the west wind's sigh
Her soft warbling passes."

My favourite lay by Annette Droste-Hülshoff is "Der Knabe im Moor"/"The little lad in the fen", the first verse goes like this:

"O schaurig ist's übers Moor zu gehn,
Wenn es wimmelt vom Heiderauche,
Sich wie Phantome die Dünste drehn
Und die Ranke häkelt am Strauche,
Unter jedem Tritte ein Quellchen springt,
Wenn aus der Spalte es zischt und singt,
O schaurig ist's übers Moor zu gehn,
Wenn das Röhricht knistert im Hauche!"

Translated (Though personally, I don't think it's as good in English as in German.)
"How creepy it is to cross through the fen
When it’s billowing with haze,
Mists writhing like phantoms,
Bine weaving through bushes;
Up squirts a springlet beneath every step
When hissing and singing come from the gap.
How eerie it is to cross through the fen
When the reed bank rustles in the breeze."