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- Herausgeber: Fyfield Books
- Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013
Gottfried Benn ranks among the most significant German poets of the twentieth century. His early work, with its shockingly graphic depictions of human suffering and degradation, was associated with the Expressionist movement; the overriding theme of his later work was the isolation and fragmentation of the human being adrift in a nihilistic world. David Paisey here presents two selections, of verse and prose respectively, from Benn's large oeuvre, ordered chronologically to enable readers to perceive the developments of Benn's art and thought. The original German text of the poems is also included. In an important biographical introduction, Paisey tackles the difficult question of Benn's compliance with the Nazi regime and its impact on his life and work.
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FyfieldBooks aim to make available some of the great classics of British and European literature in clear, affordable formats, and to restore often neglected writers to their place in literary tradition.
FyfieldBooks take their name from the Fyfield elm in Matthew Arnold’s ‘Scholar Gypsy’ and ‘Thyrsis’. The tree stood not far from the village where the series was originally devised in 1971.
Roam on! The light we sought is shining still.
Dost thou ask proof? Our tree yet crowns the hill,
Our Scholar travels yet the loved hill-side
from ‘Thyrsis’
GOTTFRIED BENN
Selected Poems and Prose
Edited and translated by DAVID PAISEY
Contents
Translator’s Preface
This is a personal selection from the much larger work of Gottfried Benn, presented in two roughly chronological sequences, of verse and prose respectively, so that developments over time can become apparent. In bulk he produced several times more prose than verse, but I have selected much less of the former for translation. The dates supplied here are of first recorded appearances of texts, either in manuscript or print, as established in the four-volume collected edition published by Limes Verlag (Wiesbaden) in 1958–61, edited by Dieter Wellershoff; later authorial amendments have been incorporated. Note that the date supplied at the head of each text is not part of the original: where no dated manuscript survives, composition may have preceded the year of first publication. I have left the texts largely without commentary, to allow readers to form their own opinions. A brief biographical note follows, which may help to put particular works into context, notably those of the Nazi period. There is a huge critical literature on Benn in German, but I see no point in listing any parts of it for readers who know no German. Benn’s original texts can all be found in the latest collected edition by Klett-Cotta Publishers in Stuttgart. I did not think it necessary to print a bibliography of their first and subsequent appearances during his lifetime.
People say poetry cannot be translated – Benn said so himself – and my efforts may be futile, but I think there may be some merit in trying to convey something of the quality of a great poet to Anglophone readers who cannot read him in the original. Nevertheless the inclusion of the German originals of all the poems selected may encourage some interaction with the poet’s own words. In my renderings of the poetry, which Benn intended to be read on the page rather than spoken, I have tried to reflect the scope of his characteristic diction, as well as his original metric structures, rhyme-schemes (with the occasional expedient of assonance), and often even the punctuation. I have allowed myself more latitude in translating the free verse. The prose is more easily rendered into English, and I have aimed at literal versions which respect the rhetorical structures – sentence length and so on – of the German originals, some of which were intended to be spoken. The early experimental narratives are pioneering examples of Expressionist prose, but the other works are mostly quite straightforward. I have translated two from the Nazi period in full, one because it is a superb piece of rhetoric, the other because its toxicity is extreme. I have omitted a substantial study entitledGoethe and the Natural Sciences (1931) because it takes for granted educated German readers’ familiarity with the life and works of Goethe and would require much annotation. The eyewitness account of the trial and execution of Edith Cavell in 1915 (1928) is included for its English interest. Most of the remaining prose here consists of excerpts from longer texts, chosen sometimes for their beauty, sometimes for their information content and interest, notably those which refer to poetry, especially Expressionist poetry. There are many fine poems I have not translated, but, apart from remaining narratives and the Goethe essay, I think I have included the best (and worst) of the prose.
I should like to dedicate these translations to the memory of Leslie (‘Moses’) Reed (1920–84), in September 1947 my meticulous first teacher of German in Whitchurch Secondary School, Cardiff. I am grateful to Professor Leonard Forster (1913–97) who encouraged me to work on diction in Benn’s poems up to 1927 at University College London and in Berlin, where I met Benn briefly in July 1955. My thanks also to Michael Schmidt (another Benn enthusiast) and Helen Tookey of Carcanet, Alun and Julie Emlyn-Jones, and to Massimo Danielis, who created the aquatint engraving Benn: Ein Wort in 2012 for the cover of this book.
Biographical Introduction
In a letter Gottfried Benn wrote to his long-standing correspondent in Bremen Friedrich Wilhelm Oelze on 11 September 1950, he said: ‘My private life is really completely opaque, a continuum of gaps and losses, no-one could make a story of me, perceive and portray any coherence. A strange parallel to my so-called oeuvre, which consists only of break-ups and break-downs, and has no line which can be read’. Nevertheless a brief biography follows, with particular attention to a period in the 1930s which caused Benn, and causes his readers, severe problems.
Gottfried Benn was born on 2 May 1886 in Mansfeld (a village in Westpriegnitz, North Germany), as the second child of a Lutheran pastor and his French-Swiss wife. He spent most of his childhood in Sellin (now Zielin, West Poland, another village in what was then the German Neumark), where he was allowed to join the son of the local manor as he received instruction from a private tutor; the two went together to secondary school (Gymnasium) in Frankfurt on the Oder. In adulthood he liked to point out how many important German writers had grown up in Lutheran parsonages, but his father was very authoritarian, and Gottfried clashed with him bitterly for refusing his mother medical relief during her painful death from cancer in 1912.
He went to Marburg University to study philology and theology, as his father wished, but after two years, in accordance with his own wishes, changed to the study of military medicine at the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Akademie in Berlin, for which there was a state subsidy. His intended career as a regimental doctor in peacetime was cut short by kidney damage suffered during manoeuvres. He undertook further training as an auxiliary doctor in Berlin hospitals, including the Westend Hospital in Charlottenburg, and in particular on a dissection course in Moabit. He later confessed1 that he had been removed from psychiatric work because he found it impossible to take any interest in individual patients’ case histories, to the extent that doing so led to severe physical symptoms in himself. His first small collection of poems, Morgue and Other Poems, was published as a pamphlet in Berlin in 1912 and created a sensation: Benn became known as a leading figure in the new movement called literary Expressionism.
After his further professional experience and a trip to America as a ship’s doctor, he found himself in the army again at the beginning of the First World War. He took part in the battle for Antwerp, then spent much of the war in Brussels, where he was given the job of doctor in a hospital for prostitutes; this was a very productive period in literary terms. In 1917 he was discharged as a result of some kind of nervous breakdown, and returned to Berlin. Here he opened the private practice for skin and venereal diseases which was his often meagre source of income for the rest of his working life in that city, with the exception of the period from 1935 to 1945, when he was again employed by the army, this time as a medical administrator. Throughout his life, poetry was of primary importance to him, though he wrote in other genres too; medicine merely paid the bills.
Although intellectually and socially he was very much a loner, he married three times,2 and, particularly in the unmarried intervals, had a number of sometimes overlapping and far more than casual sexual relationships, possibly the first being with the very fine poet Else Lasker-Schüler.3 His first marriage was cruelly cut short by his wife’s early death, and, as he did not like young children, he did not feel able to bring up his daughter Nele himself, so she lived with friends in Denmark, and was adopted there in 1946. In 1929 a young actress with whom he was having an affair committed suicide, knowing he did not consider her his equal intellectually. There are tender references in a few poems to his second and third wives, but despite their importance to his daily life, neither played a part in his creative work. Only one of his male friendships can be said to have been close for a time, that with Erich Reiss,4 a Berlin publisher who had produced some of his early works; around 1930 the two met regularly in the evening to drink in Benn’s favourite pub. Benn’s long correspondence with F.W. Oelze, already mentioned, maintained a polite distance at the personal level, after Benn’s extreme wariness at first and a hiccup in 1936, but it did provide him with a degree of support (though hardly at the intellectual level Oelze unsuccessfully aimed for), and, more importantly, assistance with preserving his manuscripts through the war of 1939–45 and its immediate aftermath.
Benn’s early poems of extreme suffering amongst the lowest levels of society seem driven by a wild but unexpressed compassion, and some of the early prose suggests a highly vulnerable sensitivity which was to be hidden under various assertive defence strategies. However, he soon turned his attention to his thereafter constant theme of the fractured human self in a tragic world of post-Nietzschean nihilism, where human existence and experience is potentially meaningful and transcendent only in so far as it produces art. States of intoxication, rushes of blood to the brain and other organs, commingling of cultural and anthropological memories, all these could help provide the conditions necessary for the production of poetry and in part its subject. Benn’s poems are monologues, acts of defiance erected against the void: but ‘the poem is the mind’s unpaid work … one-sided, without effect and without a partner’.5 The poems trace a great arc across his life and are undiscursive: they can stand for themselves.
His prose, by contrast, with the exception of some early experimental pieces with a narrative-autobiographical kernel, is full of assertions and arguments, though it too tends to the conclusion the poems simply incorporate. Much of it is rhetorically refined and mellifluous, but it should not be read in isolation from its social and political circumstances. He was elitist, and a racist foretelling the end of the white race.6 It is perhaps easy to see the attraction of parts of National Socialist ideology for him, but difficult to understand the stupidity of such an apparently rigorous thinker leaving his isolationist comfort zone to welcome the Third Reich in print, as he did in prose collections of 1933 and 1934; politics had hitherto been for him a sphere outside the permanent haven of art, and certainly never its possible concurrent. Perhaps there is a millenarian in every lyric poet, but for a time Benn saw the political upheaval as an anthropological mutation capable of countering European nihilism; perhaps also he was blinded by the possibility of acceptance in the nationalist community, as opposed to the indifference to the individual of modern society.7 He had also been flattered in 1932 by the public recognition implicit in his election to membership of the Literary Section of the Prussian Academy of Arts. But the uncharacteristically convoluted prose of his 1932 inaugural speech to that body reveals how nervously he was trying to impress; as spoken it must have been near-incomprehensible. Despite misgivings, he remained among the rump of members who had not resigned, emigrated or been dismissed at the beginning of the Nazi regime in 1933, as had several whose places were filled by more of its literary supporters, and from 15 February to 8 June 1933 was its acting chairman. He was criticised for remaining in Germany by various writers who had emigrated, notably his friend Heinrich Mann, and defended his position in print.
What today seems his worst moral failing of this or any period is his acceptance of Nazi policy towards Jews. His essay ‘Doric World’8 considered, as a model for the ‘total state’ of Nazi Germany, the severe, militaristic, slave-based and to us morally transgressive state of ancient Sparta, because it had bred what he considered the beginnings of high art. And ‘Eugenics I’9 of the previous year had supported state-run eugenics, and by implication the beginnings of the Holocaust, since it contains the chilling proposition that modern man ‘becomes great through the concept of the enemy, only the man who sees enemies can grow’: from the start, the Nazi state had insistently proclaimed Jews its prime enemy. Benn’s absorption and repetition of Nazi theory in prose examples from 1932 to 1934 extends even to the micro-level of vocabulary, which no English translation can reveal:10 and the climax of ‘Eugenics I’ uses the extreme rhetoric later characteristic of Goebbels in his prophetic rants: ‘brains must be bred, great brains to defend Germany, brains with canine teeth, teeth of thunderbolts’.11 Benn did not act like an anti-Semite, as we have seen in his friendships with Else Lasker-Schüler and Erich Reiss, and wrote to one of his concurrent mistresses on 4 December 1935: ‘My favourite milieu has always been the Jewish, and next to it the aristocratic one’. But he had nevertheless decided to adopt the Nazi position, or at least not to criticise it, and wrote to the same correspondent two weeks later: ‘Yes, the Jews, that inexhaustible subject! One should really have nothing to do with any of them, taking an absolutely strict line. But then along comes someone like E[rich] R[eiss] with a gift of chairs and two books published by Piper, and that is nice’.12
Whatever his personal feelings, he did not publicly oppose Nazi policy towards the Jews, nor, even after the war, did he disown or apologise for his earlier arguments in favour of other aspects of the Third Reich, arguments which had been long in gestation. His fault was not a Lord Jim leap, a momentary error bitterly regretted and expiated over many years.13 In 1949, Benn heard that the Jewish émigré novelist Alfred Döblin,14 with whom he had been friendly before 1933, and who returned to Germany in November 1945 as a French Cultural Officer in Baden-Baden, despite his admiration for some of Benn’s works, had called him ‘a scoundrel’;15morally this seems to me entirely just. xvii
Benn never joined the Nazi Party (NSDAP), and after the war was to have no difficulties during the de-Nazification process of the occupying powers. The more he was exposed to the organisations and ideas of Hitler’s Germany immediately after his welcome of 1933/34, however, the more they revealed strong currents of opposition to his avant-garde past and far from orthodox present, and he felt himself under threat. Keeping his head down did not seem by itself a sufficient strategy for self-preservation, and in 1935 he decided to rejoin the army, calling this step ‘the aristocratic form of emigration’.16 He left Berlin for an administrative post in Hanover at the end of March 1935, and continued in this post in Berlin again from 1937, and from 1943 to 1945 in Landsberg an der Warthe (now Gorzów in Poland).
He had reckoned without the non-intellectual side of the Nazi regime, however, and, in response to the publication in March 1936 of his Selected Poems, was subjected to a virulent anonymous attack in the 7 May issue of Das Schwarze Korps, the weekly newspaper of Heinrich Himmler’s SS, which took exception mainly to the shocking explicitness of some early works, and said he qualified as ‘a successor of those who have been thrown out of the house because of their unnatural piggery’.17 To counter this implied threat of dismissal from the army, and possibly worse, Benn succeeded in raising support from his commanding officer in Hanover, Major-General von Zepelin, and from Hanns Johst,18 President of both the Literary Section of the Academy of Arts and of the Reichsschrifttumskammer (Chamber of Literature, founded by Goebbels in 1933), of which Benn had been a member since December 1933. However, on 15 May 1936 he was forbidden to publish anything while still a serving soldier, and on 28 April 1938 was to be excluded from the Chamber of Literature.
Benn continued writing while under this ban, which did not prevent further National Socialist attacks on Expressionism and its literary products, including Benn. He had a particularly virulent opponent in Wolfgang Willrich,19 but in September 1937 Heinrich Himmler wrote to Willrich that the institutions for which he was responsible had been forbidden to take any part in actions against Benn, thanks to his unobjectionable behaviour since 1933.20 Benn was incautious enough to have 22 recent poems privately printed in August 1943, and sent them to seven people only.21 One of these poems (‘Monologue’, written in 1941) contained some withering criticism of National Socialism and its policies of enslavement, which could have cost him his life had it become public. Including a Shakespearian lament for the loss of measure, and denunciation of individual Nazi leaders, mainly for their vulgarity, it mourns the tragedy of inaction he had chosen.
After the war, and then long-drawn-out difficulties in finding publishers for his new works, his reputation in West Germany rose quite quickly, based largely on the rhyming, strictly metrical poems he was still writing, which found admirers and imitators among some poets of the younger generation. He also had considerable success with new works in prose, though he never returned to the experiments of his early years. Alexander Lernet-Holenia, one of the friends to whom Benn sent a copy of his privately printed poems of 1943, had told Benn in 1942 that he was the greatest lyric poet for 100 years, but needed to invent a new third style after his ‘cancer shed’ early poems and his eight-line stanzas of the 1920s:22 I believe he never did so. In both prose and verse he revisited familiar themes and arguments. When I visited him on 20 July 1955, he was very kind to a painfully inexperienced student, and obligingly wove into his conversation many of the formulations I knew well from his publications. In his post-war letters he tells how his wife had asked him to stop writing poems about roses and melancholy, and I believe most of the works of that final period bear the mark of depression. The often repetitious prose seems to me a falling-off, and the verse to shrink in scope to a concentration on art as the sole product capable of transcendence, to poems about writing poems. He thought no writer could hope to produce more than a handful of perfectly achieved lyric poems in a lifetime, but for me there are more than enough in his work to rank him among the greatest German poets of the twentieth century, however seriously flawed he was as a man. He died on 7 July 1956.
1 In Epilog (1922).
2 He married: firstly in 1914 Edith Osterloh, who died in 1921 (their daughter Nele was born in 1915); secondly in 1938 Herta von Wedemeyer, who committed suicide during the chaotic final weeks of the Second World War when, alone, she despaired of leaving the Soviet zone of occupation for the American one; and thirdly in 1946 the dentist Dr Ilse Kaul, who outlived him.
3 Else Lasker-Schüler (1869–1945), a Jew who would emigrate to Jerusalem to avoid Nazi persecution. Benn delivered a moving eulogy to her in Berlin in 1952, long after her death.
4 Erich Reiss (1887–1951) was a Jew, and his business, begun in 1908, was liquidated by the Nazis in 1936. He was sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, from which he was released in 1938 thanks to appeals from influential supporters (not including Benn, who at that time would have had no influence with the authorities), and emigrated to the USA via Sweden. His warm and chatty letters to Benn from 1946 to 1951 have been published.
5 In Summa summarum (1926).
6 In Benn’s view, the threat came mainly from the East.
7 Ferdinand Tönnies’ Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (1887) is the classic formulation of this sociological opposition, still very current in Benn and his contemporaries. Nazi community was, of course, exclusive.
8 ‘Dorische Welt’ (1934).
9 ‘Züchtung I.’ (1933). Eugenics, systematised by Francis Galton (1822–1911), remained a much-studied subject until some time after the Second World War, when its Nazi associations discredited it. University College London maintained a lecture room named Eugenics Theatre for well over a decade after 1945.
10 For instance, the words Führerbegriff, Volkheit, volkhaft and arthaft, not hitherto part of Benn’s diction, can be found in ‘After Nihilism’, ‘Eugenics I’, ‘Expressionism’ and ‘Doric World’, but not in the poems.
11 Compare Goebbels: ‘Only a brazen species will be able to assert itself in the storms of our time. It must have guts of iron and a heart of steel’ (quoted in the notes to Victor Klemperer, Tagebücher 1944, ed. Walter Nowojski and Hadwig Klemperer, 4th ed. (Berlin, 2006), p. 85. Victor Klemperer’s LTI [Lingua Tertii Imperii], first published in 1946, has documented Nazi linguistic practices.
12 Benn’s letters to Elinor Buller of 4 and 17 December 1935.
13 Joseph Conrad’s novel Lord Jim (1900) was known to Benn in translation.
14 Alfred Döblin (1878–1957), now best known for his novel Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929).
15 ‘Ein Schuft’; see Benn’s letter to F.W. Oelze, 23 March 1949. In his memoir Doppelleben (1949), Benn wrote that he could not see why Döblin had described him thus.
16 So in Zum Thema Geschichte (probably 1943) and Doppelleben (1950), part 2.
17 The reference is to the homosexual Ernst Röhm and his supporters in the paramilitary SA, many of whom were murdered in the ‘Night of the Long Knives’ on 30 June 1934. The passage on Greek homosexuality in Benn’s ‘Doric World’ (1934) is purely factual, and there are few other hints of any bisexual interest.
18 Hanns Johst (1890–1978), a writer whose play Schlageter (performed on Hitler’s birthday in 1933) contains the famous line: ‘When I hear the word culture I release the safety-catch on my Browning’.
19 Wolfgang Willrich (1897–1948), a member of the SS and author of Clearing Out the Temple of Art (Säuberung des Kunsttempels, 1937).
20 Quoted by Joachim Dyck in Der Zeitzeuge. Gottfried Benn 1929–1949 (Göttingen, 2006), p. 235.
21 Listed by Dyck, Der Zeitzeuge, p. 300.
22 Alexander Lernet-Holenia (1897–1976), Austrian writer, whom Benn had known since 1930; see Benn’s letter to Oelze of 24 April 1942.
POEMS
Schluss
1913
I
The spittoon-glass –
not remotely a match
for such great green tepid floods –
crashed down at last.
The mouth dropped after it. Hung deep. Sucked
back vomit convulsively. Disappointed
any trust. Gave stones for bread
to the breathless blood.
II
The little bundle smelled like a chicken-coop,
beat to and fro. Grew. Fell still.
The granddaughter played the old game:
when grannie’s asleep:
around the collarbones there were such hollows
she hid beans in them.
In the throat you could even fit a ball,
if you blew the dust out.
III
His thing was a spittoon with plumstones.
He crawled over and bit them open.
They threw him back in his bunk,
and the madman died in his straw.
Towards evening the head keeper came
and gave the attendants an earful:
You lazy damned beasts,
why is this box not cleared out yet?
IV
For weeks her children had been looking after her
when they came home from school,
holding her head up,
then there was some air-movement and she could sleep.
One of them bent over unintentionally
and the head fell out of its hands.
Turned round. Hung across her shoulder
deep blue.
V Requiem
A coffin gets to work, an empty bed.
When you consider: a couple of hours wasted
to silent night now find themselves translated
and floating in the cloudscape overhead.
How white they are! The lips as well. Like smudges
at the edge of snow across the winter land,
comforting snow, redeemed from deceitful colours,
hill and valley held in an open hand.
Near and far are one in perfect balance.
The flakes blow over fields, then rapturous
blow on, the world’s last flickering mere absence.
O scarcely dreamt! The distant happiness!
Nice childhood
1912
The mouth of a girl who had lain long in the reeds
looked kind of nibbled.
When we sectioned the thorax, the gullet was full of holes.
Finally, in a pocket under the diaphragm
we found a nest of young rats.
One little sister lay dead.
The others lived on liver and kidney,
drank cold blood and had had
a nice childhood here.
Their death was nice too, and quick:
we threw them all in the water.
Ah, how the little muzzles squeaked!
Circulation
1912
The solitary molar of a whore
who had died a missing person
had a gold filling.
As if by mutual consent,
all the others had left.
The morgue attendant knocked it out
and pawned it to go dancing.
Because, he said,
only dust should come to dust.
Appendix
1912
Incision-ready, everything is white.
The scalpels steam. The belly’s painted.
Under sheets a whimpering thing waited.
‘Herr Professor, the time is right.’
The first incision. Like slicing bread.
‘Clamps, please!’ A spurt of something red.
Deeper. The muscles: shining, fresh and wet.
Is that a bunch of roses on the bed?
Is that pus that’s spurting so?
Is the intestine snagged below?
‘Doctor, you’re standing in my light,
the peritoneum has vanished from sight.
Anaesthetic, I can’t operate
if the belly is walking to the Brandenburg Gate.’
Silence, muffled and deep, only broken
by dropped scissors that cause a minor explosion.
And the sister, an angel in blue,
proffers sterile swabs to the crew.
‘I can’t find a thing in this dirt, OK!?’
‘Blood turning black. Take the mask away!’
‘But – God in heaven – what are you doing?,
can’t you stop the heels from moving?’
Severe deformation. Finally, found!
‘Hot iron, sister!’ A fizzing sound.
You’re lucky again this time, my son.
Perforation had nearly begun.
‘Do you notice the little green bit? –
Three hours to fill the belly with shit.’
Belly closed, skin closed. ‘Plaster here!
Good morning, gentlemen.’
The theatre clear.
Death gnashing and grinding his teeth in fury
slinks in the cancer shed for another sortie.
Man and woman walk through the cancer shed
1912
The man:
This row here is rotten womb
and this row rotten breasts.
Bed stinks by bed. The nurses change on the hour.
Go on, lift this sheet and look.
This lump of fat and putrid juices
meant everything to some man once –
he called it heaven and home.
Come and look at this scar on the breast.
Can you feel the rosary of soft lumps?
Go on, feel. The flesh is soft and without pain.
This one is bleeding enough for thirty.
No human has so much blood.
This one first had a baby
cut from her cancerous womb.
They’re kept asleep. Day and night. The new ones
are told: You’ll have a sleep cure here. Only on Sundays
for visiting are they let wake a bit.
They eat next to nothing. Their backs
are raw. You can see the flies. Sometimes
the nurses wash them. Like washing trestles.
Loam already churns about each bed.
Flesh flattens into land. Warmth dissipates.
Juice prepares to flow. Earth calls.
Express
1912
Brown as cognac. Brown as leaves. Red-brown. Malayan yellow.
Berlin express from Trelleborg and the Baltic beaches.
Flesh that walked naked.
Tanned to the lips by the sea.
Drooping ripely, like Greek hedonists.
Missing sickles: how long since summer!
And tomorrow the final day of the ninth month!
Stubble and last almonds thirst in us.
Unfoldings, our blood and tirednesses,
the proximity of dahlias confuses us.
Male tan in collision with female tan:
A woman is good for one night.
And if it went well, for the next one too!
Oh! and then being alone again!
These silences! This sense of being driven!
A woman is something with fragrance.
Inexpressible! Pass away! Mignonette.
Enclosing the South, shepherds and sea.
On every slope a happiness leans.
Female light brown staggers against male dark brown:
Hold me, love! I’m falling!
My back is so exhausted.
Oh, this feverish final
sweet fragrance from the gardens.
Night café
1912
824: Frauenliebe und -leben.
The cello has a quick swig. The flute
belches three bars away: supper was good.
The drum reads the end of his detective story.
Green teeth, acned face
waves to lids with styes.
Oily hair
is talking to open mouth with tonsils,
faith hope and charity round her neck.
Young goitre fancies saddle-nose.
He buys her three beers.
Barber’s itch buys carnations.
To soften up double chin.
Opus 35: B flat minor sonata.
Two eyes roar up:
Don’t squirt Chopin’s blood down here
so the pack can scuff about on it!
Enough! Hey, Gigi! –
The door dissolves. A woman.
Utterly dried out. Canaanite brown.
Chaste. Full of caverns. A scent comes with her. Hardly scent.
Merely a gentle arching of air
against my brain.
An obesity trips after her.
Frauenliebe und -leben is Schumann’s song-cycle to poems by Adalbert von Chamisso (1781–1838), op. 42. ‘824’ may be an inaccurate reference to the last, tragic song, no. 8.
Songs
1913
I
O could we restart our primal mission
and be a speck of slime in a tepid fen.
Life, death, insemination, parturition
would slip out from our voiceless fluids then.
A leaf of algae or a sand-dune growing
under the wind and gravity’s firm touch.
Even a dragonfly’s head, a gull’s wing blowing
would go too far and suffer much too much.
II
Despise the infatuated and the callous,
nostalgia, desperation, a hope of sorts.
We gods are rotten with disease and sadness,
and yet a god is often in our thoughts.
The bay is soft. Our dreams are dark with promise.
The stars hang big as snowball blossoms there.
Panthers are hunting soundless through the forest.
All is shore. The sea calls everywhere –
Then Icarus
1913
Then Icarus crashed down at our feet
and screamed: Get fucking, kids!
Get in there, into that stale Thermopylae! –
Then threw us one of his shin-bones,
keeled over, snuffed it.
Underground train
1913
The gentle showers. Flowering dawn. As if
from downy furs arriving from the forests.
A red swarms up. Blood’s greatness starts to grow.
Through all this springtime comes an unknown woman.
The stocking on her instep. But where it ends
is far from me. I sob there at the threshold:
tepid florescence, unknown dampnesses.
Oh, how her mouth squanders the tepid air!
You rose-brain, sea-blood, twilight of the gods,
you bed of earth, oh how your hips stream forth
the cool precision of the way you walk!
Darkness: alive now under what she wears:
animal whiteness, relaxed, dumb fragrances.
Pathetic brain-dog, heavy laden with God.
I am so tired of thinking. Oh a lattice
of flower-heads could so softly fill its place,
could swell with me and burst in showers and droplets.
So disconnected. So tired. Let me wander.
Bloodless the pathways. Singing from the gardens.
Shadows, the Flood. A distant joy: to die
beneath the sea’s redeeming deep, deep blue.
English café
1913
The quite narrow-shoed pack of robbers,
Russian women, Jewesses, dead peoples, distant coasts,
slips through the spring night.
The violins turning green. May surrounds the harp.
The palm-trees redden. In the desert wind.
Rachel, a slim gold watch at her wrist:
forbidding sex and threatening my brain:
my enemy! and yet your hand is clay:
sweet brown, almost eternal, in your fragrant lap.
Friendly earring arrives. In Charme d’Orsay.
The bright beauty of your Easter lilies:
their wide mouths yellow, with meadow at their feet.
O blonde! O summer-ripened back! And Oh
how jasmine-infected is your elbow!
Oh, I adore you. Let me stroke
your shoulders. You and I should travel:
Tyrrhenian Sea. A blasphemous blue.
The Doric temples. Pregnant with roses
the plains. Fields dying
the death of asphodel.
Lips, intoxicated, deeply filled like chalices,
their sweet blood hesitating, it would seem,
rustling through a mouth’s first autumn.
O aching brow: sickness deep in the mourning
of your dark eyebrows! Smile, be bright:
the violins are shimmering a rainbow.
Threats
1913
Know this:
I live the days of a beast. I am a water-hour.
At evening I am heavy-lidded like forest and sky.
My love knows but few words:
all is beautiful about your blood.
My royal chalice!
My roaming hyena!
Come into my cave. Let us be bright-skinned.
Until the cedar shadow ran across the little lizard:
you – happiness –
I am ape-Adam. Roses bloom in my hair.
My fore-flippers have grown long and hairy.
Tree-branch lustful. From my mighty thumb
you can hang down all day. –
I make love as a beast.
In the first night everything is decided.
We take in our teeth all we desire.
Hyenas, tigers, raptors are my escutcheon. –
Now you move over water. So like a sail yourself.
Fair-skinned. Cool in play.
Yet bitter-red, the blood inside is dead,
a cleft of screams your mouth.
You, let us not land on a shore!
You make love to me: like a leech:
let me get away –
You are Ruth, cornstalks on your hat.
Your back is brown from your Maccabee blood.
Your brow is fleeing: you watched so long
for Boaz across the almonds.
You carry them like a sea, not to let anything
spilt in play wet the earth.
Now arm a look through your lids:
see: abyss nearing across a thousand stars,
see: gorge, into which you must pour it,
see: I. –
Express-train
1913
Gliding things that stand still in the windows!
Like leaves the fields are falling from my shoulders,
the little plots and growth-dead villages;
mothers gone missing; the entire country
a grave full of fathers: – now the sons are tall
and swagger with their reddened brows of gods,
naked, giddy with liberated blood.
The ulcerous sounds off with sickly voices:
where were we close to happiness? We little
forest, no eagles and no deer! Pathetic
plants, dull colours on our land.
The heart cries out: O hair! You Dagmar-blonde!
You nest! You comforting, you blossoming hand!
The outspread meadows of abandonment!
The rowanberries’ red is ripe with blood.
O be with me. The gardens are so silent.
Yet gliding things that stand still in the windows:
like leaves the fields are falling from my shoulders,
fathers and hilly grief and hilly joy –:
the sons have grown so tall. The sons are walking
naked, grieving with liberated blood,
red brows reflect a far abyss of joy.
Robbers-Schiller
1913
I bring plague. I am stench.
I come from the edge of the earth.
Sometimes in my mouth a confluence,
if I were to spit it out, the stars would still be sizzling
and here would drown all the cowardly
titty-slobberers and Abel’s blood.
Because my mother weeps? Because my father’s
hair is going white? I yell:
You grey sleep! You canyons done with birthing!
Soon a couple of handfuls of earth will cover you with seeds.
But my brow rustles alive like cloud-flights.
The dram of infection
from whore-slime trickled into my blood?
A crumb of death forever stinking from the corner –
throw it out! Smash it! Pah!
The Robbers (1781) was the first, revolutionary, play by the young Johann Christoph Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805); its printed motto was In tyrannos (Against tyrants).
No comfort here
1913
No-one will be the border of my path.
Just let your blossoms fade.
My path floods and moves alone.
Two hands are much too small a basin.
One heart is a hill too small
to rest upon.
You, my life is always on the beach
and under the falling blossoms of the sea,
Egypt lies before my heart,
Asia dawns.
One of my arms lies always in the fire.
My blood is ash. I always sob
past breasts and skeletons
towards the Tyrrhenian islands:
dawning a valley with white poplars
an Ilyssos with meadow-banks
Eden and Adam and an earth
of nihilism and music.
This is a reply to the poem ‘Höre!’ (Listen!) by Benn’s lover at the time, Else Lasker-Schüler (1869–1945), which contains the lines ‘Ich bin dein Wegrand./ Die dich streift,/ stürzt ab’ (I am the border of your path. She who brushes against you plunges down).
Night café IV
1914
It’s hardly worth the effort. Then you thrust
and fall: out from the hem of God;
love me too? I was so very alone.
The Weserlied has made the sow receptive.
Her lips are weeping along. And down the river
the happy valley! She sits there with her lute.
The waiter rows about with nightcap punch.
He swims to freedom. Flesh foliage and whorish autumn,
a shrivelled strip. Fat forks apart. Pits rumble:
flesh is fluid: pour it as you will,
around you;
a cleft of cries our mouth.
The ‘Weserlied’ (Song of the River Weser): a popular nationalist drinking song whose first verse begins ‘Wo die Weser einen grossen Bogen macht/ wo der Kaiser Wilhelm hält die treue Wacht …’ (Where the Weser makes a great curve, where Kaiser Wilhelm keeps faithful watch).
O night
1916
O night! I’ve taken a shot of cocaine
and blood-division is set in motion,
grey grows my hair, the years unconstrained,
I must, I must in a great explosion
before dissolution bloom again.
O night! That’s not a lot to ask,
a little piece of concentration,
an evening mist, a counterblast
to space, of individuation.
Feeler threads, corpuscular rims,
a to and fro, with scents dispersed,
tattered by cumulus language-bursts –:
too deep in brain, too narrow in dreams.
Stones shoot to earth, and fishes muster
to snap at shadows, while with malice
through the mess of things evolving
tumbles the skull’s own feather duster.
O night! Let me not cause you pain!
A tiny chip of selfhood awoken,
let me in a great explosion
before dissolution bloom again!
O night, reface my naked bone
and melt around what day has faded;
homeward deliver me unaided
from febrile myths to chalice and crown.
O hush! I sense a coming rut,
my stars shine out – no how or what –
a vision, I: me, lonely god,
collecting my self round a grand thunderbolt.
Caryatid
1916
Abstract yourself from stone! Explode
the cavern that enslaves you! Rush
away into fields! Despise the entablature –
look, through the beard of the drunken Silenus
from his eternally over-addicted
loud, unmatched and roaring blood
wine drips into his crotch!
Spit on the mania for columns: death-slain
old men’s hands quivered them
towards darkling skies. Smash down
temples from the longing in your knees
where dancing is urgent!
Spread out your limbs, shed blossoms, oh, bleed
away your gentle bed from splendid wounds:
look, dove-circled Venus is winding
roses around her hips’ threshold of love –
look, this summer’s last blue breath of love
floats across aster seas to distant
tree-brown shores; dawning
see this last lying hour of happiness,
our meridian,
arched on high.
Through the alder wood it was making its way
1916
the snipe, I mean – recounted the parson –:
and naked branches stuck out against the air: brazen.
A sky was blue: indubitably. The shouldered shotgun,
the parson’s tension, the little dog,
the beaters even, granting the master his pleasure:
unshakeable.
Then gilding the world: the shot:
taking into account many actions,
weighing up possibilities,
considering physical conditions,
including parabolas and the cone of fire,
air density, barometric pressure, isobars – –
but pervading everything: inevitability,
the exclusion of all questions,
everything pulled together,
a wild beast’s claw at perception’s neck,
its prey convulsed in streams of blood
under the concept: snipe-hunt.
Copernicus died there. No more Newton. No third law of thermodynamics –
a little town shades into view: cellar smells: bakers’ boys,
conveniences with a woman guard,
wiping the seat with a hand-cloth
in the interest of public hygiene;
an office, a young registrar
with cuff protectors, with his morning snack,
reading a letter from his godmother aunt.
Journey
1916
O this light! The island wraps
itself in star-blue liquidly,
still at the edge, with sands perhaps,
and takes its daily fill of sea.
Nothing needs to seek a prize,
the auks, the dipping foliage
are self-fulfilled, their meaning lies
in a centred anchorage.
I join in: brown! I also: tanned!
Low-lying, that’s self-quarantine!
Horizons take the eye in hand
and verticals remain unseen.
Compulsive contacts disappear,
relational systems compromise,
and song-dark under the skin’s veneer
blood-Methuselah starts to rise.
The doctor
1917
I
Sweet carnality sticks like a film
to the edge of my palate.
All the juice and decaying flesh
that ever shook around calcified bones
in my nose a miasma with milk and sweat.
I know how whores and madonnas smell
after stool and when they wake in the morning
and at the tides of their blood –
and men come into my consulting-room
whose sexual organ has sealed itself:
the wife thinks she’s being impregnated
and blown up into a sacred mound;
but the husband is scarred,
his brain roams wild over a misty steppe,
his seed falls in without a sound.
I live in the body’s presence: and in the middle
the genitals sticking to everything. The skull
gets a whiff of it too. I sense
that one day cleft and ramrod
will gape to heaven from the brow.
II
The crown of creation, man, the swine –:
get lost, consort with other beasts!
At seventeen the crabs,
swapping one evil gob for another,
gut diseases and benefit,
women and infusoria,
at forty the bladder beginning to leak –
was it for such louts, do you think, that the earth
grew from sun to moon –? Why do you curse?
You speak of soul – what is your soul?
The old woman shits her bed night after night –
the old man embalms his rotten thighs,
and you grab grub to cram it in your gut,
do you think the stars ejaculate with bliss …?
Eugh! – From cooling colons
spit earth and from other orifices fire,
a gobful of blood –:
it tumbles down
in an arc
complacently into the shadow.
III
With acned skin and rotten teeth
they couple in a bed and press together
and sow the seed in fleshy folds
and feel like god and goddess. And the fruit –:
that is often born deformed:
with cysts on the back, cleft palate,
a squint, anorchic, the intestine
escaping from wide ruptures –: but even what’s whole,
bubbling to light, is not much good,
and through the holes drops earth:
a walk –: foetuses, breeding pack –:
taking the air. Sitting down.
Smell the finger.
Get the raisin out of that tooth.
The little goldfish –!!! –!
A lift! A rise! The Weserlied!
Generalities in passing. God
as cheese-cover stuck over the genitals –:
the Good Shepherd –!! – feelings of universality! –
and at evening the billy-goat goes at his nan.
Poplar
1917
Reserved,
unopened in branch and shoot
to shout up into heaven’s blue –:
trunk only, closednesses,
tall and trembling,
a curve.
The medlar flees,
killer of seeds,
and when lightnings’ shattering blessing
whistled round my shaft
disuniting,
far scattering
what once was tree?
Who ever saw forests of poplar?
Solitary,
and on the brow of the crown the scar of cries,
unceasing through nights and days
above old mignon-scented gardens’
sweet and gaping decomposition,
offering what roots and bark can absorb
into dead spaces aloft
to and fro.
Cocaine
1917
Decay of self, so sweet, longed for so deeply
is what you give me: already my throat is sore,
already the foreign sound’s at work, so freely
dismantling structures of the self and more.
No further swords delivered from the mother’s
sheath to instigate a work or two
and smash with steel –: but under heathland covers
where possibilities may lurk from view.
A tepid slide, a little something flatter –
and now emerges for a breath of a breeze
the Origin, compacted non-beings clatter
brain-shudders full of rotting disloyalties.
Exploded self – o swallowed suppuration –
fevers swept off – so sweet the burst defence –:
stream out, stream out and end the long gestation
with the bloody birth of formlessness.
Synthesis
1917
Silent house. A silent night.
I am among the stars immobile,
still driving into my own darkness
my very own created light.
My brain returns to its resting-place
from caverns, heavens, atavism.
The most a woman can embrace
is dark delicious onanism.
I roll in world. I rattle rape.
At night my naked triumph’s hurled:
no death can force, no dust can scrape
me, concept-I, back to the world.
The instrument
1917
O you denial of Berkeley,
space, broad-bellied, rolls towards you!
Most armoured brain for the aim of aims,
sparkling with male clout, combated myopia and that armpit
washed in the morning as objectively as possible! –
The man mounting, rearing to copulate,
eating ostrich eggs to swell the swelling.
Urethral ironing-woman, needling the womb-ligament
to belly-fat for the sperm-Winkelrieds! – –
O take me up into the jubilation of your bevel:
space is space! O in the flashing
of the handle: focus, virtual image,
enacted according to the law! O, in the eyes
of the point sparkles
trusty, blood-birthed
TARGET.
George Berkeley (1685–1753), Anglo-Irish philosopher, could be misinterpreted to have maintained that what is not perceived cannot exist. Arnold von Winkelried is the legendary hero of the Battle of Sempach (1386) between the Swiss Cantons and Austria, in which he is said to have created a way through the enemy ranks by gathering a large number of pikes into his body.
Marie
1919
O fully female!
Your measurements are normal,
every child can pass through your pelvis.
Lying broadly spread
you conceive up to your brow
and go. –
Curettage
1922
She’s lying in the same position
as when she took,
her thighs akimbo
in the iron hook.
Her head dissolved, without a rudder,
as if she cried:
give, give, I’ll gurgle every shudder
deep inside.
Her body, still strong from little morphine,
is crashing through,
forget the Flood and later hygiene,
just you, just you …
The walls collapsing. Chairs and table,
all are full of being, crave
blood-letting, thirsty grappling, fatal
highway to the grave.
Rubble
1922
Ghosts. The soul is roaring
its mighty gamut of fire.
Grope and kiss and the boring
grimaces of dawn-dead desire.
Breach, and ah your girlhood
sparkling at its death’s door,
Maréchal Niel of falsehood –
never, oh nevermore.
Rubble, every fragment
in daylight dystrophy
leaves but this transparent:
you and infinity –
drink, and every shadow
hangs its lips in the glass,
stop feeding your tired da capos –
impasse –!
Immodesty born from sea-foam,
Acropolis, Grail decay,
fora, a twilit maelstrom
plunging the other way;
frenzied horsemen retreating,
ghosts, the soul roars its grief,
sobbing, self-defeating,
the final pronom jactif.
Come, the letters distorted
that bars of iron encase,
heavenless, finally thwarted
everything, hand and face.
Falling: fading stories,
change: a smile to renew –
everything: sunshine glories,
