Isabel Fargo Cole is the recipient of a PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant for her translation of Franz Fühmann's At the Burning Abyss.
Read her introduction to translating Fuhmann's work here.
from At the Burning Abyss
For poems are not, as
people think, feelings (those you have early enough)—they are
experiences. For the sake of one poem you must see many cities, people
and things, you must understand the animals, you must feel the birds
fly, and know the morning gesture with which the little flowers open.
You must think back on journeys in strange regions, on unexpected
encounters and partings you long saw coming—on days in childhood, still
unexplained, on the parents you couldn’t help hurting, when they brought
you joy you failed to understand… And it is not enough even to have
memories. You must be able to forget when there are many of them, and
you must have the great patience to wait for their return. For the
memories themselves aren’t yet it.
—Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
My
first glimpse of Trakl’s appearance, in a photographic image, keepsake
pose, barrel-shaped body bent slightly forward, knitted cap sagging over
his right ear, smiling obligingly next to his companions, gave me a
shock beyond belief: Not, at first, that it was this
form, but any form at all, any corporeality. – Then, too, that it was
this one. – Thou shalt make no image; I had none, only his poems, and
through the vicissitudes of nearly two decades they’d remained the
revelations of a fire god: flame shooting down into shadows; blazing
thorn bush; foehn and flare; grim glare from hellish depths; now and
then the mild glow of sunsets, and beneath the crust of suppression
lava’s smoldering incandescence, lowering in fissures.
I needed no image, and when it was
forced on me I fended it off, and biographical details too, until
painfully I began to grasp that a poet is also a person, and not a mouth
alone.
This understanding, which, by the way, I
am far from truly reaching, demands a sum of experience, and it is of
this I wish to tell.
I.
A burst of fire through smoke and darkness, that was my first experience of Trakl: Under vaults of thorns / O my brother we blind clock-hands climb toward midnight.
– And in this light a poster, plastered back then on every wall:
against a smeared grim grey background a steel-helmeted profile gazing
toward a hidden sun, the hand gesture that signals the tightening of the
chin-strap, and below that the solemn appeal to the beholder: The
Darkest Hour Is Just Before Dawn! – Now, suddenly, I saw: Toward
midnight.
It was the 3rd or 4th
of May 1945, just before the capitulation of the Wehrmacht, and I, a
soldier of twenty-three, had through a string of coincidences been
released from the military hospital, still hobbling on a stick, and was
spending a few days at my parents’, scot-free, with an official pass
granting me sick leave, and subsequent marching orders to Dresden, which
lay in ashes somewhere. And probably in enemy territory: the Americans
and Russians had met at the Elbe, Berlin was taken, Breslau blasted,
Cologne shattered, Hamburg burned, but: The darkest hour is just before
dawn! and in the mental no man’s land of a madness that had no more
hope, and all the faith in the world, we whispered of the miracle
weapons that would annihilate entire armies, and waged these battles of
annihilation at the pub table, amidst puddles of beer and streaks of
schnapps and marking lines of sausage skins, for here, in the valleys of
the Giant Mountains, there was still beer, and schnapps, and
sandwiches, and the nighttime stillness was broken only by the drunken
singing of the Yankees’ and Russkis’ conquerors staggering homewards. –
Now and then, at vague sounds, we stopped and listened, were the new
shells’ explosions already wresting dawn from the east? But the night
kept its silence. – Early next morning I’d have to set out; now, as
always after dinner, I sat with my father in his study, each of us
immersed in reading, he in fantastical handwritten formulas he dreamed
would bring an upswing and save his little pharmacy (such as a poison
bait for roaming vermin which would stick to the teeth when bitten and
couldn’t be spat out; or a marvelous rejuvenating elixir in suppository
form; or green herbs which, taken as tea, would bring sweet dreams at
night): he, then, in an olive-brown velvet jacket adorned with hussar
braid, bent over his magical schemes, and I, already half in uniform,
with a book of poems purchased in a used book store en route from the
military hospital, a large-format volume with large type, pale-blue
titles over the blocks of verse and a laurel-broken lyre on the grey
cover, and through the night behind the window and the eyes this distant
lightning flared:
Over the white pond
The wild birds have taken flight.
In the evening an icy wind blows from our stars.
Over our graves
The night bends its broken brow.
Under oak trees we sway on a silver skiff.
The city’s white walls ring forever.
Under vaults of thorns
O my brother we blind clock-hands climb toward midnight.
There was no need for the title Downfall
to grasp what this poem voiced. – It was our downfall. – I had never
read poems without the images they uttered looming large as life before
my eyes (I had no notion that poetry could be read in any other way),
and so I saw the pond, and I saw my forest lake, the lake dearest to my
heart, both a piece of the earth’s surface with specifiable geographical
coordinates and the most secret recess of my soul, but now the forest
was nothing but a blur of black, and the lake, which in my remembering
dreams had always had the lunar sheen of silver, was now white in the
awful sense that it reflected nothing, as chalk reflects nothing, no
shore, no tree, not even a sky, only a veneer with not a ripple now
stirring beneath it. – And yet my pond all the same, its singular form. –
When I’d found this lake – an eight-year-old, on vacation, escaped from
my parents while hiking and suddenly lost in an unfamiliar forest – its
hue was that of the thrill it aroused, the mystery of an enchanted
place to be shared with no one. Everyone is granted an experience of
this kind; the only key thing is not to scorn it. This place can be a
cave, an elderflower arbor, or a rock crevice, or merely the corner of a
room in a certain light, a section of sidewalk over a drain, a basement
window, a mountain, a field’s edge, a strip of asphalt – for me it was
in fact a lake, and its unfathomable depths contained the frantic lust
of escape as the essence of all possible futures, just as the
possibility of all power is contained in Aladdin’s lamp. – And now I
learned that this fullness was gone, transformed into its emptied
opposite: the lake filled from the very depths with chalk; in the air
still the rush of the birds as they took flight; woods and sky rapidly
dimming, and from our stars an icy wind was loosed. – Our stars were the
ones that had shone upon our victories, not a certain constellation
such as Orion or the Corona, but their totality at a certain hour, that
of victory, which we believed would return like a morning breaking time
and again, and now this hour, too, was gone forever; our stars nothing
now but holes in space; cold descended, and although it was May, I knew
the white of the pond for the white that appeared in the face of a
comrade trudging beside me through the snowstorm, white as a harbinger
of life dead from cold, whose sight makes you wonder if you too already
bear this sign. – Death: and suddenly cold entered the room; a breath,
and I sensed the pond outside the window, and for the blink of an eye I
knew without yet grasping it that the war was lost.
***
The
reader will long have felt the narrator’s difficulty, namely the
infeasibility of relating, in the consecutive manner of an unfolding
narrative, a moment which holds an inward and outward era as a second of
eternity. And he will be nagged by the sense of having little way to
ascertain the objectivity of the account: Who can assure him that this
is not mere fantasizing, projecting today’s insight more than thirty
years back into the past? These qualms are as impossible to allay as the
discomfort with the linear mode of narrative. And so it seems a
convenient opportunity to interject a few explanations to make the
narrative less insupportable as well as addressing the listener’s
scruples – whether they will dispel them, we do not venture to guess.
Let us begin with a third thing.
No one who studies Trakl can fail to
notice his penchant for colors, and some of his interpreters point out
that Trakl’s colors express and evoke opposing sensations: White is the
color of snow, but also that of mold; yellow is gold-like, but also
fecal; green is May foliage, but also decay, and thus “green” says both
hope and fear. – We will find the opportunity to generalize these
observations of Trakl’s poetry and grasp the essence of the poetic word
as the unity of opposites, even in such unremarkable constructs as “and”
and “also”.
The German language was so clear-sighted as to give the noun “
Wort” [word] two plurals, “
Worte” and “
Wörter”,
and our intended logic is to assume the existence not of a twofold
plural, but indeed of two different, albeit homonymous singulars, from
now on assigning the term “
Wort” as the singular of the plural “
Worte” to the realm of poetry, as strictly distinct from a singular “
Wort” with the plural “
Wörter”,
which for us refers to the word as a scientific instrument. Here we
follow the example of Schiller, whose declaration “Three words [
Worte] I call you, weighted with import” refers not to
Worte in the sense of coined thoughts, but to the simple lexemes “free”, “virtue” and “God”.
[1]
But this logic means no less than to assume the existence of two
languages, homonymous in their basic elements and yet essentially
different, a language of science and one of poetry, two languages in
which identical-seeming building blocks are so very different that, say,
the adjectives “red” and “yellow” in scientific language must be
regarded as unambiguous “
Wörter”, that is, as names for the retinal impressions of certain electromagnetic waves, but in the language of poetry as ambivalent
Worte
which, though each is precisely defined, can never be tapped to the
full. “Red”: that is the name for the retinal impression of the
frequency 4 × 10^14; and “red” bespeaks a unity of life and death.
***
Contradiction as a word and in a word
provokes the reader to contradict: Why should the whiteness of the pond
be specified as the white of chalk and frost, when it could equally well
be interpreted as the white of a gentle thing, as the white of asters
or anemones shivering in the icy wind? Of course the pond can be seen
this way too, and the best testimony to the possibility of different
readings is provided by Trakl himself. This poem is the fifth version of
an effort whose four preceding versions have been preserved, showing
the following metamorphosis of the pond complex:
Version 1: Intertwined we plunge into blue waters –
Version 2: When the coolness of blue waters breathes upon us –
Version 3: When the face of stony waters breathes upon us –
Version 4: Under the dark vaults of our dejection
The shades of dead angels play in the evening.
Over the white pond
The wild birds have taken flight –
these third and fourth lines then being
adopted as the beginning of the final form the poem took. But however we
construe the pond’s whiteness – don’t the different ways of looking at
it all lead to the same conclusion: a final despair? And isn’t this
despair so irrefutable because the white in each reading comprises both
interpretations: the pond as a lovely frozen thing, or loveliness as
something hopelessly threatened by frost? – Trakl’s verse unites both
possibilities (and the very word “white” unites them) such that it
becomes the leap between the two, the switching of one to the other
within the unity of a poetic image, the exquisitely accurate word for a
motion containing a cosmos.
What Trakl has sometimes been accused
of, or what some have been prepared to excuse as “the urgency of
utterance” – namely the use of conflicting adjectival messages in the
different versions of his poems – this supposed weakness is his
strength, the preternaturally confident use of the poetic word as the
elementary building block of all poems, the Wort in the sense of the plural “Worte”
whose essence is the contradictory unity of human experience. Thus
every interpretation of poetry is on the right track so long as it is
capable of embracing at least one of the elements of that unity of
contradiction, which at the same time means relinquishing the claim to
be the one right interpretation. Such a one could do no justice to
Trakl, let alone those attempts at interpretation that from the outset
view a poem not as poetry, but as the mere vehicle of a scientific
insight, that is, one expressible in Wörter.
And should anyone find it suspicious
that our interpretation fits a later point in time so perfectly as to
suggest that this poem was written not in 1913 by Georg Trakl, but
rather thirty-two or even sixty-four years later by his interpreter, let
him see how he responds to this argument: that it is history itself
that seems to have conformed to Trakl’s poetry. Without a doubt it has,
in the sense that Trakl expressed what was to come: the downfall of a
world that feels itself invincible and acts in the belief of this
invincibility even as its foundations tremble. – Poetry is the other
kind of reality, the anticipatory, and the misfortune of the poetic
image is that one day it is realized. With that I return to my father’s
study a few nights before the end of the war.
***
He
sat there in his velvet hussar jacket, sipping wine and scribbling
calculations on an empty pack of cigarettes, and over our graves the
night bent its broken brow. – Over
the white pond / The wild birds have taken flight. / In the evening an
icy wind blows from our stars. //Over our graves / The night bends its
broken brow. / Under oak trees we sway on a silver skiff.
– Poems are another kind of dream. – Our graves were the holes that
stared in space in our stars’ stead: the night, and its broken brow. – I
could see it, just outside the window, and suddenly I recalled a scene
from a horror movie. The mad owner of a wax museum has lost not only his
intact human face but his mind to a fire that ravaged his business, and
so, hiding his charred features beneath a wax mask, seemingly crippled
and showing himself only in a wheelchair, he attempts to create himself a
new collection of curiosities by luring people into his clutches and
dousing them with boiling wax. Once when he attempts to overpower a
victim, she fights back, his mask shatters beneath her blows, and as he
rears up the grimace of death emerges from his broken brow. – Women
always fainted at this scene; the cinema lived from this horror, and we
sat in our seats, boot-shod juveniles, and laughed, and cracked jokes,
and yet we felt the thrill that the madman might reach for us – and now a
veneer cracked again, this time beneath the blows of silence, and I
lifted up the book as though to fend them off, when suddenly I heard my
father ask whether the poems I was reading there, by a Georg Trakl,
might be by a certain Georg Trakl from Salzburg, and when I confirmed
that the collection contained poems on Mirabell Palace and the
Mönchsberg, as well as other lines that might refer to a cathedral city,
a gratified smile spread over my father’s still-incredulous face; he
gazed across his formulae at the book as though at an apparition and
said with a misty-eyed shake of the head, stroking his hussar braids: So
poor Schorschl made something of himself after all.
Of course I asked if he knew Trakl, and
my father took the book from my hand and leafed through it, explaining
as he did that he’d been Trakl’s comrade, the same age as he, and also a
military pharmacist, Medikamentenakzessist was the official
term, more or less lieutenant rank, strictly speaking a bit higher than a
lieutenant, though unfortunately, well, without the same recognition,
and he lowered the book and explained that as part of a medical
battalion deployed in early fall 1914 near Przemyśl Fortress he’d often
rubbed shoulders with Schorschl, eating next to him in the mess hall and
sometimes sharing quarters, which was why, if I was interested, he
could tell me quite a bit about Schorschl; about his crackpot notions,
that loose screw of his, because there was no doubt about it, the chap
was crazy, which naturally earned him a proper bit of ragging, and the
man of sixty took off his pince-nez and rubbed his eyes, blinded by the
sudden light of memory, and blinked, and sighed pensively: dear me, how
they used to ride that Schorschl, sometimes it was a bit much really,
especially how they’d wind him up about his doggerel, his floating
corpses and his funny birds, he’d jump up from the table sometimes and
couldn’t even talk, just swung his fists, and then he’d run out like he
was going to do himself harm, but he was that daft, good old Schorschl
Trakl, you just couldn’t help making fun of him, and him a bear of a
man, and a good fellow, of course not a good pharmacist, but he could
put away the wine like only the staff surgeon could, those were quite
some drinking binges back then in Galicia, between battles and battles,
well, and then Schorschl suddenly disappeared, probably dismissed, there
really wasn’t much you could do with him; and all at once, as though
fearing thirty years later the guilt of delayed acknowledgement, my
father propped the pince-nez back upon his nose, cleared his throat,
refilled his wine glass, and began to read.
The night was outside, its brow riddled
with holes, and it and I watched my father, losing himself in the poems
now and quarreling with memories; he’d stare at one line for a long time
without moving his eyes, and sometimes he said: “My God” and looked up
with a helpless smile, and swallowed, and read on reluctantly, chewing,
as he did in awkward moments, at the ends of his bristly moustache, and
then he leafed through the book so distractedly that I both feared and
hoped he would break off reading with some pleasantry or other, but all
at once he nodded vigorously and exclaimed with the eye-widening
pleasure of recognition: Yes, he was exacting, the daft old thing, he’d
say that for him, and they gave him a pretty hard time about that at a
drinking party once, they’d found some of his papers and passed them
around in the mess hall, and read them out, he remembered it now, word
for word, and how Schorschl bellowed, and went red, and white as a
sheet, and trembled so you thought he’d lay about him, bear that he was,
but then he just sat there, chalk-white, scary, as if he couldn’t hear a
thing now – and before I could ask him which poem he meant, the man in
the yellow hussar jacket laughed, jovial but raucous, and quoted a
phrase and laughed some more and offered his two cents: rubbish like
that no sane person could understand. But in the midst of his laughter,
as though sensing in me the upwelling of that angry sadness that had
twice led to blows between us, he broke off and snapped the book shut
and proposed a toast to poor Schorschl, a good fellow, maybe not a good
pharmacist, but undoubtedly the oddest Medikamentenakzessist in an Imperial & Royal Austrian Army that had no lack of odd birds.
We drank, and the night watched us. – I
no longer know today, and probably didn’t know then, even as my father
silently handed the book back to me across the table after we raised our
glasses, which poem he had meant; perhaps one with the figure of the
sister as a monkess, for so the phrase he quoted seems to ring in my
memory, but I can’t say for certain. All I remember is that toast, and
that my father didn’t ask me what I thought of the poems, if I liked
them, if I understood them; he turned wordlessly back to his formulae:
the poison in the fox’s mouth and the herb of dreams, burying himself in
tomes of organic chemistry, and I felt shy or fearful of asking him any
more about his comrade, the Imperial & Royal Medikamentenakzessist
Georg Trakl, not knowing then that at the very time my father believed
him dismissed he had sought refuge in death from the horror of his day,
and probably by his own hand. – I knew nothing then of the lives of the
poets; I wanted no image. – And so I asked no further, and took the
book, and drank wine, and it seems to me that I read once again the poem
that had shaken me in the way that leaves cracks you sense will open
only later, the Downfall, its third stanza, the last, never again forgotten: The city’s white walls ring forever. / Under vaults of thorns / O my brother we blind clock-hands climb toward midnight.
[1] Wörter
refers to words in the technical, quantitative sense, as a collection
of grammatical units without regard to deeper meaning or connotation.
Thus a dictionary is a
Wörterbuch and a computer word count will calculate the number of
Wörter in a document.
Worte emphasizes words in a more complex sense as units of meaning and vehicles of thought:
Goethes Worte.
“Wort” in this connection can also serve as a pars pro toto, referring
to a more complex, multiword unit of meaning, a phrase or sentence – as
Fühmann calls it here, a “coined thought”.
Ein Wort Goethes is
likely to refer to an entire Goethe quote. Certain English usages (God’s
Word, good word, word of honor, have a word with) reflect a similarly
broad understanding of the “word”. (Tr.)
Asteroid
3552 displays some bizarre, disassociated behavior. Astronomers
describe it as a small body orbiting around the sun. Yet it acts like a
comet, and, for that matter, like an extinct one, meaning that the
asteroid has expelled from its nucleus most of its volatile ice. Thus,
it is lifeless, incapable of generating energy in its tail—a comet
without force, a kind of impostor, pretending to be something it isn’t.
