Letzte Wache
Wie dunkel sind deine Schläfen
Und deine Hände so schwer,
Bist du schon weit von dannen
Und hörst mich nicht mehr?
Unter dem flackenden Lichte
Bist du so traurig und alt,
Und deine Lippen sind grausam
In ewiger Starre gekrallt.
Morgen schon ist hier das Schweigen
Und vielleicht in der Luft
Noch das Rascheln von Kränzen
Und ein verwesender Duft.
Aber die Nächte werden
Leerer nun, Jahr um Jahr.
Hier, wo dein Haupt lag, und leise
Immer dein Atem war.
Here follow some excerpts from Peter Viereck’s major essay, ‘Ogling through Ice: the Sullen Lyricism of Georg Heym’, published in Books Abroad, April 1971. ‘Final Vigil’ is included in this essay. The version of the translation printed above is a revision of that originally printed in Books Abroad. It is followed by a Translator’s Note, with a subtle analysis of the translational decisions taken. I have, perhaps mistakenly, excerpted from the first rather than the last, more technical part of this essay . . . [DW]
Though typical of Heym in craftsmanship, ‘Final Vigil’ is untypical in
subject matter. Its subject is an individual death. His other poems more often deal with mass doom. They parade a veritable menagerie of morgues, suicides, madmen, hanged criminals, deaf men, blind women, and some choice somnambulists worthy of Dr Caligari. Heym records his doomed parades not through direct observation but through a shimmer of sinister “Fun House” reflections. It was still a cosy warm world in 1912, but he photographed it through a cold blue lens, as if already ogling up from under the ice that drowned him.
Heym’s treatment of death is often delicate and hushed. For
example, his Ophelia elegy, not to mention ‘Final Vigil’. Yet even more frequent is what we must call the lurid Heym. His more lurid poems of death teeter on the edge of silliness. They include, depending upon which way they teeter, his best and worst writing.
*
We believe that Heym’s rhythmic originality (which our translation
endeavours partly to convey) is so considerable that no other German or English poet can, on that score, be compared with him . . . [. . .] However, in his never static, always propulsive metaphors Heym does have one equivalent in American letters and one in British letters: Hart Crane [. . .] and the South African Roy Campbell. As an epitaph for the breakneck gallop of Heym’s imagery, we may cite a line from Campbell: “stunned by his own expenditure of force.” In all three poets, metaphor loses autonomy and becomes a subtopic under the category “rhythm”. In all three, the rhythms are emphatically preferable to their surface message (meaning by “surface” their mere ideological rather than emotional insights). By such a preference are we falling into the formalist trap of selling content short? Such is certainly not the intention. The intention is simply to keep content in perspective. This seems a needed corrective in the special case of Heym, whose lurid surfacecontent
has been disproportionately emphasized by both his followers
and detractors.
Sometimes one oversimplifies for clarity. Some oversimplifications
seems justified, some not. In the oversimplified distinction above,
between form and content, it must not be forgotten that content is able to form and that form is able to contain. The oversimplified distinction does seem at least partly justified in the exceptional case of Heym’s way of coping with more emotion than words can bear. No hermetic aestheticism: we are not saying, “Look only at his form, look only at his rhythms”. We are saying, his rhythms are relatively unoriginal and unilluminating – though valuable in other ways: namely intellectually exciting, metaphorically dynamic, stimulating to the nerve ends but not to the core. [. . .]
*
[. . .] It is worth learning German just in order to savour Heym’s swollen, magical two-syllable rhymes – and then forgetting German again so as to savour a music unencumbered by message. He wrote more feebly as he became fastidious and mature; the “Old Wordsworth” disaster waited just around the corner and waited in vain.
This selection concludes with Peter Viereck’s transplantation of Pushkin’s tiny poem ‘On The Hills of Georgia’, referred to by him, in his ‘Translator’s Comment on Goethe’s “Wanderer’s Night Song”’, as, along with the Goethe poem, “the simplest great poem in history”. It seems to me appropriate to end with a poem and also to recall Peter Viereck’s dedication to Russian as well as German culture. We are, in any case, only two years past Pushkin’s bicentenary, which was commemorated in MPT 15 with a ‘Pushkin Portfolio’. As with Brodsky, Peter Viereck’s contribution comes to us late but no less welcome! Having myself attempted a translation of this lyric, I appreciate in particular Viereck’s manipulation of the rhyme scheme, allowing him to give the poem’s aphoristic pathos, dare I say it, an additional charge. Pushkin’s text alternates feminine and masculine rhymes, a/b/a/b/c/d/c/d. Here is a literal prose version
of the poem: “On the hills of Georgia lies a nocturnal mist, / The Aragva roars/ stirs before me. / I am sad and easy/light: my sorrow is bright, / My sorrow is filled with you, / With you, with you alone . . . My dejection / Nothing torments, troubles, / and the heart again burns and loves – because / It cannot not love.” Now Viereck. [DW]
Translated by Peter Viereck
Page(s) 256-258
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