fromTranslator's Comment on 'Templars'
The Knights Templars, a crusading religious order, were founded 1118-1119 in Jerusalem: to protect pilgrims to the Holy Land. In 1312 Pope Clement suppressed their entire order. They were exterminated by mass killings and burnings at the stake by King Philip lV of France, 1314. Motive: to seize their wealth. He accused them of heresies, conspiracies, Satanic abominations, and sexual perversions (all mostly unproved). Rather than marry and have children, they carried on their secret society via adopted sons, as noted in stanza six. As armed priests, shunning women and bonded to their male Grand Master, their resemblance – hieratic, psychological, erotic – to the George circle is almost embarrassingly self-evident. But the poem triumphantly universalizes the merely personal and quirky. It makes the élitism one of idealistic service, not mere selfish arrogance.
*
The role of the needed outsider, the redeeming outlaw, was always the author’s obsession but never so successfully universalized as here. Here the outsider forces the exhausted earth mother to renew her insider role: to heal the body-spirit split. Critics have argued about what kind of outsider George is summoning. Let each reader choose his own outsider archetype . . . [. . .] It enhances the magic of the lines that you can read all or none of these figures into it.
Though it smacks of reductive pop psychology, you can view
‘Templars’ as an outburst of its author’s megalomania. Young George once boasted, “Had I only had a few hundred loyal followers, I would have overthrown every throne in Europe”. Reversing Napoleon’s “I love power as an artist” (“j’aime le pouvoir comme artiste”), George remarked: “I love art as power” (“j’aime l’art comme pouvoir”). He identified with defeated emperors, not only Napoleon but Heliogabalus. His combination of seeing himself as hated outlaw and beloved saviour shows how personally he meant the “we” of this poem. He might have said of it, like Louis XlV, “l’état c’est moi”. But what matters most is what he created out of his Yeatsian “rag-and-bone shop of the heart”.
Aesthetically supreme is the sheer propulsiveness of its torrential rhythms and the vigour of its images. This may be the greatest as well as most offensive poem in modern German literature.
*
[. . .] The last line reconciles the sundered halves. “Polarities”, in William Blake’s phrase, “are positive”. And this through the organic growth of life itself, not through a merely mechanical Hegelian logic of thesisantithesis-synthesis. Life and logic, both indispensable, grow in very different yet parallel ways. Life is biology: a rambling English-style garden. Logic is geometry: a symmetric garden of Le Nôtre at Versailles. At least this is how I see both life and this poem.
How, then, to translate the reconciling last line? Essential: to preserve the unifying repetition of “gott” and “leib” (god and flesh). Literally: to deify the body and embody the deus (or embody the divine). But “deus” isn’t English, and “divine” is a weak, gushy, arty adjective. Needed instead: a strong monosyllabic noun of exciting physical action. So I have recast the line to make it strong and immediate.
In the third line from the end, “freely” (“willfährig”, voluntarily) is
an important qualification: the coercion of earth is not violating her
nature, her ancient rite, but renewing it: a qualification that may or may not convince the reader. A poem must be read in the context of its time and culture. Modern feminism versus macho coercion, these belong to a valid but later context. Or shall the coercive Templars be a second time burnt at the stake six centuries later, this time the stake of political correctness? [. . .]
*
Though the real Templars were, in their own odd way, Christians, the poem not only distorts and idealizes them; it mixes them with very different religions. The Christ-child reference of stanza four is, to be sure, Christian. But the “dunkle Spille” (dark spool) of line 5 can only refer to the thread of life spun by the three Norns (Fates) of
Scandinavian myth. The actual word “Norn” is not used except in my clarifying translation; myth-conscious German readers did not need it. The “spring” of the next to last stanza refers to the Icelandic “Edda” epic. [. . .]
*
Particularly un-Christian is the concluding god embodiment. It is
George’s interpretation of the Hellenic heritage. By writing “god”, not “God”, he signalled that he preferred the Greek gods to the monotheistic “God” of his Catholic childhood. Here, as in all his work, the Nietzsche influence is obvious.
*
How relevant is intelligence to poetry? Auden called Tennyson “the
stupidest of the great poets”. Lyricism makes poetry beautiful;
intelligence makes it interesting. Are they compatible? The book The
Seventh Ring (1907) proves they are. The whole volume, Templars’ in particular, shows an inventive, form-shaping and idea-spewing intellect, a pinnacle of IQ, whether or not you agree with the ideas (I often don’t). Combining traditional forms with daringly unconventional contents, George was one of the most intelligent and also well-educated autodidacts in literature. Hence ever interesting, ever fascinating.
Page(s) 250-252
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