Raymond Oliver
Sprache als zufluct und doppelganger
German: I craved it as one craves a place,
A drink, a season, or the three together.
Its Gothic letters, wrought like iron lace,
Like stepped façades and gables in narrow streets,
Fitted the mind as steep roofs fit the weather
Of Germany. A cold, enchanted land.
I needed that resort, my first and last,
Far from the everyday yet close at hand:
A language I could enter, always open,
Whose prospects opened on the fabled past
Of Hoffman, Tieck, von Eichendorff, the Grimms.
Its sounds and rhythms, dark as Gothic script,
Foamed in my skull like beer that overbrims
The cup; its heavy frame of syntax, rigid
But tough, and compound words that never slipped,
Once clamped on concepts, gave me strength and weight,
Shaping the childish body of my thought,
Whose flesh and blood were English and innate,
Unwilled. I made myself a German; now
We live within that frame of mind I wrought.
Page(s) 40
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