Alfred
Lichtenstein (Germany)
1889-1914
Alfred
Lichtenstein was born in 1889 in Berlin, and studied law there until 1913, the
year he joined a Bavarian regiment for a year’s military service. At the
beginning of World War I he was in Belgium, and was killed in action the
following year, September 1914, in Vermandovillers.
Lichtenstein had published only one small
collection of poems, Die Dämmerung, published the year before his death.
He had, however, written extensive other poems and stories that appeared in two
volumes in 1919 in Munich, books reprinted in 1962.
The poet’s work fit nicely into the urban
poets of early Expressionism. As a gentle humanist, skeptical and tender,
Lichtenstein’s poetry was both highly serious and satirical, particularly in
the ironic and self-deprecating poems he wrote under the persona of Kuno Kohn.
The realist, slightly surrealist poems he created link this German author with
the experiments of Pound and early Eliot.
BOOKS
OF POETRY
Die
Dämmerung
(1913); Gedichte und Geschichten (ed. By K. Lubasch), Vol. 1 (Munich,
1919); Gesammelte Gedichte (Zürich: Im Verlag der Arche, 1962)
BOOKS
IN ENGLISH TRANSLATION
A
selection of Lichenstein’s poems appear in Modern German Poetry 1910-1960,
edited and translated by Michael Hamburger and Christopher Middleton (New York:
Grove Press, 1962)
The
Galoshes
The
fat man thought:
At
night I like to walk in my galoshes,
Even
through pious and immaculate streets,
I’m
not quite sober when I wear galoshes…
I
hold my cigarette in one gloved hand.
On
tightrope rhythms then my soul goes tripping.
And
all the hundredweights of my body dance.
1913
—Translated
from the German by Michael Hamburger
The
Patent Leather Shoe
The
poet thought:
Enough.
I’m sick of the whole lot!
The
whores, the theatre and the city moon,
The
streets, the laundered shirtfronts and the smells,
The
nights, the coachmen and the curtained windows,
To
hell with it!
Happen
what may…it’s all the same to me:
This
black shoe pinches me. I’ll take it off—
Let
people turn their heads for all I care.
A
pity, though, about my new silk sock.
1913
—Translated
from the German by Michael Hamburger
Prophecy
Soon
there’ll come—the signs are fair—
A
death-storm from the distant north.
Stink
of corpses everywhere,
Mass
assassins marching forth.
The
lump of sky in dark eclipse,
Storm-death
lifts his clawpaws first.
All
the scallywags collapse.
Mimics
split and virgins burst.
With
a crash a stable falls.
Insects
vainly duck their heads.
Handsome
homosexuals
Tumble
rolling from their beds.
Walls
in houses crack and bend.
Fishes
rot in every burn.
All
things reach a sticky end.
Buses,
screeching overturn.
1913
—Translated
from the German by Christopher Middleton
Ash
Wednesday
Only
yesterday powdered and lustful I walked
In
this various and resonant world.
Today
how long ago the lot was drowned.
Here
is a thing.
There
is a thing.
Something
looks like this.
Something
else looks different.
How
easily one can blow out
The
whole blossoming earth.
The
sky is cold and blue.
Or
the moon is yellow and flat.
A
wood contains many single trees.
Nothing
now worth weeping for.
Nothing
now worth screaming for.
Where
am I—
1913
—Translated
from the German by Michael Hamburger
Morning
And
all the streets lie snug there, clean and regular.
Only
at times some brawny fellow hurries by.
A
very smart young girl fights fiercely with Papa.
A
baker, for a change, looks at the lovely sky.
The
dead sun hangs on houses, broad as it is thick.
Four
bulging women shrilly squeak outside a bar.
The
driver of a cab falls down and breaks his neck.
And
all is boringly bright, salubrious and clear.
A
wise-eyed gentleman floats madly, full of night,
An
ailing god…within this scene, which he forgot
Or
failed to notice—Mutters something. Dies. And laughs.
Dreams
of a cerebral stroke, paralysis, bone-rot.
1913
—Translated
from the German by Michael Hamburger
______
English
language translations copyright ©1962 by Michael Hamburger and Christopher
Middleton.
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