The Dial (Third Series)/Volume 75/Phantasus
PHANTASUS
Contemporary German Poetry. Translated by Babette Deutsch and Avrahm Yarmolinsky. 12mo. 201 pages. Harcourt, Brace and Company. $1.75.
ABOUT modern German poetry, with its barbaric gravity, with its goose-step from one philosophy to another: especially about the fantastic bulk of it there is something preposterous and incredible; at least one has this feeling when reading the introduction to the anthology compiled by Babette Deutsch and Avrahm Yarmolinsky. They write as if they were describing something imaginary. These poets they discuss, who attained "a heightened emotional tonus," who wore their "boutonnière with a difference," who wreathed "roses of cement about the brow of Berlin," obviously never existed; they were invented like Earl Roppel or the Spectric School, as a vaster hoax. In face of such description to believe in their reality demands an act of faith, and yet they can be proved by the simplest empirical laws or by their collected volumes, numerous enough to pave the highroad of their flight to Berlin, after the suppression of the revolt in Munich. The introduction to Contemporary German Poetry is exact in spite of its affectations and alembications; it defines a literature which is real but improbable.
Naturalism in Germany followed sentimentalism and was followed in turn by symbolism, mysticism, fantaisisme. The last of these schools was founded by Alfred Mombert, or by Arno Holz, who wrote lines of uneven length which he centred round a vertical axis, giving his poems the silhouette of a pagoda. The title of his principal work, Phantasus, might be applied to the whole of con- temporary German verse.
However, the period described and translated in the present volume begins earlier, toward the middle 'eighties, with the naturalism of Detlev von Liliencron. Miss Deutsch's own technique renders him admirably into English, and her lyrical versions of his friend, Dehmel, and of the mystical but straightforward poems of Rainer Maria Rilke can be praised equally. With Stefan George, chief of the symbolists, the translators have done badly; they chose his less characteristic work and allowed the essence even of this to escape, retaining little of the original except the curious punctuation. They seem to lack sympathy for anything in the least obscure.
Liliencron, Dehmel, Rilke, George: these, such giants as they were, loom as giants among the German lyric poets of the 'nineties. Fatally, they lose most of their stature in a translation which comes at the wrong moment, in the middle of a reaction against all forms of naturalism and symbolism. It is too early or too late to judge them fairly, and certainly it is too late to grow enthusiastic over qualities which they borrowed from the French, or which a few of our own poets afterwards borrowed from the German. In translation and at this moment they can give us nothing new. The same objection should not hold against our own contemporaries, the expressionists. Contemporary German Poetry is a volume in two parts, of which the second is devoted to this younger group.
War rages: a nation loses its young men, starves, goes down to a defeat which is the defeat not of a nation only, but of a civilization and a philosophy; out of the general indifference or debauch the surviving poets lift their voices in a chorus which is louder, more despondent and more hopeful than any imagined chorus, and vowed more fatally to remain discordant, unfulfilled, being the celebration of a fallacy.
The fallacy has often been expressed, but nowhere so clearly as in the introduction to Menschheitsdämmerung (Berlin: Emnst Rowohlt Verlag) which incidentally is the most complete anthology of the expressionist school. Its editor says, explaining his choice:
"The reproach can easily be made that during the past decade many poems have been written which are more complete than these; richer, qualitatively better. But can a poetry which presents the pain and passion, the desires and longings of these years . . . can this poetry take a clean and pure shape? Must it not be as chaotic as the epoch out of whose torn and bleeding soil it rose?"
Verse composed before dinner should express no emotion other than hunger. Our epoch is incomplete; therefore its poets should strive to write incompletely, badly. Composition and style, to writers who share this belief, are qualities which the present era should avoid. They despise art, which perhaps is fortunate for their self-respect.
The expressionist school is based on two general and contradictory theories. One of them is a sentimental communism, a revolt in favour of a new society. The other is an attempt to express the pure Self, independently of every element imposed on the poet from without; in other words it is a revolt against every form of society. The two theories are to be found existing together in many of the early romantic poets; from one point of view German expressionism is no more than a violent restatement of romanticism. It would be more exact to call it a simplification.
Man. God. Self. Brother. Cosmos. Purity. Buttocks. Revolution. Write these eight words, and perhaps a few other generalities of their nature, on separate cards and shake them in a hat. Extract them one by one and place an exclamation point after each. The recipe for making expressionist poetry is not remarkably complicated. Instead of describing the infinite diversity of the exterior world it confines itself to the soul, and souls are uniform and simple. To express the inmost Self is the narrowest of all formulas. One feels when reading Menschheitsdämmerung, which is the work of two dozen poets, that the whole anthology could have been written by any one of them. They are more viciously similar than the Georgians.
Despising art they can write with ease, and voluminously. Johannes Becher has published ten volumes of verse since 1914, Klemm seven since 1915; Rudolf Leonhardt, who was born in 1889, is the author of "some thirteen volumes of verse and prose and also of a tragedy." Klabund is thirty-one years old. He has published forty volumes, eight of which consist of lyric poems. He says in a brief notice: "What you know is only part of what I composed. Often the wind scattered my pages. In my many wanderings I lost the manuscripts of two dramas." Klabund, with his sententiousness, must be an acquaintance of that other poet who began a letter by saying: "Three years ago I was a dadaist. Now I am a communist." Gravely, as if the world and his own personality had been changed by his decision. Of all features of contemporary German verse this seriousness is the most incredible, except perhaps for its unimaginable volume.
Miss Deutsch and Mr Yarmolinsky translate four of those poems by Klabund which the wind failed to scatter. They print Klemm, Becher, Leonhardt, Schickele, and worse. On the other hand they omit Jakob van Hoddis, who left behind him not forty volumes, but sixteen brief poems, finished roughly but perfectly, remarkable for movement, for thunder, for a cruel extreme fantasy. His peculiar qualities would be hard to recapture in English, but they are worth the effort. The absence of Hasenclever is less important; he is repeated by the other expressionists. With Hans Arp the case is different. He is sometimes called the greatest living German poet, but he is also called a dadaist, which may explain his exclusion even from an anthology which is designed "to convey the mood and manner of current German verse."
Its picture of this mood and manner could hardly be just, but it is not lacking entirely in force. It includes Mombert (the "lonely cosmic tear") and Heym, whose poems have the imaginative brutality of Munich posters. It prints a single poem by Theodor Däubler and another by Alfred Lichtenstein. It translates Gottfried Benn, who believes in a return to primitive passions and who writes with particular gusto about dissections in the morgue. Evidently the translators do not fear the most brutal naturalism. On the other hand, paradoxically, they have a weakness for the decorative and are capable of prettifying passages where the original is rough and new. They avoid real novelty almost as strictly as they avoid obscurity: an attitude which, though honest, prevents their doing justice to some of the best of modern poetry.
But happily not to all. If this wind which blew his pages from the grasp of Klabund, if this providential wind arose to sweep away everything which is pompous, verbose, sentimental, or careless from contemporary German verse, there would still remain a considerable body of poetry, and it would retain a perfume of its own, a combination of fantasy with barbarity, pessimism, and culture which can be found in no other literature, and which derives neither from Whitman nor Mallarmé. The real task of Miss Deutsch and Mr Yarmolinsky was to convey this perfume, and fortunately it was strong enough to endure a translation less honest and even more fragmentary than theirs.