Your Diamond Dreams Cut Open My Arteries COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES ImUNCI Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures From 1949 to 2004, UNC Press and the UNC Department of Germanic & Slavic Languages and Literatures published the UNC Studies in the Germanic Languages and Literatures series. Monographs, anthologies, and critical editions in the series covered an array of topics including medieval and modern literature, theater, linguistics, philology, onomastics, and the history of ideas. Through the generous support of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, books in the series have been reissued in new paperback and open access digital editions. For a complete list of books visit www.uncpress.org. Your Diamond Dreams Cut Open My Arteries Poems by Else Lasker-Schüler translated and with an introduction by robert p. newton UNC Studies in the Germanic Languages and Literatures Number 100 Copyright © 1982 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons cc by-nc-nd license. To view a copy of the license, visit http://creativecommons. org/licenses. Suggested citation: Lasker-Schüler, Else. Your Diamond Dreams Cut Open My Arteries: Poems by Else Lasker-Schüler. Translated by Robert P. Newton. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982. doi: https://doi.org/ 10.5149/9781469656670_Lasker-Schuler Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Newton, Robert P. Title: Your diamond dreams cut open my arteries : Poems by Else Lasker-Schüler / by Robert P. Newton. Other titles: University of North Carolina Studies in the Germanic Languages and Literatures ; no. 100. Description: Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, [1982] Series: University of North Carolina Studies in the Germanic Languages and Literatures. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 82002656 | isbn 978-1-4696-5666-3 (pbk: alk. paper) | isbn 978-1-4696-5667-0 (ebook) Subjects: Lasker-Schüler, Else, 1869-1945 — Translations into English. Classification: lcc pt2623.a76 a26 1982 | dcc 831/ .912 Contents Else Lasker-Schuler 3 Notes 51 Poems from Books and Poem Cycles Styx (1902) 56 The Seventh Day (1905) 106 My Miracles (1911) 130 To My So Beloved Playmate Senna Hoy (1917) 146 To My Pure Friend in Love Hans Ehrenbaum-Degele (1917) 158 Gottfried Benn (1917) 162 Hans Adalbert von Maltzahn (1917) 184 My Pretty Mother Always Looked to Venice (1917) 236 Hebrew Ballads (1913) 244 Concert (1932) 264 My Blue Piano (1945) 274 To Him (1945) 290 Identifications 305 Bibliography 307 Index of Poem Titles 313 Subject Index 315 Acknowledgments Acknowledgment is made to Kosel-Verlag, Munich, for permission to translate the poems in this book. Thanks are due to Inter Nationes, Bonn, and to the Research Council of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro for grants to aid in the preparation of this work. Robert P. Newton Your Diamond Dreams Cut Open My Arteries Else Lasker-Schuler 1. A bulky American desk encyclopedia, undoubtedly an arbiter and repository of only the most worthwhile information, cannot find room for her slender figure between Lasker, Emanuel: German chess player and mathematician, and Laski, Harold Joseph: English politi­ cal scientist, economist, author, and lecturer. The Kleines literarisches Lexikon, in its 1953 edition, eight years after her death, gives as a capsule orientation the following message: Lasker-Schiller, Else, lyricist, in themes, ethos, and style an Expressionist. Also stories & dr. 1876-1945,* in Elberfeld,+ in Jerusalem. Strongly improvisatory talent, alternating between pure poetry and unrestrained fancifulness. Drawn to the Orient and Judaism as if by mythical memory. Close friendship with Peter.-Hille, championed by Karl.-Kraus, associations with.­ Daubler, .-Trakl, Franz Marc. Lived a bohemian life usually in Berlin. 1933 emigration to Switzerland and Palestine. 1 The missing listing in the encyclopedia is not surprising, for Lasker­ Schuler is almost unknown in the English-speaking world and until recently has remained largely untranslated. But even the sober, telegraphic report of the German lexicon, in itself not incorrect (save in the birth date), could hardly convey to a user the impression that she had also evoked judgments such as these: This was the greatest woman poet that Germany ever had. 2 Perhaps the greatest poet the Jews have ever had.3 Her poetry ... belongs, in the development of modern Euro­ pean poetry since Baudelaire, since the French symbolists, among the highest achievements.4 The Black Swan of Israel. 5 In a time in which it became difficult and rare or intolerable and conventional, she brought the love song, the love poem once more to great beauty. 6 A body of love poetry that is remarkable for its wealth, its variety of nuances and its power. 7 3 4 Else Lasker-Schiller Some of the most beautiful love songs that German literature possesses. 8 She is the Sappho of our century, a "black Sappho," for whom the world has split apart. 9 The Sappho of our century would probably not have wanted to appear among chess players and political scientists anyway. She was sensitive-hypersensitive-to the company she kept. And, inciden­ tally, she had good reason to be cautious. Not everyone was a friend, as the following charges indicate: An extravagant unartistic style is characteristic of her, also a gypsy-like erotic sensibility. Her poetry seems more calculated and artificial than original. 10 This in part perverse poetry. 11 A boundlessly egoistic spirit addicted to play. 12 A pathological urge to lie. 13 One can doubt that Else Lasker-Schuler was ever psychologically healthy. 14 A public danger, mentally ill. 15 Total softening of the brain, we hear the reader say. 16 Lasker-Schuler was described at various periods of her life as a mixture of archangel and market peddler17 or witch, 18 as a strayed bird of paradise,19 a giggling elf or fortune-telling herbwoman,20 an inextricable chaos of genius and craziness, of megalomania and inten­ tional eccentricity. 21 Of her own changeable nature Lasker-Schuler said: "I'm not a human being, I'm weather."22 Artists, by the very nature of their role as forces of the spirit, arouse strong sympathies in their disciples and rejection by their antago­ nists, but the tone of the reactions to Else Lasker-Schuler is more personal than is usual. With her flagrant eccentricities and aggressive frankness she was hard for her contemporaries to ignore, and she appears to still evoke passions and prejudices in more recent critics. Though she was given to personal devotedness, infatuations, and friendships, the emotional demands she made on others as well as on herself often strained or broke the very bonds with which she sought to secure herself in the void of her lifelong loneliness. Because her own nature was divided, it is understandable that her critical image is not yet firmly fixed. Indeed, the existential fascination Else Lasker-Schuler 5 of her work, apart from the great beauty of language and music in a number of poems, lies in following the plight of a self-obsessed soul, threatened every moment with the loss of self, striving to find a saving union with others but always fearing its own dissolution in nothingness, the fading away of that sense of a unique being which was all it had. (Note the number of poems in the Index that begin with the word "My.") After a youth dedicated to considerable self­ dramatization, so much a part of her nature that it never ceased, she faced in middle life the ominous eclipse of feeling's warmth, the petrifaction of her kaleidoscopic consciousness. She lived on then in the sustaining hope that her true and unknown essence would some­ day reveal itself: I used to be an actress; now I sit in the cloakroom and bum the audience's straw hats and coats. Because I'm disappointed. I was always seeking a hand, and what lay in my hand-if I was lucky-? a glove. My face is like stone now; I have trouble mov­ ing it. One should be proud of that; no one has to erect a monument to you any longer. If only they would decorate me, at least on holidays. The more afraid I am, the more enor- mous my fearlessness grows. But I'm always afraid; a bird is fluttering somewhere in me, can't take flight any longer.... Perhaps it will begin to sing tomorrow. All my life I've been waiting for this song. 23 The feelings of isolation, abandonment, and disillusion are clear, as is, in the context, the immediate source of her dejection; the passage stems from the same "letter" to Franz Marc (in The Malik) where she announces that the love of the poet Gottfried Benn for her has been extinguished. And yet her capacity for self-identification with other beautiful souls rejuvenated quickly throughout her life-her feelings for Benn never cooled completely-and in late 1913 and 1914, only a year after the above letter, we find her involved in the fate of one of those colorful figures to whom she was always drawn and who were per­ haps indeed (how can we honestly know at this remove?) somewhat as admirable and saintly as she found them. It was a scene worthy both of her penchant for the theatrical and of the power of her loyalty: At the end he lay in the Prisoners' Section of the Insane Asylum in Meshcherskoye four hours from Moscow. I had as I entered no longer complete control of myself. We first had to go through 8 6 Else Lasker-Schiller towers his brother and I high up between the walls. In front of every gate of the tower stood 8 armed soldiers or guards.