There are many poems about spring, but one that continues to haunt me is Elisabeth Langgässer's Frühling 1946 (Spring 1946) . This tightly constructed, emotionally-charged poem celebrates a return to life on so many levels. The poem itself if a triumph of form, imagery, and meter. But it is the story behind it that makes it almost unbearable. Frühling 1946 moves from nature to myth, from the spring flower anemone to Nausicaa, the woman who saved Odysseus, from toad's realm ("Reich der Kröte") to the realm of the living. The Greek anemōnē means "daughter of the wind", and at the end of the final stanza Nausicaa is recognized as the child ("Kind Nausikaa!"). And Frühling 1946 is dedicated to Cordelia, Elisabeth Langgässer's daughter who, as a Volljüdin (a "complete Jewess" by parentage) was taken from her by the Nazis and sent first to Theresianstadt and then to the Auschwitz death camp. It was assumed that Cordelia had been murdered at Auschwitz. Miraculously, in the spring of 1946 Elisabeth Langgässer received word that her daughter was alive, having been rescued by the Swedish Red Cross.
Spring 1946, an entire nation emerging from the "toad realm", from the terrible music of the "Death-Führer" (Totenführers Flöte), a writer, who for 12 years was forbidden to write because she was a "half-Jew", who endured the deprivations of war,mourning a lost daughter presumed dead, and who was brought low by the multiple sclerosis that would soon kill her. She was given new life by Kind Nausikaa.
In Homer, Odysseus says to Nausicaa when he takes leave from her: "I will never fail to worship you all the rest of my days. For it was you who gave me back my life."
Frühling 1946 (für Cordelia)
Holde Anemone,
bist du wieder da
und erscheinst mit heller Krone
mir Geschundenem zum Lohne
wie Nausikaa?
Windbewegtes Bücken,
Woge, Schaum und Licht!
Ach, welch sphärisches Entzücken
nahm dem staubgebeugten Rücken
endlich sein Gewicht?
Aus dem Reich der Kröte
steige ich empor,
unterm Lid noch Plutons Röte
und des Totenführers Flöte
gräßlich noch im Ohr.
Sah in Gorgos Auge
eisenharten Glanz,
ausgesprühte Lügenlauge
hört‘ ich flüstern, daß sie tauge
mich zu töten ganz.
Anemone! Küssen
laß mich dein Gesicht:
Ungespiegelt von den Flüssen
Styx und Lethe, ohne Wissen
um das Nein und Nicht.
Ohne zu verführen,
lebst und bist du da,
still mein Herz zu rühren,
ohne es zu schüren –
Kind Nausikaa!
Spring 1946
So you return
My sweet Anemone –
All brilliant stamen, calyx, crown –
Making it worth the devastation,
Like Nausicaa?
Windblown and bowing –
Wave and spray and light –
What whirling joy at last
Has lifted up this weight
From shoulders bent with dust?
Now I arise
Out of the toad’s domain –
Pluto’s reddish glare still under my eyelids –
And the hideous pipe of the guide to the dead
Still in my ears.
I have seen the iron gleam
In the Gorgon’s eye.
I have heard the hiss, the whisper,
The rumor that she would kill me:
It was a lie.
Anemone, my daughter,
Let me kiss your face: it is
Unmirrored by the waters
Of Lethe or the Styx.
And innocent of no or not.
And see, you are alive
And here – there’s no deception –
And quiet in the way you touch my heart
Yet do not rake its fires –
My child, my Nausicaa!
(Translated by Eavan Boland, from: After Every War, Twentieth – Century Women Poets, Princeton University Press, Princeton & Oxford, 2004
ISBN 0-691-11745-4 )
See also:
Review: Burned Child Seeks the Fire by Cordelia Edvardson
