Keeping with the theme of National Poetry Month, I offer a poem by Elisabeth Langgässer (1899-1951), a Catholic poet and novelist. I am making my way through her masterpiece, Das unauslöschliche Siegel (The Indelible Seal) and have looked into her biography a bit. The poem Frühling 1946 (Spring 1946) was dedicated to her daughter Cordelia, who, as Langgässer learned in 1946, had miraculously survived Auschwitz. Langgässer herself had been deemed a Mischling – or half-Jew – in the Third Reich, and was therefore prohibited from publishing until after the war. And so in 1946 Langgässer was reborn as a writer and a mother. In the poem the poet is literally brought back from the realm of death (Reich der Kröte) by the flower Anemone, who is identifed with Nausicaa, the rescuer of Ulysees. In the final line, Nausicaa is recognized as her child.
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 )
