The Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht

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The Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht Page 56

by Tom Kuhn


  And the land that received us will be no home, but an exile.

  Restlessly we sit, as near as we can to the borders

  Awaiting the day of our return, watching every smallest change

  Across the border, eagerly questioning

  Every newcomer, forgetting nothing, relinquishing nothing

  And forgiving none of what happened, forgiving nothing.

  Oh the tranquillity of the sound cannot deceive us! Even here

  We can hear the screams from their camps. After all, we ourselves

  Are almost like rumours of crimes that have slipped out

  Over the border. Every one of us

  Walking in tattered shoes through the crowds

  Bears witness to the shame that stains our nation.

  But not one of us

  Will settle here. The last word

  Has not yet been spoken.

  Thoughts on the duration of exile

  1

  Don’t knock a nail in the wall

  Throw your coat over the chair!

  Why set up for four days?

  You’re going back tomorrow!

  Leave the little tree without water!

  Why plant a tree at all?

  Before it’s as high as the doorstep

  You’ll be leaving here, happy!

  Pull your cap over your face when people come by!

  Why turn the pages of that foreign grammar?

  The news that calls you home

  Will be in a familiar tongue.

  Just as the lime peels from the timbers

  (Don’t trouble yourself with that!)

  So that barrier of violence will crumble to dust

  Erected at the border

  Against justice.

  2

  See the nail in the wall, you knocked that in!

  When will you return, do you think?

  Do you want to know what you believe in your heart?

  Day after day

  You labour for liberation

  You sit in your little room and write

  Do you want to know what you think of your work?

  See the little chestnut tree in the corner of the yard

  To which you lugged that can full of water!

  Refuge

  An oar lies over the roof. A moderate wind

  Won’t carry off the thatch.

  In the yard for the children’s swings

  There are posts knocked in.

  The mail comes twice a day

  Where letters would be welcome.

  Down the sound the ferries sail.

  The house has four doors, to flee by.

  And in your country?

  In our country, at the turn of the year

  Or when a piece of work is done, or on the anniversary of a birth

  We share our wishes for happiness and luck

  For in our country the pure of heart

  Need luck.

  He who harms no one

  In our country will end up in the gutter

  And fortunes

  Are only to be had by villainy.

  To come by a meal at midday

  Calls for the courage

  On which elsewhere empires are founded.

  No one, unless they’re prepared to look death in the face

  Can succour those in misery.

  He who speaks untruths is borne in triumph through the crowds

  Whereas he who speaks the truth

  Needs a company of bodyguards

  But will find none.

  Driven out with good reason

  I grew up as the son

  Of well-to-do folks. My parents

  Looped a collar round my neck and raised me

  In the habit of being waited upon

  And schooled me in the art of giving orders. But

  When I was grown up and looked about me

  I took no pleasure in the people of my class

  Nor in giving orders and being waited upon

  And I left my class and took up

  With the lowly people.

  So it came

  That they nurtured a traitor, schooled him

  In their arts and he

  Betrayed them to the enemy.

  Yes, I spill their secrets. I stand

  Amongst the people and declare

  How they deceive, and I foretell what is to come, for I

  Am privy to their plans.

  I translate the Latin of their corrupt clerics

  Word for word into the common language where

  It is revealed as hogwash. The scales of their justice

  I dismantle and show off

  The false weights. And their informers report

  How I sit down with the dispossessed when they

  Plan the insurrection.

  They cautioned me and took away

  What I had earned by my own labour. And when I wouldn’t mend my ways

  They came to hunt me down, but

  In my house they found

  Only writings that exposed their assaults

  Against the people. So

  They issued a warrant against me

  Denouncing me for my low disposition, that is

  The disposition of the lowly.

  Wherever I come I am branded

  In the eyes of the haves, but the have-nots

  Read the warrant and

  Offer me a bolthole. You, I hear them say

  They have driven out with

  Good reason.

  To those born after

  1

  Truly, I live in dark times!

  A trusting word is folly. A smooth brow

  A sign of insensitivity. The man who laughs

  Has simply not yet heard

  The terrifying news

  What times are these, when

  A conversation about trees is almost a crime

  Because it entails a silence about so many misdeeds!

  That man calmly crossing the street

  Is he not beyond the reach of his friends

  Who are in need?

  It is true: I still earn a living

  But believe me: that is just good fortune. Nothing

  That I do gives me the right to eat my fill.

  By chance I am spared. (If my luck runs out

  I am lost.)

  They say to me: eat and drink! Be glad that you have the means!

  But how can I eat and drink when

  It is from the starving that I wrest my food and

  My glass of water is snatched from the thirsty?

  Yet I do eat and I drink.

  I would like to be wise

  In ancient books it says what it means to be wise:

  To hold yourself above the strife of the world and to live out

  That brief compass without fear

  And to make your way without violence

  To repay evil with good

  Not to fulfil your desires, but to forget them

  Such things are accounted wise.

  But all of this I cannot do:

  Truly, I live in dark times!

  2

  I came into the cities at a time of disorder

  When hunger was ascendant.

  I came amongst mankind at a time of uprising

  And I rose up with them.

  Thus the days passed

  Granted to me on this earth.

  I ate my meals between battles

  I laid myself down to sleep with the murderers

  I made love heedlessly

  And I looked upon nature with impatience.

  Thus the days passed

  Granted to me on this earth.

  All roads led into the mire in my time

  My tongue betrayed me to the butchers

  There was little I could do. But the powerful

  Would sit more securely without me, that was my hope.

  Thus the days passed

  Granted to me on this earth.

  Our po
wers were feeble. The goal

  Lay far in the distance

  It was clearly visible even if, for me

  Hardly attainable.

  Thus the days passed

  Granted to me on this earth.

  3

  You who will emerge again from the flood

  In which we have gone under

  Think

  When you speak of our faults

  Of the dark times

  Which you have escaped.

  For we went, changing countries more often than our shoes

  Through the wars of the classes, despairing

  When there was injustice only, and no indignation.

  And yet we know:

  Hatred, even of meanness

  Makes you ugly.

  Anger, even at injustice

  Makes your voice hoarse. Oh, we

  Who wanted to prepare the land for friendliness

  Could not ourselves be friendly.

  You, however, when the time comes

  When mankind is a helper unto mankind

  Think on us

  With forbearance.

  This Part contains poems from the years 1938–1945. There is no great collection that dominates, but there are some informal and unpublished groupings. We have organized the material like this:

  Studies

  Uncollected Poems 1939–1940

  Steffin Collection

  Songs for Life of Galileo, Mother Courage, The Good Person of Szechwan, and Other Plays

  Poems for Margarete Steffin, 1938–1941

  Children’s Crusade 1939

  Uncollected Poems 1941–1942

  Chinese Poems

  Hollywood Elegies

  Uncollected Poems 1943–1945

  The context, of the growing threat and then reality of world war, is abundantly clear. In 1938 the Brechts were still living in Denmark, and they stayed there as long as they sensibly could. In April 1939 there began a series of upheavals, as the family and Brecht’s associates fled before the growing tide of fascism, first to the Swedish island of Lidingö, just northeast of Stockholm. Then, just a year later, German troops overran Denmark and began to invade Norway, and the Brecht team moved on to Finland, where they lived both in Helsinki itself and on the country estate of the writer Hella Wuolijoki to the north in Marlebäck. Throughout these years, the energies of Helene Weigel were essential: mobilizing friends, finding accommodations, improvising conditions in which Brecht could work, even maintaining some semblance of family normality. Again just a year later, in May 1941, the family received immigration visas for the United States, and in August, after a journey via Moscow and Vladivostok, they moved into a house in Santa Monica on the Southern California coast. There they stayed until 1947. Brecht made frequent trips to New York, where Ruth Berlau, who traveled with them, had a flat, but otherwise he saw very little of America outside Los Angeles.

  Studies

  One of the striking features of Brecht’s work in these years is the intensified engagement with the literary and poetic tradition. These sonnet “studies,” in the context of the so-called “Expressionism Debate” then being conducted by German writers in exile, all take a critical look at some canonical texts. Needless to say, Brecht’s readings are polemically slanted. He first gathered them into a collection in 1938, then added to it till 1940, and they were only published as a collection in 1951. We have added to Brecht’s selection another four sonnets written around the same time and in similar spirit.

  On Dante’s poems to Beatrice

  And even now above her dusty tomb

  Whom he was not allowed to have but stalked

  With shuffling steps whatever ways she walked

  The air we breathe still shivers at her name.

  For he commanded us to think of her

  And wrote such verses for her that indeed

  We cannot help but heed them and concede

  How beautiful his praises of her are.

  Oh the perniciousness that man inspired

  By praising with such mighty praises what

  He only ever looked at, never tried!

  For since he sang her he had only eyed

  What looks nice crossing the street, is never wet

  Counts as an object fit to be desired.

  On Shakespeare’s Hamlet

  Within this idle bloated body of a man

  Reason presents itself as bad illness

  For there unarmed among his ironclad clan

  Stands the parasitical thinker in undress.

  Until they bring him to hear Fortinbras

  Drumming a thousand idiots to gain

  A patch of ground so small it won’t contain

  The heap of them when they are carcasses.

  Only then does Fatty manage to see red.

  He sees that he must end his hesitation

  And do something, which is to say: shed blood.

  So we nod grimly hearing at curtain-fall

  That he was likely, had he been put on

  To have proved most royal.

  On Kant’s definition of marriage in his Metaphysics of Morals

  High time, I think, and needful to impress

  On people once again what marriage (Kant says) is:

  A contract to reciprocally possess

  And use each other’s sexual organs and capacities.

  I hear of parties to the contract who are dilatory.

  Some even—I believe this to be true—

  Have kept their sexual organs out of play:

  The law has loopholes easy to slip through.

  There’s nothing for it but to go to court

  And have the unused sexual organs seized.

  The offending partner then will perhaps be pleased

  To scrutinize the contract as he ought.

  And if he won’t comply he may be sure

  He’ll have the law-enforcer at his door.

  On Lenz’s bourgeois tragedy The Tutor

  This is Figaro on our side of the Rhine!

  The gentry take instruction from the rabble

  Who seize power there, here they become respectable.

  There it’s a comedy and here more pain, no gain.

  Instead of books, poor man, he’d rather be

  Perusing what’s in his rich pupil’s blouse

  And in this Gordian quandary he goes

  For broke on his own person, as a lackey.

  When he has grasped that as his organ rises

  So does—and out of reach—his meagre daily pelf

  Then he must choose and then indeed he chooses.

  His belly rumbles but he thinks more clearly.

  He whines, mutters, blasphemes, castrates himself.

  The poet’s voice breaks as he tells this story.

  On Schiller’s poem ‘The Bell’

  I read that fire is a friend of ours

  So long as it is mastered and confined

  But that, allowed its freedom, it devours.

  I wonder what it was he had in mind.

  What is it he urges you to bring to heel?

  This, as he says, most useful element

  And civilizing, though itself beyond the pale—

  I ask what sort of element he meant.

  This fire, this daughter of Nature, she

  Who stalks your streets with her red bonnet on

  Unleashed now, who, I wonder, can she be?

  No longer the good old maid of yesterday.

  Perhaps you dealt too kindly with this person?

  I see she has asked you, What about my pay?

  On Schiller’s poem ‘The Bond’

  O noble times: humans behaving well!

  One man owes another man something

  Who, though a tyrant, grants an interval

  And lets him travel to his sister’s wedding.

  The bondsman stays. The debtor leaves the land.

  It happens that Mother Nature, naturally

  Offers him more than on
e way out but he

  Persists, returns, redeems his bond.

  Contracts are sacred when men act like that.

  In such an age you can give guarantees.

  And if the debtor’s keen to pay his debt

  Your hands around his throat need scarcely squeeze.

  And then besides it turns out after all

  The tyrant wasn’t so tyrannical!

  On Goethe’s poem ‘The God and the Bayadere’

  O cruel surmise of Siva, our Great God

  That whores in pleasure houses when they squeal

  In the ecstasy they are required to feel

  Don’t mean it. Oh that would be too bad!

  How beautifully does he who knows the story’s heart

  Sing of the sole girl he felt sorry for

  Who said she’d die for him and not ask more

  Than the price agreed between them at the start.

  Harshly he tested did she also love him.

  The text expressly says he caused her pain . . .

  Six he had tried already, she alone

  The seventh, shed real tears when she lost him.

  But how he then rewarded her! The envy

  Of all, he raised her up to him at the finale.

 

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