by Tom Kuhn
(QUOTATION FROM A POLITICAL SPEECH)
An early dawn. I heard the whistling of the jet planes
So very costly, but we have to do this . . .
If we don’t want to speak of the earth
Then we say: the heavens aren’t empty.
Beyond the ocean shrouded in smoke
The apocalypse. The passer-by falls to his knees.
If we won’t speak simply of the earth
The kneeling man says: the heavens aren’t empty.
Here a crowd of boys makes the pigeons scatter.
A girl ties up a blue shawl.
If we don’t want to speak directly of the earth
Then we say: the heavens aren’t empty.
4
From villages, from small towns, they come in wagons
To build the foundry, to conjure the city
To shovel up a new Eldorado from the dirt.
A troop of pioneers, a motley crew of hoodlums
Crowding into barns, barracks and hotels
Tramping whistling down the filthy street:
A great migration, stubborn ambition
Around their necks some tinsel with the Częstochowa cross.
Three storeys of cursing, a pillow
A pig’s bladder of schnapps and ambitions to go whoring.
A soul of distrust, oafish peasants
Half awake and half already drunken
Inarticulate, singing their folksongs
Sniffed out from the dark of the Dark Ages
A sauntering mob, inhuman Poland.
Howling with boredom of a December night . . .
Let down on a string in rubbish baskets
Lads clamber like cats over the walls
Of the women’s hostels. The secular convents
Creak with rutting, and lazy whores rid themselves
Of the litter—quiet flows the Vistula.
The great immigration, building an industry
Foreign to Poland, but known throughout history
Following the doctrine of big words
Living from one day to the next, in spite of all preachers.
Of coal dust and in slow torment
The working class is smelted.
Waste. Just temporary raw material.
5
And there’s this too. A brown column
Of smoke rising from the burning mine.
The shaft is isolated. Of the torment below
We say not a word to anyone. The black shaft is a coffin.
The saboteur is flesh and blood
One hundred families weep, two hundred families
They write about it in the newspapers, or they don’t.
Only shreds of smoke hang in the air.
6
At the railway station
Miss Jadzia at the buffet.
So pretty when she yawns.
So pretty when she fills your glass . . .
Beware. It’s your enemy offers you schnapps!
You’ll be poisoned here for sure.
Miss Jadzia will pull off your boots
Beware. It’s your enemy offers you schnapps!
Don’t go, my son, to Nowa Huta.
Or you’ll be poisoned on the way.
Let the snake poster be your warning
And the national cod in your belly.
Beware. It’s your enemy offers you schnapps!
7
I won’t believe, my dear, that the lion is a lamb.
I won’t believe, my dear, the lamb is a lion.
I won’t believe, my dear, in magic spells.
I won’t believe in keeping reason in a glass case
But I do believe the table has four legs.
But I do believe the fifth is cramp.
And when the cramps take over, my dear
We die a slow death of heart cramps.
8
When the two-penn’orth of claptrap
Drowns out the great didactic goal.
When the vultures of abstraction eat out our brains
When the students are shut into textbooks with no windows
When language is reduced to thirty magic spells
When the lamp of imagination gutters out
When the good people from the moon
Deny us the right to have taste
Then blinkered bigotry threatens us.
9
A corpse was fished from the Vistula
A note in his pocket.
“My sleeve is right.
My button is not right.
My collar is not right.
But the lapel is right.”
They buried him under a willow tree.
10
A street of freshly plastered block-houses
Lime dust in the air, a cloud sailing in the sky
The rollers flattening the road.
The transplanted chestnuts rustling, green. It’s evening.
Under the chestnuts children run around.
Dragging half dismantled scaffolds as fuel to their kitchens.
On the steps there’s a din of girls’ names, diminutive, melodious
Fifteen-year-old whores climb over the boards to the cellar
A giggling of lime, of lime their smell
Round the block in the darkness a radio calls a summons to the dance
Night comes, hooligans play at being hooligans.
How hard it is, in youth, to sleep amongst the rustling of the chestnuts . . .
Dissonances, dissolve into darkness
I wanted to take pleasure in the new!
I wanted to speak of young streets, not of this one!
Am I lacking the gift of sight, or the gift of convenient blindness?
A short note is all I have. Oh, you songs of a new sorrow!
11
The speculators dragged her to a new hell
In an isolated villa at the edge of town—she fled.
She wandered through the town, drunk
And slept on concrete till the morning.
She was thrown out of art school
For lack of socialist morals.
She took poison—she was saved.
She took poison again—and they buried her.
Everything here is old. Old
Too the dog-catchers of socialist morality.
12
That dreamer Fourier charmingly promised
That the seas would be filled with lemonade.
And are they not?
They drink sea water
And cry out
Lemonade!
Quietly they drag themselves home
To vomit!
To vomit!
13
They came running and shouting:
A Communist will never die.
It had never been that a man should not die.
Only the memory remains.
The more the man is worth
The greater the pain at his loss.
They came running and shouting:
In Socialism
Your cut finger cannot hurt.
They hurt their fingers.
They felt.
And they doubted.
14
They threatened the apparatchiks.
They instructed the experts.
Shamed the experts.
Enlightened the experts.
They called literature to their aid
A five-year-old urchin
In need of education
And needed to educate.
—Is the expert an enemy?
The expert isn’t your enemy
The expert must be instructed.
The expert has to be enlightened.
The expert must be shamed.
The expert has to be persuaded.
We have to educate.
They have made us into merciful Samaritans.
I heard a clever lecture once:
“Without properly allocated
Economic incen
tives
There will be no technological progress.”
The words of a Marxist.
Connoisseur of reality
Let’s put an end to utopia!
We don’t need novels about apparatchiks
But about the worries of the inventors
About the troubles that beset us all.
This is my naked poem
Before it is entwined
In the troubles and colours and smells of this earth.
15
There are people exhausted, people from Nowa Huta
Who have never been to the theatre
There are Polish apples, out of the reach of Polish children.
There are children scorned by criminal doctors
There are boys forced to lie
There are girls forced to lie
There are old wives, chased from their homes by their menfolk
There are those overworked, who die of heart attacks
There are people defamed and spat upon
There are muggings by vagrants
Without legal status
There are people waiting for papers
People waiting for justice
People waiting.
Over here, you exhausted and lost ones!
Give us the keys that fit the doors
Give us a room with windows
Give us a wall without damp
Give us your hate of papers
Give us times that are fit for human beings
A way home with no dangers
Away with the distinction between word and deed.
We demand for this earth
Which we didn’t win at the throw of a dice
For which a million fell in battles
The bright truth, the seedcorn of freedom
The fire of reason
The fire of reason
We demand it daily
We demand it through the Party.
Chronicle
Because he fought, the soldier is killed in the forest
Because he took the land, the peasant is killed at home.
Because he stayed alive, the Jew is killed by the wayside.
In the bitter chronicle of the current state of affairs
The verdict of one hundred fools hangs over the future.
Under its moss the forest hid the partisans
It redoubles the praise of the fallen with scorn
Because he fought, the soldier is killed in the forest.
The mill in Resovka turns its sails in the fire
Like a helpless baby
Because he took the land, the peasant is killed at home
Because he stayed alive, the Jew is killed by the wayside
The funeral cortege sets the petty bourgeois laughing
The little scamp playing at civil war—
The howling of the wolf lives on longer than the beast.
The verdict of one hundred fools hangs over the future.
But it vibrates like the air when you shoot
Which returns into itself, healed again by air
The wounded crystal redoubles the praise of those
Who in the bitter chronicle of the current state of affairs
Died a senseless death.
For Paul Éluard
Night comes, black night with a dollar-face
Comrade Éluard, friend in hope:
In the mines of the West the miners are striking tonight
Lighting up hope with their lamps
In the American night, it is an hour of putting to the test.
The hour of painful and joyful comparison
Comrade Éluard, friend in enthusiasm
In my words coal glitters and metal from Silesia
The miners exceed the projections
My Party is already drawing up the plans for tomorrow.
Friend of children, of the fruits
Of the mild clime
There is a land that changes the inside of the fruits
There is a land that changes human beings
A land that changes the weather.
Friend of merriment, let the garden spread out
Where there is prosperity on earth, where bread is free
What was once Europe’s myth and Asia’s dream
Is now determined by plan and the conscious mind
What man once gave to his god
Is now in the power of men.
Postcard from a socialist city
Impatient in the morning
Beautiful but not satisfied
The locomotive hissed
A girl knelt down beside.
Heathen profile of our sister—
Yet whoever appeared before her, fleeting
Still saw a believer
By the locomotive kneeling.
Her lips trembled
As she gave brass rod and piston
Early in the morning, on her knees
Their first anointing.
Murder
For a word: comradeship
For a field edge
Not once ploughed in a thousand years
For Lenin’s exact science:
As he went to tear out the roots
Gripped fast in the earth by a thousand claws
Killed on the tractor
As you others were killed in tanks
He fell with you.
Because, beyond the peaks of the Urals
The first agricultural workers’ city is rising up
Because the electricity works on the Volga
Is becoming the engine of the cereal factories
Fallen upon from behind
Beaten with a threshing flail
Shot with a holy bullet
By the kulak mob.
You from Lenino
You from Warsaw
Number him amongst your own
He fell with you.
Those who died for us on Warsaw’s walls . . .
Those who died for us on Warsaw’s walls
Those who died on the Westerplatte
Did not uselessly give up their lives.
Those who fell in the snows of Narvik
Who fell in the sands of Tobruk
They did not fall in vain.
Those who bellowed “Merde” in Bir Hakeim
Those who sank the cruisers in Toulon
Were like us other Poles.
Those who fell in Guadarrama
Who took pride of place in the dying
They were like us other Poles.
Those who defended the walls of Odessa
Who defended Sevastopol
Were defending themselves and us.
Where the Volga approaches the Don
Where the ruins of Stalingrad gleam
There our house was rescued.
Dialectical ode
They’re laughed out, those who try
To read fortunes in a palm.
Work will plough up
The lines of their hands.
Their children will be amazed at the transformation
And at the harmony that returns (in giant leaps).
It is not the saints who fashion the pots, nor paradise either
But those for whose future we step up to fight.
From memory they will
Reassemble the rhymes of the heart
Torn to pieces in the struggle.
I, so much changed, have not forgotten
A single page of the faded contents
And I know that beauty, when it
Becomes deed
Can hold within the pain of experience.
First was joy . . .
First was joy, she would not let me rest
Then a troubled heart was my sad plight
When these two had done their worst and best
Then I slept. But there was no respite:
May morning always brought November night.
She went into the hills
She went into the hills
In her hand a rose.
From afar she saw the world
In her hand a rose.
She cast herself into the depths
In her hand a rose.
And yesterday to her grave she went
In her hand a rose.
How it was
My care was your care
Your care was mine
If you could not share a joy
Then I too had none.
And I always thought . . .
And I always thought the very simplest words
Would be enough. If I say what is
Every heart will surely be lacerated.
That you will go under if you don’t fight back
Surely you must see that?
When in my hospital ward . . .
When in my hospital ward at the Charité
I awoke towards morning
And heard a blackbird, I saw it all
More clearly. For some time already
I had put aside fear of death, since I
Can nothing lack, if
I myself am lacking. Now
I was able to take pleasure also
In the song of every blackbird after me.
NOTES
For every poem, these notes provide the original German title; the volume and page reference to the standard German edition (the Grosse kommentierte Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe, abbreviated as BFA) on which our versions are, for the most part, based; the date or approximate date of composition; the date of first publication (indicated by P) insofar as we have been able to ascertain it—for poems first published after Brecht’s death we have not always gone beyond the principal Suhrkamp Verlag publications; and the initials or name of the translator.