The speakers of this poem are Jewish prisoners. They describe drinking "black milk," a symbol for the un-nourishing life of a concentration camps. They drink this toxic brew all day long.
They also dig mass graves under the orders of one of the Nazi guards. The guard lives in a house and thinks about classic German literature a lot.
Black milk of dawn we drink you at night we drink you at noon we drink you evenings we drink you and drink a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete your ashen hair Shulamit he plays with the snakes.
Black milk of dawn we drink you at night we drink you at noon death is a master from Deutschland we drink you evenings and mornings we drink and drink death is a master from Deutschland his eye is blue he strikes you with lead bullets his aim is true a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete he sets his dogs on us he gifts us a grave in the air he plays with the snakes and dreams death is a master from Deutschland.
Er ruft stecht tiefer ins Erdreich ihr einen ihr andern singet und spielt er greift nach dem Eisen im Gurt er schwingts seine Augen sind blau stecht tiefer die Spaten ihr einen ihr andern spielt weiter zum Tanz auf. Used with the permission of the translator. Autumn eats its leaf out of my hand: we are friends. We shell time from the nuts and teach it to walk: time returns to the shell. In the mirror is Sunday, in the dream we sleep, the mouth speaks true.
We stand and embrace at the window, they watch us from the street: it is time, for this to be known! Im Spiegel ist Sonntag, im Traum wird geschlafen, der Mund redet wahr. Mein Aug steigt hinab zum Geschlecht der Geliebten: wir sehen uns an, wir sagen uns Dunkles,. Only there did you wholly enter the name that is yours, did you step sure-footed toward yourself, did the hammers swing free in the belfry of your silence, the overheard reach you, the dead put its arm around you too, and all three of you walked through the evening.
Not that there's anything wrong with these fine films. Anything that keeps us from forgetting the tragedy suffered by over six million Jews should be counted as a good thing. But the dwindling numbers of living Holocaust survivors have complained that the portrayal of concentration camps in popular culture does not do justice to how horrible they truly were. Because poetry is such a direct and intimate form, it can convey emotional tones that films or prose histories cannot.
Even great works like Elie Wiesel's Night must rely on narrative; that is, they tell a story. It uses blunt, simple language and a form borrowed from classical music to bring us into the world of Jewish suffering and Nazi sadism. But let's back up a second and consider the very idea of writing a poem about the Holocaust.
This is obviously a difficult, not to mention sensitive, subject. What's more, poetry has its origins in song, and it seems very inappropriate indeed to sing about death camps. A German-Jewish philosopher named Theodor Adorno even went so far as to say that writing poetry in the wake of Auschwitz and the other camps was barbaric.
He thought that writing poetry about the Holocaust would be like saying, "We can go back to our old art forms now. Things haven't changed that much. Celan lived in a concentration camp for eighteen months. He had to deal with the question of the appropriateness of poetry as well as the appropriateness, for him, of using the German language.
He discussed the problem after accepting an important literary award: "Only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all losses: language.
Yes, language. In spite of everything, it remained secure against loss. Located geographically between eastern and western Europe and overlapped by both regions, the city was culturally influenced by both spheres.
Apart from its Romanian population, it was home to many minorities. Before the Second World War these included about 50, Jews, representing roughly a third of the entire population—dating to the influx of significant numbers of Jews following the annexation of Bukovina to the Hapsburg Empire in Typically, that Jewish middle class sought to ensure German language and cultural education, frequently in tandem with Yiddish or Hebrew—or both.
Celan, for example, had at least some elementary Hebrew schooling and exposure to basic synagogue experience in his youth. He escaped the German deportation of Jews in , but his parents were sent to Transnistria, where they were murdered, and he spent about eighteen months in a forced labor camp. He returned to Czernowitz in , just before the Soviet annexation of the northern part of Bukovina. In he went to Bucharest, where—for the poetry he would publish in German—he took the German name Antschel from an anagram of his Romanian surname.
Some accounts maintain that his birth name was Antschel. At that time, and during a two-year sojourn in Vienna starting in , he began to publish his verse. In he settled in Paris, where he taught German, continued his poetic pursuits, and published important translations that approached an art form in themselves. He is said to have considered making aliya after his visit to Israel, but he returned to Paris, where, in —just shy of his fiftieth birthday—he drowned himself in the Seine.
A retrospective 21st-century study and collection of his correspondence has suggested that his was a complex and sensitive artistic personality, for whom the most definitive agonies and the most destructive inner convulsions might have occurred after the war and in the aftermath of the Holocaust.
0コメント