Love Poems

Erich Fried
Translated by Stuart Hood

ONEWORLD CLASSICS

oneworld classics ltd London House 243-253 Lower Mortlake Road Richmond Surrey TW9 2LL United Kingdom www.oneworldclassics.com Love Poems rst published in Great Britain by John Calder (Publishers) Ltd in 1991 This new, revised edition rst published by Oneworld Classics Ltd in 2011 A selection from two volumes entitled Liebesgedichte and Es ist was es ist originally published in German by Verlag Klaus Wagenbach Erich Fried Estate, 1991, 1999, 2011 Verlag Klaus Wagenbach, 1979 and 1983 Translation Stuart Hood, 1991, 2011 Cover image Corbis Images Printed in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe isbn: 978-1-84749-196-1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without the express prior consent of the publisher.

Contents
I n tro du c tion Pa rt i 
Was es ist What It Is Fragen und Antworten Questions and Answers Eine Kleinigkeit A Trie Schmutzkonkurrenz am Morgen Morning Mudslinging Nach dem Erwachen On Waking Up Nur nicht Better Not Aber But Zum Beispiel For Example In einem anderen Land In Another Land Erwartung Expectation Einer ohne Schwefelhlzer A Man without Matches Nachtgedicht Night Poem Ein Fufall A Case of Homage to a Foot Nachtlied Night Song Was? What? Kein Stillleben Not a Still Life xi 3 4 5 6 7 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

Love Poems
Erotik Erotic Scham Shame Das richtige Wort The Right Word Verantwortungslos Irresponsible Dich You Zwischenfall Something Odd Ungeplant Unplanned Altersunterschied Difference in Age Was war das? What Was That? Erleichterung Relief Erschwerung Complication Trennung Separation Eine Art Liebesgedicht A Sort of Love Poem Erwgung Reection Nhe Nearness Wintergarten Winter Garden Nachhall Echo Was weh tut What Hurts Antwort auf einen Brief  Answer to a Letter Achtundzwanzig Fragen Twenty-Eight Questions An Dich denken Thinking of You Freiraum 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84

contents
Breathing Space Luftpostbrief  Airmail Letter Kein Brief nach Spanien Not a Letter to Spain In der Zeit bis zum 4. Juli 1978 Leading up to the 4th of July 1978 Rckfahrt nach Bremen On the Way Back to Bremen Der Weg zu Dir The Road to You Auf der Fahrt fort von dir On the Journey away from You Triptychon Triptych Vielleicht Perhaps In der Ferne In the Distance Ich trume I Dream Meine Wahl My Choice Notwendige Fragen Necessary Questions Herbst Autumn Eifriger Trost Eager Comfort Dich You Ungewiss Uncertain Die Vorwrfe Reproaches Zuucht Refuge Vorbungen fr ein Wunder Warming up for a Miracle Strauch mit herzfrmigen Blttern Bush with Heart-Shaped Leaves In Gedanken In Thought 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129

Love Poems
Ich I Trnencouvade Couvade for Tears Diese Leere This Void Die guten Grtner The Good Gardeners Tagtraum Daydream Ohne dich Without You Dann Then Warum Why Spter Gedanke Late Thought Traum Dream Das Schwere Difficult Wartenacht Night of Waiting Das Herz in Wirklichkeit The Heart in Reality 130 131 132 133 134 135 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172

Pa rt II
Gegengewicht Counterpoise In dieser Zeit In This Time Die Liebe und wir Love and Us Was ist Leben? What Is Life? Ein linkes Liebesgedicht? A Left-Wing Love Poem? Durcheinander Confusion Liebe bekennen

contents
To Make Love Known Reden Speeches Grenze der Verzweiung Edge of Despair Hlderlin an Susette Gontard Hlderlin to Susette Gontard Du You Karl Marx 1983 Karl Marx 1983 Parteinahme Taking Sides Kinder und Linke Children and the Left Regelbesttigungen Proving the Rule Lebensaufgabe A Lifes Task Die Feinde The Enemies Warnung vor Zugestndnissen Warning about Concessions Gesprch mit einem berlebenden Conversation with a Survivor Dankesschuld Debt of Gratitude Die Lezten werden die Ersten sein The Last Shall Be First Shne Atonement Dialog in hundert Jahren mit Funote Dialogue a Century from Now with Footnote Das rgernis The Offence Deutsche Worte vom Meer German Words about the Sea Realittsprinzip Reality Principle Glcksspiel Game of Chance 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 182 183 184 185 186 187 190 191 192 193 194 195 196 197 198 199 200 201 202 203 204 205 206 207 208 209 210 211 212 213 214 215 216 217

Love Poems

Pa rt III
Schwache Stunde Time of Weakness Lob der Verzweiung Praise of Despair Versuch sich anzupassen Attempt to Conform Sterbensworte Don Quixotes Don Quixotes Last Words Als kein Ausweg zu sehen war When No Solution Was in Sight Wo immer gelscht wird Wherever Something Is Quenched Die Stille Silence Bereitsein war alles Readiness Was All Verhalten Stance Ausgleichende Gerechtigkeit Even-Handed Justice Diagnose Diagnosis Die Bulldozer The Bulldozers Eine Stunde An Hour Entenende The End of the Ducks a ira? a ira? Zukunft? Future? Es gab Menschen There Were People Was der Wald sah What the Wood Saw Fabeln Fables Homeros Eros Homeros Eros

219 220 221 222 223 224 225 226 227 228 229 230 231 234 235 236 237 238 239 240 241 242 243 244 245 246 247 250 251 252 253 254 255 256 257 260 261 264 265 266 267

contents
Bedingung Conditional Der einzige Ausweg The Only Way Out Heilig-Nchtern Soberly-Holy Ungewi Uncertain Macht der Dichtung The Power of Poetry Gedichte lesen Reading Poems Die Einschrnkung The Reservation Nacht in London Night in London Es dmmert It Grows Dark Eigene Beobachtung Personal Observations Der Vorwurf  The Reproach Ei ei Aye Aye Abschied Farewell Altersschwche? Weakness of Old Age? Zuspruch Encouragement Aber vielleicht But Maybe Alter Age Zu guter Letzt At the Very End Vielleicht Perhaps Grabschrift Epitaph 268 269 270 271 272 273 274 275 276 277 278 279 280 281 282 283 284 285 286 287 288 289 290 291 294 295 296 297 298 299 300 301 302 303 304 305 306 307 308 309

In d ex o f First Line s 310

Introduction

On repatriation leave in the autumn of 1944 I came across a collection of German poems by writers in exile. Among largely unfamiliar names there was that of Erich Fried who had contributed two poems. One was called Gottes Mhlen mahlen am Lethe (Gods Mills Grind on Lethe). In nightmarish and prophetic terms, soon to be terribly conrmed in photographs of the great charnel pits of Belsen and the other camps, it described the trail of death the war and tyranny were spreading over Europe. Struck by the power of Frieds images, I translated the poem which began: A corpse-fed river full in spate Flows in my dreams throughout the night. It was published so to speak by being put up on the walls of the Left Book Club rooms in Edinburgh. Erich Fried and I were not to meet until 1946. It was in London, in Bush House, where we were both employed in the BBCs German Service. In the depressing subterranean canteen where the voices booming over the Tannoy were reputed to have inspired Orwells Big Brother I got to know this young man with his uneasy gait, his slightly pudgy sensitive hands, his ne head with its mass of dark hair, his extraordinary voice; learnt to know his quixotic, indomitable spirit, his courage, mischievous humour and deep seriousness. We discussed poetry, in which we shared certain tastes, and politics, in which we shared the experience of being disillusioned Communists who were still determined not to abandon the humanist and utopian aims of socialism. It was a friendship that was to last for forty years until his death. xi

Love Poems To be close to Erich which was not always easy for those nearest to him was to see functioning a human being of apparently inexhaustible energies and inventiveness. His creative powers rested on his ability to reach down into the deepest recesses of his psyche, to confront what he discovered there and to endure the most profound and painful emotions. But he also had a capacity to recognize the absurd sides of our human natures, the quirks of behaviour in himself and others. One of his own eccentricities was his love of rummaging in skips to rescue what was still usable and for collecting junk on one pretext or another: an activity which he correctly defended as a protest against consumerism and as what now would be called a green attitude to our sum of natural resources. It also had roots in the poverty he had experienced as a young exile who stole lead piping to raise money to get other refugees to safety. Many of his objets trouvs decorated his study where there was gathered along with a barely controlled confusion of books, les, manuscripts an extraordinary collection of things beautiful, strange and curious: they included (as one of his poems testies) his mothers ashes. His typewriter, which functioned by means of an ingenious arrangement of weights and counterbalances, bore witness to his technical inventiveness, which he applied in the painstaking repair of domestic appliances and had earlier used in Vienna to invent electrical patents. The room, in short, was a reection of the diversity of his talents, of the quirkiness and originality of his mind. In the post-war years, although he decided against living in either Germany or his native Austria, his reputation grew there as a poet, writer and translator. His oeuvre included radio plays, the libretto for an opera (the music by Alexander Goehr), a remarkable and disturbing novel, short prose pieces, works of criticism. To these must be added translations notably of T.S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, E.E. Cummings and of Shakespeare, the latter in a version that, in its accuracy and vigour, in its actability, challenged the famous Schlegel-Tieck edition. (To his great satisfaction he completed King Lear before his death.) But above all xii

introduction there were the poems. He once said in typically self-mocking way that he produced poems in the same way as rabbits have babies. The writing of poetry was, he believed, an activity which one had to pursue like any other craft, experimenting, perfecting skills, practising with language. At the height of his creative powers there can hardly have been a day that passed without his writing not one but several poems. Certain days or nights produced whole sequences. Some of his critics have seen in this facility a weakness and undoubtedly there were poems in his prodigious output which were ve-nger exercises, technical experiments, the polishing of writing skills; others were ephemeral because of their topicality. But the critics were also making a political point; he reacted too easily, they argued, to events of the day, to political happenings in Germany, the Middle East or Vietnam. His poems, they objected, were the reex reactions of a tender conscience. Poetry should be more aloof from politics. This was to misunderstand the nature of Frieds political commitment. Never narrowly dened in terms of party loyalty, it expressed his resolution to ght tyranny, the abuse of power, doctrinaire stances, hypocrisy, wherever they appeared. His critics similarly misunderstood his commitment to use in that ght the weapons of language, of wit, of irony and invective; all his skills as a writer. He believed that he had to follow a categorical imperative: to be both politically engaged and poetically creative. Indeed he was unable to see how it is possible to unravel emotional commitments from political ones or to split these off in turn from the business of writing. On the political level his success was demonstrated by the way in which lines and formulations from his poetry were taken up by the German student movement and, more generally, by the extraordinary reach of his published works. The Liebesgedichte, from which many of the poems in this volume come, was rst published in 1979. When the 1987 edition appeared the print run was from 166 to 173,000. Even when they were ephemeral his poems were the utterances of a xiii

Love Poems voice which in the Sixties and later was listened to with respect by audiences in Germany. One important reason for his success was that he spoke, as few others were able to speak, to that generation whose parents had lived as adults through the Thirties and the war who had therefore been in one way or another involved in the life and politics of the Third Reich. Fried was a member of that same generation as their parents, an anti-Fascist, a man of the Left, a Jew who had lost many of his family at the hands of the Nazis. What set him apart and gave his words a particular resonance was that he was prepared to speak about politics of the past and the present with indignation but also with a humanity which saw even men and women perverted by evil to be themselves the victims of tyranny. He understood the questionings and dissatisfactions of the post-war generations, their need to look at the past and to discuss it without the use of mere slogans. He also understood the impatience and frustrations which led to terrorism, which he condemned just as he condemned the inhumanity and repressive excesses of the German state apparatus. But he was also not afraid to express deep human emotions, to describe the difficulties and rewards of love relationships into which he entered with openness and a commitment which the younger generation could recognize and which was undiminished by age. His voice fell silent before the events of 1989 and the breaking of the Wall. In the political events that followed it was a voice that was deeply missed. What was remarkable about him was his political honesty and his courage to confront both those who were his opponents on the Right and those on the Left to whom he extended an often critical solidarity. His refusal to be silenced brought him into the courts in Germany, where he was acquitted, and into public confrontations in which his tenacity and power of argument wrung apologies from members of the German Establishment. His condemnation of Zionism and of the policies of the State of Israel together with his championing of the Palestinian cause brought down on him xiv

introduction the threats and crude abuse of Zionists. In Germany politicians of the Right called for his works to be burnt. On the Left his friends at times found him excessively tolerant of political enemies; but it was his rm conviction that one may indeed must attack ones opponents ideas relentlessly, but that the opponent as a human being deserves to be treated with respect. It was an attitude which extended to ex-Nazis and neo-Nazis. It was a political tactic which some found rested too much on the idea of individual salvation, on the conviction that all human beings, can one but nd the way to address them, are open to reason. This remarkable man bore the stamp of a rich and intricate cultural heritage. Growing up in Vienna between the wars, he was educated in a humanist classical tradition that went back to the Enlightenment. His knowledge of German literature and thought was extensive and deep. It naturally included the writings of Marx. Although never a practising Jew he was conscious of belonging to the same Central European cultural tradition as produced many of the great thinkers and artists of the twentieth century. He also knew and delighted in the stories from the shtetls of Eastern Europe, about the doings, sayings and paradoxes of the wonder rabbis, which were one legacy of his Jewish origins. He was profoundly inuenced by psychoanalytic theory, although he typically could not easily be classied in terms of any particular school. He was marked by the political events in Austria from the suppression of the workers movements and the rise of Austro-Fascism to the Anschluss. In exile in London, he rejected Stalinism as he rejected Zionism. In his political thinking he was deeply inuenced by the libertarian teachings of Marcuse and the utopianism of Ernst Bloch just as in his approach to human psychology he owed much to Ronald Laing and Margaret Miller. These were some of the intellectual inuences that went to shape him. But what obsessed him was an interest in language, and in particular the German language for great as was his mastery of and knowledge of English (witness his translations), English always remained in a real sense a foreign language which he held xv

Love Poems

Was es is t
Es ist Unsinn sagt die Vernunft Es ist was es ist sagt die Liebe Es ist Unglck sagt die Berechnung Es ist nichts als Schmerz sagt die Angst Es ist aussichtslos sagt die Einsicht10 Es ist was es ist sagt die Liebe Es ist lcherlich sagt der Stolz Es ist leichtsinnig sagt die Vorsicht Es ist unmglich sagt die Erfahrung Es ist was es ist sagt die Liebe20

W h at I t I s
It is madness says reason It is what it is says love It is unhappiness says caution It is nothing but pain says fear It has no future says insight10 It is what it is says love It is ridiculous says pride It is foolish says caution It is impossible says experience It is what it is says love20

F rag en u n d A n t wo rt e n
Wo sie wohnt? Im Haus neben der Verzweiung Mit wem sie verwandt ist? Mit dem Tod und der Angst Wohin sie gehen wird wenn sie geht? Niemand wei das Von wo sie gekommen ist? Von ganz nahe oder ganz weit Wie lange sie bleiben wird?10 Wenn du Glck hast solange du lebst Was sie von dir verlangt? Nichts oder alles Was soll das heien? Dass das ein und dasselbe ist Was gibt sie dir oder auch mir dafr? Genau soviel wie sie nimmt Sie behlt nichts zurck20 Hlt sie dich oder mich gefangen oder gibt sie uns frei? Es kann uns geschehen dass sie uns die Freiheit schenkt

Q u e s t io n s a n d A n sw ers
Where does it live? In the house next to despair Who are its kin? Death and fear Where will it go when it does go? No one knows Where does it come from? From very near or very far How long will it stay?10 If youre lucky as long as you live What does it ask for you? Nothing or everything What does that mean? That its one and the same What does it give you or me in return? Exactly what it takes It keeps back nothing20 Does it keep you or me prisoner or does it set us free? It can happen to us that it gives us freedom

Frei sein von ihr ist das gut oder schlecht? Es ist das rgste was uns zustoen kann Was ist sie eigentlich30 und wie kann man sie denieren? Es heit dass Gott gesagt hat dass er sie ist

To be free of it is that good or bad? It is the worst that can befall us What is it really30 and how can one dene it? They say that God said he is it

E in e K l ein ig k eit
fr Catherine

Ich wei nicht was Liebe ist aber vielleicht ist es etwas wie das: Wenn sie nach Hause kommt aus dem Ausland und stolz zu mir sagt: Ich habe eine Wasserratte gesehen und ich erinnere mich an diese Worte wenn ich aufwache in der Nacht und am nchsten Tag bei der Arbeit10 und ich sehne mich danach sie dieselben Worte noch einmal sagen zu hren und auch danach dass sie nochmals genau so aussehen soll wie sie aussah als sie sagte Ich denke, das ist vielleicht Liebe oder doch etwas hinreichend hnliches

10

A t r if l e
for Catherine

I dont know what love is but perhaps it is something like this: When she come home from abroad and tells me proudly: I saw a water rat and I remember these words when I wake up in the night and next day at my work10 and I long to hear her say the same words once more and for her to look exactly the same as she looked when she said them I think that is maybe love or something rather like it

11

S c hmu t z ko n k u r r en z a m M o r g e n
fr Catherine

Als ich Liebe vorschlug lehntest du ab und erklrtest mir: Ich habe eben einen liebenswrdigen Mann kennengelernt im Traum Er war blind und er war ein Deutscher Ist das nicht komisch?10 Ich wnschte dir schne Trume und ging hinunter an meinem Schreibtisch aber so eiferschtig wie sonst kaum je

12

M or n in g M u d s l in g in g
for Catherine

When I proposed love You declined And explained to me: I just met a nice man in a dream He was blind And he was a German Isnt that funny?10 I wished you sweet dreams And went down To my desk But jealous I was hardly ever before

13

N ac h d em E rwac h en
Catherine erinnert sich an etwas das sie an etwas erinnert doch zuerst weder was noch woran Dann wei sie es war ein Geruch und dann ein Geruch der sie10 an Weihnachten erinnert aber kein Tannen- und Kerzengeruch und ganz gewi auch kein Geruch nach Backwerk Sondern was? Sondern Seifengeruch Der Geruch einer Flssigkeit die sie und ihr Bruder bekamen zu Weihnachten20 fr ganz groe Seifenblasen Nun ist die Erinnerung wieder da ganz gro und ganz rund und spiegelt ihr Kindergesicht und schillert und dann zerplatzt sie

14

O n Wa k in g Up
Catherine remembers something that reminds her of something but at rst not what or what of Then she knows it was a smell and then a smell that10 reminds her of Christmas but not the smell of pine and candles and certainly not of baking But what? But the smell of a soap The smell of a liquid she and her brother got for Christmas20 for great big soap bubbles Now the memory is back very big and very round and mirrors her childs face and is full of colours and then it bursts

15