To Europa
Johannes R. Becher
Translated by Stefan Schöberlein
I
Those reveled once in choirs of orphic lullaby,
They—: pilgrims through Southern nights wry.
(…and grape-gardens swelled up into ear-pendants hung high…)
But sun struck them—: Axe-leap! Axe-leap!
Young poets rush forward now, thronging nigh,
Up toward the state. Like hissing thunder, you sweep
Houses apart. Cube-stones. Hymnically legs fly.
The windows burning eve-lake of eye.
And slither yourself ecstatic hypotenuses—
Asphalts clang. Asphalts, too, steam up.
They paint us with shreds of cloudy greases.
A broom-horn grows from the nose a shrub.
Azures flake glistening onto you manuscripts.
A holy storm trills aroar from gasifiers.
Moon you, broaden your silver hedge:
The typhoon-night’s shimmering oasis.
Cannonries loosen pipe-organs from their lips
Landscape of scent-summer hangs itself from feet’s ledge.
…limber-chests bow to feed-cribs.
Flame-labyrinth’s circles around us mystic frocks stretch.
Yes—: torn in two swing-planks,
Ulcer on porous skin you moon.
The floorings soft soft cushions shrank,
Hacked apart by ghastly rain soon.
That dustily onto charred heavens blank,
Dull bursts the batteries’ tune.
Dead flags from mouths wave,
Banked up as mountains by foot’s waist.
Your bark, it slithers toward its swallower, the night.
Consumes the late street not (dishwater) gas-light?
…and woods remain no longer on mountain ridges.
Facing July they wheel with rubble to the ground.
Wire-clad wire-clad lands engirdle.
Grenade blares out, a pattering hound.
There we stood up, a swerving round of coats,
Singing, this spot we wove around us wide,
(…in us may hate and hate to love transform…)
We grenadiers hymnically toward black night.
Around these temples now twined theaters.
Silver-sweated forehead lost in steep turret.
In hair’s leaves the crooked murderers,
They softly sleep. Acropolis, azure and current!
Europa you! Your song rolls in the winds!
Still in pours itself the sun’s gush.
In the skies enormous glacier’s bandage spins,
Small villages’ slide and downward rush.
Everywhere the shocks flitter catacombs.
Attrition-war’s thunder bacchanal—
Europa you—: crowned your head with bombs
There cavalcades wind from mouth’s portal.
Europa you! Field hospitals erect
Themselves into spirals high through yellow skies.
O young poets, how elastically like springs,
That you call your countries to rise!!
With loud hurrahs Paris in Berlin’s embrace be bound,
London too will unfold a star of blonde around her,
Rome’s marble wilderness may hardly ripple with muted sounds,
Stockholm clangs shrill, a small quint in the psalter.
Vienna though stretches herself a colorful rug on verdant grounds,
They swell up, impossible to falter.
Europa’s peoples want to flow, flow,
Toward great cities. Passionate administrators.
Century! Child you of appalled zones.
Rise up! Rise up! Olympus, Olympuses mounting thrones!!!
Move radiantly! Revolutions
Assemble in the twirl of your frocks.
Newspapers found! (…most radical ones…) Imperatives
Surround the square. Flanking candelabras.
Announce them—: the thundering parade
Of newest poets. Splendid union bound!
Fantastic cities’ phenomena bathe
In your flesh’s hyacinthian ground.
We—: in ivory from morasses darting.
Ourselves with horizons’ woolen sash girding.
There—: our breast-buds twirl carrousels.
And acrobats we! Colored lampions buzzing.
Into the comet-net of beams woven.
There magic crackles. Torpedo-bodies fire.
Ha! Every skin-square dabbed wet by drums.
These ripple steeply. Long into eons trickling.
Heroes from mother-bulges dart!
Cherished, baptized by these melodies.
Peoples are flowing! Smoke-demons depart.
Toward remotest poles our stretched arms start.
With chalices’ balm the lowliest water these.
Moths unfold factories’ pinnacled wings.
Dreadnoughts on coasts themselves hell-fish nestle.
Triumph! Triumph! We can always stand alert!
The palm sprawls wide in roomy chest.
A zebra flushes from a wale’s throat,
Tulip drifts on dolphin’s boat
Toward Ithaca; melodic Apache’s coat
Around a cough’s much rockier note!
Triumph! Triumph! How the hospitals speedily saunter,
Through which hallways I glide as doctor divine!
The tub leaves you poor hour-counter,
Prisons smudge honey-pounder,
Siberia resonates softly in choir’s rhymes.
Triumph! Triumph! Europa’s peoples flow.
Young poet sings of ages new.
Whitechapel itself into gloriole he will fold.
I swear you this—: No body shall anymore grow cold,
In all brain Europa shall take hold:
With flaneuresses and ample fruit in these.
Triumph! Triumph! My people, you are ready.
Toward lusters of sun bubble up you dark generals!
Endless galleries’ portraits with thunder from the walls descend.
Now they move home toward Schwalbental’s.
A spring-village glistens on withered hand.
Europa you…! Nations’ edifice a glowing hue!
In you, the brothers’ new phalanx as flame ascends
(…once mirror-image you of glorious firmaments…)
O: That toward you so soon the battle will dew!!
II
You died ahead—: Millions of bodies roll
On our brains’ burnished tracks. (Wagons rarely to be seen).
You bearers of banners! Your foreheads’ mole
Piles up plateaus and forts. A sharp fire’s scream.
You died ahead. —And threw yourself as spine-bridges of bone
Across currents erected all around from waters of pus.
You died ahead—: A Thousand sharp knives shone.
(—hedgehog—). Stapled brightly shining onto firmaments thus.
You died ahead—: Ernst Stadler you—: elastically your gigantean lines move.
Ellipsis-tubes sucking a light that libidinously glowed.
Hans Leybold! Gay sailor of vespertine summer-streets.
You Georg Trakl though—: Loneliest (melancholy) ode.
…And Alfred Lichtenstein so softly destroys,
You edged-in one (and jumping trapezes) by jagged cities’ fiery shine.
The ear’s membranes enfold drum-choirs.
Swerves the battle into a magical rhyme.
So too their bow cowers strained into oval.
While the lands are rusted by rushing creeks rouged with blood.
You small citizens—: Already your oily bomb-pimpled faces blot!
Cordon of cypress that singes eyelashes. Shine through the prisons’ moldy wall.
Yet eternally Dante drags up mechanism toward kaleidoscopic paradise.
Out from the chalice of gramophone cones
Schiller must today proclaim the song of friendship as informal “duo-ode”!
But untiringly, again and again walks
Whitmann, long singular, a hymnic
Paean, like one of these movable defenses being pushed
Ahead of itself, against the still warring
Nations’—ha!—incalculable cannon-mouths!
(—! You, though, poets of decay! Permit yourselves to be squashed apart!!
Verlaine—Rilke—Baudelaire—buzz along!)
Most besieged you! From the containers of your works
Stylized rot is unleashing itself! Blankly
Screws itself upward the pus-moon through corridors of veins.
There—: our crooked fingers scythes! digging—
There—: our periodic sentence knifes! squirting—
There—: our elbows wedge-panzers! moving—
Violet blabber-toads you —
—! You poets of decay— — —
But you friends! Leaders!! Having been recorded
Soon by every deed. Mountain’s swelling fire toward futurity.
This one—already from English trombones exhorted—
Will trumpet apart your desperation-worlds’ gristly naturity.
You—: gluing us into each other
Insolubly. Friends, Friends under the canopy of stars!!!
You—: Tamer of European thunder!
Ozones dust up! Blueness’ blueness falls!
That this one must steep toward the grandstand clamber:
O—: President of the parliament new.
Another hurls thorny fiddlenecks’ anchor
Of heaping manifests. Street! Street of flaming hue!!!
The mad painter must posters daub,
Glowing with it! Barricades themselves unfold.
Then blaring trumpet-sign toward you throbs:
That our armies advance as concentric wedges (—nothing longer to withhold—).
Ocean thunder you our coastline reaching—
Sharpened crests claw theses into chests.
O new beginnings! March forward. Steps are pinging
Like typewriters. Heavens! Heavens are dripping!!!
We thrust us up toward the pyramid,
On triangular surfaces loop star-bundle’s rays.
Like vanes we wave around brimmed hats.
Peoples are dangling in the plazas’ bays.
Canals of blood brightly cut into blocks.
Onto the azure it beckoned grandstand-face.
And wings of arms rampage around.
A visage explodes. (Banner vermilion).
The young poet. — And the trains swoop
Into (…collected meat…) towns.
In street-docks toss troops.
From bayonets slime flickers all around.
Clenched fists down on rifle-butts stoop.
They float upwards. Now the woods drum of stones.
Soon the frame of the barricades dams up soundly…
—: Workers! Students! Soldiers!
The power is yours. Let the dungeons tumble down.
A fantastic sun’s softer bloom to overwhelm.
(…you would let yourselves be into smaller freedom thrown…)
By propped-up knifes be wings cut down.
You—: Hammered into place. Made for a foreign realm.
Jaurès, chalice of more beautiful day, convulsed apart at the seams,
Traitors angled away, a dishwater-ray.
Indeed—: Trampled Belgium of armies steamed.
Often it strangled—ha!—melodic valleys away.
Returned—: you dark-city specters!
Assemble! Awake! Dart forth! Start!
Clarion-movements must hymnically clangor,
With widest fire onto the ridges clamber,
There with purple morning winds forward dart.
Students! Universities
Under the canopy of dawn’s call!
There horizons fall over from the bloated grease
Of frocks. Battle’s chaos a hand that levels it all.
The poet weaved around you an atmosphere
Of hell, deployment’s march, union, Europa’s sturdy built.
Nations turn homeward into each other.
Each face into face—: O brother—dives.
In bloodstreams from the heavens strives.
And savior twists from battered beast’s ligaments.
Electrically sizzling cheek across walls drives.
Severs gory membrane from cantonments.
In ruined domes the green professors intrude.
So propel upward the lecterns rapidly!
Volcanoes spewing in floods of manifestos.
You—: trumpeters of brightest future so heavenly.
Bowed into wood we are. A scream cuts through. All ear-pipe.
Students. Viaductian bodies jump
Up into the ether. Approaching cloud-clump.
Morasses clap from the temple’s tomb.
Soldiers! Your bodies harness-blocks.
You hurry as if propelled by a sling!!!
Speckled you with sulfur’s violet burn!!!
Through remotest ages your barked hurrahs ring.
Concert of bayonets around the trenches clink.
Grenade-fugues. Booming the contours
Of ammunition-columns. Greasy meat on cities sticks.
O—: fuse yourself with such echoing choir,
That, puffing and blowing exudes over the bloody toil,
From eyes crept a blossoming soil.
Workers! Loudly shipped to war.
Moraine of armies in harness yanks.
In funnels of skull rot-puddles twirl,
Stuffed with corpses. Horse-tower clanks.
And winds crash in shrillest registers.
Searchlights collide, dragging accents
Onto floors that chimney-colored pus-oil taints.
Ha!—: You polished musical instruments:
Your only regents the generals’ brains.
O—: that the armies’ stiff panzers be molten
By poet’s storm-song. Nourished by cataract’s blood.
We stripped fascine trenches from the mountain,
Now as string of pearl threaded around the moon.
We weary of day. Day so fluidly blue.
Sea our shoulders’ column-capital rocks.
Turbanesk snows on mossy heads accrue.
O—: Sun tattooed into forehead. A red sea.
And poor rainbows back and forth are blown.
Scalar thunder like insistent trombone.
III
Comrades! Arise! Arise from your solitudes!
Entrails flitter like red sunlit isles!
Surrounded by roaring desert-heaven’s vault.
Cafes pass through caressing skies,
They trace the dulcet shore of your thighs.
Melt! Melt! The union’s pillars scald.
Struck down by women! Much plowed up ones.
So that poet’s song will tightly each to each other cleave!
To muscled arms the peoples bend!
Like parchment yet the mountains crease!
O—: lead upward to victory the day of doom!
Where nations, static no more, toward each other pine!
The city’s bell-works grips into your pulses’ boom.
Embellished we with night. The future’s plastic sign.
Distant—: a couple entwine
Amidst the soot of broken silos.
Lovers each other wholly and sweetly unwinding.
Faces through thrusts of parallel walls fully into each other finding.
Comrades! In hell’s manure the traitors congregate
Convicted by brothers’ tribunal.
O—: none be returned after us!
There jagged lusts softly end those who assassinate,
Slumbering away there in cradling valley and strewn hill.
Push toward verdict! Good! Decent! Outrageous!
Uncomplicated—and raise your arms! Cross arms! Move your names!
Such deeds soon to lick the new state’s mystic banner-frames!
Ah!—How unitedly you so glowingly debate!
There two twitch up like spiked bats.
In street-thorned hedge your body in pieces slithers.
Now they bleat even from dog’s barks.
Facades form lengthways lined mothers.
And shriveled. And frayed, purple height.
Out from your quarters heaving channels slide
Defeated! Light. You toward dry cape.
Never again cinemas rattle. Never butterflies
You girls ring! Eaten by chromic blackness.
Only man’s strut counts, and blankness etched!
The youngling, overflowingly stretched,
Adores resin and wheat as his best dress.
With wedge of books we forward strive.
Rotund verdigris-light daubed on oily firn.
The clatter of derma over smolder-squares swooping.
Europa’s people! Seams of her borders
Waft away wholly, dissolved into ether.
Manchuria must with Riva mingle.
Hamburg blindingly trickled by Montblanc.
O Geneva — : encircled by the flitting scaffolds
Of the Black Forest. Glaciers gush slanted.
With silver jolt rivers rear up,
Burrowing in spirals out of their bed.
Europa’s people! Damn up in theaters
Mightily. Entwine the plafond plunges.
The new Marseillaise bends out of the tubal craters
Of spread mouths. Sprouts a telephone.
Tomato-eyes through rooms dice.
Thicket grows up into air from arms thrown.
Gothic skeleton. Stemmed legs round of trees.
That shudders shrill. Clinks staggeringly through.
Never cinemas again. Never woodcut-girls.
Lampion-terraces not. O never—: arcades.
Barrel-antlers from which God sharply unfurls.
O never—in evening’s rosy spice-bath daze.
Into bayonets a moustache itself twirls.
No…loftily cube-stone rotates.
(A mortar-slide tears down my night-face,
Inside glass panes flake…) Comrades!
Citizens into a black host knot!
Herb-herd of jellyfish on asphalt limping.
Out of jaws unhinged teeth blinking.
Amateur-choirs hydra-heads yodeling.
Ha! Citizens deadly our sharpest words tingle.
Ha! Citizens… Phosphor-bellies bloated. (Droop-eyes out of joint).
That back into you the retreating canon-mouths spew!
Like lances our fingers stitch you. These twiddling bugs! So we point
Our poems toward you. Ha! Ripped out
Be every fiber—You! And hate and hate and again hate be inplanted!!!
But soon we will from towers us flout,
Steep over you as viaduct drawn.
Still crowing your ripcage-pillars waver.
Then slowly though we knead you close.
Now fellow cementians you. Vein-branches twist
In trade winds. Flood of sun in throes…
And women their eccentric ballet!
Prop up sail’s sail on slimly bed!
Let flicker round the tricolor-smocks!
The coiffed up skull’s bomb downward throbs!
Birthing ones. The (frayed) crotch bears teeth.
Assemble! To an outrageous feast!!!
Join in! Join in! Already the tenors loudly declare!
Contralto softly purrs. A hissing valve.
In zigzag rondo we each other swear.
A cello darkly under brides burrows.
And if us now the blue day to shreds tears—
You shall ever be rendered as garish apostrophe!!!
Like lily-obelisks our necks extend:
Europa you! Vessels we inhabit where nations mingle in large. Melt
O melt apart..! — and triumph
Harmonic brain: striated with callositic lands you, drowned out by the sounds of public squares!!!
Stefan Schöberlein’s essay “Johannes R. Becher’s ‘To Europa’: A German Expressionist Takes Up Walt Whitman’s Broad-Axe” appears in Chicago Review issue 61:02.