Phantasus selection 2

Arno Holz was deeply interested in the scientific developments of the later 19 th century, when evolution was part of the Zeitgeist and Ernst Haeckel’s drawings of microscopic life forms were revealing wondrous unsuspected beings. But Holz imagined himself even farther back into cosmic Deep Time, as this selection shows.

SELECTION (2): COSMOS, TIME, EXISTENCE

Just under a quarter of the poems in Phantasus touch on this Theme. The five selected below indicate the range of his imaginative voyages, which expanded hugely as Phantasus went through its three decades of development. The handful of lines of “Seven billion years before my birth” grew to over 150 pages in the final mid-1920s edition.

I should like to know every secret!
All the stars with rolling seas I create by my hand.
In my dreams
worlds revolve
and I delight in the smallest nest
that in summer a pair of swallows
builds in my eaves.
The slightest chirping coming from it
moves my heart!

Seven billion years before my birth
I was a sword-lily.
My roots
sucked themselves into a star.
On its dark waters,
floating,
my giant blue flowers.

Around a red glowing pillar of iron rising to the sky
speckled with sharp glass shards and shearing-blades,
invisible chains drag me up and down.
Slowly, by jerks, and thoroughly.
I moan, groan, gurgle, roar: Hosanna!
In seven times seven eternities,
when the shards are worn down and the blades can do no more,
the pillar will stand there black;
below,
in the round stinking slough surrounding it,
my brain, my liver, my blood, all the gore will lie curdled,
and I,
“chastened”,
a transfigured Liebig tin made blessèd,
will, blubbing,
with my last remaining little knucklebone
knock at the gates of Paradise!

For seven septillion years
I counted milestones along the Milky Way’s rim.
They were never-ending.
For myriads of eons
I was lost in the miracle of a single tiny dewdrop.
New ones forever revealed themselves.
My heart quaked!
Into moss, blissfully,
I laid myself down, and became soil.
Now brambles straggle
over me,
on a rocking blackthorn branch
a robin twitters.
From my breast
a merry spring gushes,
from my skull
flowers grow.

Into red fixed-star forests bleeding to death,
I whip my winged steed.
On through!
Beyond shredded planetary systems, beyond frozen primal suns,
behind wastes of night and nothing,
New Worlds are growing glimmering – trillions of crocus flowers!

Translations © C. D. Godwin 2019 (amended May 2020)