Phantasus Selection 4

Loss, love, longing, joy, scorn, sadness – Holz can capture moods and emotions with the condensed economy of a haiku or a Chinese quatrain.

Night.
The sycamore outside my window rustles,
from the leaves dew sparks down onto grass,
and my heart
beats.
A dog … barks ,… a twig … snaps, – silent!
Silent!
You? … You?
Ah, your hand! So cold, so cold!
And … your eyes … dimmed!
Dimmed!
No, no! You must not see
how my lips quiver,
and not the tears I shed like a child around you–
You poor woman!
So by night,
only by night do you dare,
timidly,
to leave your coffin?
So that you can creep on tiptoe to me?
Poor woman!
Faded,
the garlands you wove,
gone with the wind,
the songs you sang,
and your hair, your lovely hair,
is clotted with
earth.
Dead, dead, dead …
And your wings, your poor wings!
Cut without mercy
down from the shimmering shoulders – ah don’t weep!
Don’t weep!
Here! Here! You must sit down by my side,
at night, every night,
until morning
greys,
until the sun
shines,
and the world,
the clever world, again rolls unconcerned across your grave –
Hark!
The sycamore outside my window rustles,
dew drips,
and my heart
beats.
Night, night, night…

In my black forest of yew
a fairytale bird sings –
the whole night.
Flowers gleam.
Under stars that mirror themselves,
my boat drifts on.
My dreaming hands
dip into floating waterlilies.
Below,
silent, the deeps.
The shore far away! The song …

Then the light was doused,
and through the silence
only the beating of your heart …
Bliss!
In the garden an early bird trilled,
dew dripped from a thousand blades of grass,
the whole sky spread in roses.
“My love!” “My love!”
And again kiss upon kiss …
What more can the world now offer us!

Purple citron forests
bloom around blue seas.
Silken sails
speed
my dragon ship.
Firmly
into the green spume
my fist presses the tiller,
not an eyelash twitches.
To you! To you!
Beneath the mirror of my golden armour
from which the sun streams out,
my heart
is beating.

He can’t stand any twittering of birds.
The so-called natural sounds of nightingales and larks
are odious to him.
His brain
is lined through0ut with cotton wool.
There in the middle
squats a little rococo Venus,
peeing from silver
into a golden chamberpot.

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