A Gottfried Benn Breviary
Selected translations of Gottfried Benn, taken from "Das Gottfried-Benn-Brevier: Aphorismen, Reflexionen, Maximen aus Werken u. Briefen", and three new translations of Benn's poetry.
The public is mainly of the opinion: there is a heathland or a sunset, where a young man or a young lady stands, a melancholy mood is present, and now a poem is emerging. No, that's not how a poem emerges. A poem rarely ever emerges - a poem is made. If you extract from the rhyme the moderate mood, what then remains, if anything remains, this, perhaps, is a poem.Â
Even one's legacy has comedy and not much else in this frayed humanity. Â
I am personally against Americanism. I am of the opinion that the philosophy of pure utilitarian thought, of optimism à tout prix, of "keep smiling", of constantly having a grin upon one's teeth, is not appropriate for the western man and his history. I hope that the European, at least in the pure types of his artists, will always spurn what's just useful, the mass article, the collective plan, and live only from his inner self. Â
A realization I've had the last few weeks is that there is much greater enmity for art amongst bourgeois circles than amongst the louts of the world.Â
Art is more precious than anyone's trivial fate, and making art is, anthropologically speaking, more righteously creative than the reproaches against it of some, because their private life did not go as expected.Â
No one can kill art, where it really takes shape, it lives on and survives politics and the historical situation.Â
Art becomes no deeper when history confirms it, the idea no purer, once reality covers it.Â
But the art or the spirit of today can't do much else other than the leaving of impressions and the spreading of germs, that is its only vocation today; it honestly cannot conjure beauty, tranquility, or harmony -Â that's what the comb companies do, but from what I hear they aren't succeeding at a lucrative scale anymore either.
Artworks are phenomenal, historically inefficacious, and practically without consequence. That is their magnitude.Â
Now think for a moment about Nietzsche or Hölderlin, how much devastation is within them, against how many unspeakable torments they fight tooth and nail with their verse, from how many shadows does the image emerge with them, with George everything is delicate, clear, Apollonian, everything seems lawful, and that is itself endlessly striking in a country from whose poets something rushes out so easily, that is not overtaken by the word, not enveloped by the word, but instead remains naked substance, foaming emotion.Â
God is form.Â
Words, words - nouns! They need only unfurl their wings and millennia slip and plummet from their flight.Â
The great poet is a great realist, very near all realities - he burdens himself with realities, he is quite terrestrial, a cicada, according to legend born from the Earth, the Athenian insect.Â
At the moment though, one must say that the Western poem is still held together by a form-idea and is shaped through words, not through belching and coughing.Â
The age of Goethe has been illuminated, burned to ashes by Nietzsche, scattered in the winds by Spengler - the air is glowing and smoldering, but not from St. John's - or potato fires, rather from the scorched logs of the theory of cultural circles, where one circle sinks, another rises, and we are the puppets and character actors in these solar pieces.Â
The non-intellectual woman - she is much more attractive than the wiseacre, she wraps stupid men around her finger much more easily than an academic can, men don't want to be touched by a woman on the brain but somewhere else entirely.Â
Love is the Elysium of the unproductive, of those who cannot think and who cannot express themselves.
The public is the stench of a cesspool and politics is the domain of the reduced.Â
What the political man cannot see at all is solitude, asceticism, monasticism - art. But if humanity didn't have that, it wouldn't exist.Â
Writers who aren't able to linguistically cope with their worldviews are called seers in Germany.Â
The modern poem, the absolute poem, is the poem without faith, the poem without hope, the poem addressed to no one, a poem composed of words which you fascinatingly assemble.Â
A poem is a difficult work, everything must dovetail with each other, a formidable alignment and balancing work, until everything fits together and is attuned, empty passages may also be necessary, in order to let potential fuller ones stand out more strongly. One doesn't want to be appealing with a poem, you don't want it to please, it should however tense and stimulate the brain, break it up, circulate it, render it creative.
A poem is always a question of the I, and all the sphinxes and images of Sais interfere with the answer.
The novel, Europe's creation, which started in 1800, successor to the comedy, over there it still wins great style, in Faulkner, Dos Passos, Wolfe - : each of its parts gathers and splinters in high presses and fountains of the Earth, the tissue of the Earth, once again together, then they let it sink over graves, over fortunes, into shadows.
Three poems by Gottfried Benn: SYNTHESIS Silent night, silent house. But I am of the quietest stars; I too rush mine own light Out into mine own night. I am swept pensively homewards From caves, heavens, dirt, and beasts And what still affords itself to women Is dark, sweet masturbation. I wallow world. I rattle rape. And next, I am naked in bliss No death wrests, no dust reeks Me, the Self, back to the world LAST SPRING Usher the forsythias deep within yourself and once the lilacs bloom, mingle them too with your blood and bliss and misery, the dark ground, on which you rely. Lethargic days. Everything’s surmounted. And don’t ask if it’s the end or the beginning, then perhaps the hours will bear you right until June, there with the roses. APRÈSLUDE You must be able to dive, you must learn, one time it’s luck and one time shame, don't give up, you mustn't depart when the hour after light yearns. Await, abide, once sunken, once overflowed, and once mute, peculiar law, there are no sparks, not alone - look around you: Nature wants to make her cherries, even with few blossoms in April She keeps her stone fruit things up to the good years, still. No one knows where the germs feed, no one, if the crown one day will bloom - Await, abide, grant yourself Darkening, aging, aprèslude.Â