Three texts by Christoph Meckel, translated by Christopher Middleton

Anthem of Motifs and Materials

'Close your eyes and what you see is yours' (old saying)

   Barrels filled with live human beings, rolling, bumping over

each other across wide open country

   Temples sinking into the sand, heavy trucks, flying bodies;

heads in the sand-drifts, body-parts, ladders

   Incinerated forests, skeletons of trees, blasted wood (napalm);

bombed temple-terraces, divinities without heads, without thighs

(Laos)

   Wheelchairs with anthropomorphic apparitions in them, pushed by

anthropomorphs. Apes, giants; streets cordoned off, human crowds

cramming visible space, dissolved into limbs and heads beyond,                                                                                                                                        ashes

in the air beyond them, smoke beyond that, beyond that nothing

   Onlookers, faces in latticework, behind iron bars, keyholes,

gaps in branches, eye-sockets in masks. Captives, children, animals

   Cannibals, bird-eaters, fish-eaters, mouths gaping, dentures,

gobs, tooth-cavities, teeth

   A rocking-horse the size of the Trojan Horse, mounted by women

and men, ladies and gentlemen, jaynaked partygoers (confetti,

bunting, balloons)

   Sack-hoppers (memory of children's birthday parties before

1945), children bundled into sacks; women, soldiers, unknown

creatures, predatory beasts; Uncle Pelle with bowler and umbrella,

beergardens by water, seesaw and swing

   Cosmos-collectors with a big wagon, assistants like garbage-

men, gloves, dust-goggles, caps, gathering things, shoveling them

into trailers, killing people, beating stuff to bits, jettisoning

water they draw

   Refugees, camps and sheds, sleeping quarters, hangars full of

bunks: a sew as big as a pond, police with ladles, people in line

with pannikins large and small, possessions, a lost child, a defile,

a pushing and shoving, women shrieking, people crushed, people

squashed flat

   Morgue of gods, morgue of animals; ship graveyards, bird and

frog graveyards, bears and horses in coffins, memorial to the 

Unknown Fish

   Cities by water, bucket-wheels on towers, wells, pails full 

of rocks and nails

   Slot machine the size and shape of a palace, human figures 

wandering among pictures and letters, climbing inside luminous

corpuscles, falling charred inside beacon housing, signals blood-red

   Carthago, Babylon, Potosi, Ragnarok, Muspilli. Birds in cages

that fly, mountains and ships, the world in a bottle

   Dance-floors (Senegal), rope-dancers, bull-creatures, lion

people, naked painting dancing women, breasts flopping up and 

                                                                                 down

breasts rotating, dancing musicians, dancing king (Yoruba), highlife

                                                                              bushes

   Two Blacks in the surf at Coney Island heaving a motorbike 

                                                                              toward

the shore

My real grandfather, Felix Pietzker, was a master builder of ships

and airships, a colleague of Graf Zeppelin, and he wrote a book 

                                                                   about

the water-displacement of ships that is said to be still standard,

though not the peak of fashion.

   I learned of this as a child. Before the First World War

grandfather had crashed in an airship and been burned to death; 

since then water, air, and ship have been my own line of things

   I knew that there were slave-ships, ships for salt and wine, 

high society tubs with tennis courts and dance-floors, motor

boats with bandits

   and, deep under the sea, under every other wave, lay a wreck

with treasures and bones

   Strangest of all was the music ship - a ship-shaped musical

box? A watertight natatory gramophone? A hull full of orchestras,

choirs, fiddlers and yodellers? One could hear it from far away

because water carried the sounds

   Since then, the music ship has been the Boat for me, although

and because it only exists in the phrase music ship

   Dolphins, so I hear, love music. A music ship was accompanied by 

dolphins, dolphins followed it through any waterhole's needle-fine 

ear and into the distant harbour

   A music ship sounded in every direction, day and night, through 

storm-driven seas and fog

   Whatever it is, a seaworthy music ship has a musically talented

captain, a highly gifted company of sailors, a few stowaways quietly

whistling along, and dolphins, dolphins wherever you care to look

Poem for Christopher Okigbo 

(1932-68, killed in the Nigerian Civil War)

In broad daylight memory collects the dead, delivers them to my

house, clothes the naked with fresh fabrics, undresses those who

are clothed

   removes from bodies the holed overcoats, fabrics smeared with

blood and urine, ripped silk, cracked leather, gives their outlines

new attire

   I am the one who places them in the ferry and takes them

across the river Chelele into the zone between Cythera and Ulro,

into the city of Jaljil, shadowy courtyards in sunny Jaljil, 

where there are trees, benches, and fountains

   They are the dead I found and searched for in forest ditches

around Erfurt at the war's end; the starved, the ones who bled

to death overnight, every morning taken away from the camp that

had once been a nursery garden; the ones who were pulled from

ruins, laid out on the street, a short tarpaulin spread over

them

   Stick-figure bones of abuse and slaughter, the stabbed, the

dehydrated, the grilled, others cooked with the dust of hot 

plateaus to speckle them, and the remains of the minister killed on

the toft where the track runs on to Oshogbo

   There is the serene shade of Christopher Okigbo, the crowing

poet, on the streets of Ibadan, with piazzas of wood and clay;

there was laughter without reason, beer in the Lebanese cookhouse, 

boxing matches at night in the municipal palace, and a 

                                                                       few verses

of Heine and Schiller that he wanted to hear me speak.

   Death is a late-news item. The news comes by ferry into the

City of Jaljil and leaves at the fountain the dead man alone.

(All three texts are from Musikschiff (2006), by kind permission of 

Christoph Meckel and Waldgut Verlag, Frauenfeld, Switerzerland)

*

Claudius the God

(translated in fond memory of Zbigniew Herbert during his Berlin years)

I spoke Greek like an Athenian but respectably

kept a lookout for what was not Greek to me

nature started me off

but did not complete me

a wagon driver educated me I was thrashed

needled even in testaments I was made fun of

at a ripe age I enjoyed the reputation

                                    of a gambler and a drinker

I liked the suburban hobbledehoys and tarts

I played being an idiot for fear of death played

   patiently and for a long time

silliness slips easily into the bloodstream

after Caligula's murder I hid behind the curtain

the Pretorians dragged me out

when the world was flung at my feet

I didn't even have time to put on my face

                                    a look of intelligence

since then I have drudged tirelessly I was a Hercules

                                             of administration

every day I issued dozens of condemnations

                           announcements  decrees

I was most of all proud of the rule that

                                             at dinner parties

it was permisslble to emit belly-noises

who'd have the cheek to call me a tyrant

unjustly I'm reproached for having been

                                             cruel and cynical

actually my thoughts were elsewhere

after Messalina was murdered I asked at dinner

why is the lady of the house not present?

                            there was deathly silence

                                    I'd clean forgotten

I had new aqueducts constructed

After that it was easy in Rome to wash

                                    the bloodstains away

if the historians and keepers of death-lists

                                        are to be believed

I condemned to death 35 senators

                           and 300 tribunes

I won't deny it  it's possible

But I did it all to take from death

                           its air of inescapability

I had the dead invited to a dice game

And if they didn't come I punished them with fines

I enlarged the bounds of my empire to include

                  Britain and Mauretania also Thrace

                           or so it would seem

but my triumphal arch consists of letters

                   with which I enriched the alphabet

I enlarged the bounds of speech the bounds

                           that is to say of freedom

Death was brought to me by Agrippina and

                               a passion for mushrooms

for me the mushroom the essence of the forest

                                    became the essence of death

by the letters digamma and antisigma supported

                                             under the arms like Oedipus

I tottered into the dark boondock of Orcus

Zbigniew Herbert

[from the German version by Karl Dedecius, 1974]

*

The Cow Pasture Remembered

The cow pasture, there it goes, and now I remember that before sundown in the summer, coming from a swim in the lake, you could see hundreds of large dragonflies hovering and whizzing crisscross over it.

   Ever since we appeared, the globe has been circled by a flock of messages, a flock beyond measure. The ruse of anthropomorphism coming into play, pictures of angels came to be painted - the messengers. But it was messages that hovered and whizzed crisscross around the globe.

   Matter, so self-absorbed, shuns advances of spirit, and spirit knows, in company with the neuro-scientist, how deeply at risk its retirement places matter. Messages could be received and translated into skills, into arts, into sciences. They regulated the discourse of myths and of religions, but they were, after all, barely translatable, and they resisted the decipherers, if only to freshen their air and make room for change. So they increased and made fruitful our human puzzlement.

   Mounting evidence indicates that technologies invested for material ends in merely human communication in a global web facilitate business but make it more than ever difficult to receive the other messages. It is possible that current advances in methods and means of communication will soon have dispersed, as insecticide (and the retirement of cows) banished all the dragonflies, the flock of messages that not only circled the globe, but kept it afloat and spinning.

   A memory as stocked and intricate as Dante's, or as rich and disconcerted as that of Ezra imprisoned at Pisa, rarely nourished empirical philosophizing, or serious thought along rough tracks of existence as such. Has the service of memory to thought - memory sweet or bitter, of carnal momentary particulars - been disregarded in philosophy between Plato and Bergson? I can only be sure that the cow pasture, my casually passing it by, my meagre interest in the corrugated iron cowshed, my fugitive delight at seeing the flock of dragonfiles undulate, lay in want for years and years. It wanted a memory of these perceptions, casual as they had been, to proliferate into a speculation by loose analogy. The aleatory and the necessary, their fusion on a small scale began with the evening's light's sensitizing of the retina, its increased love, so the ancients might have told me. The process had unfolded of its own accord.

   Philosophy dissects signs and their meanings, and poetry combines them, so that essential words are concerted. Scholars know the intricacies of Tantric Buddhist metaphysics; but the visionary authors of that system, century on century, did not know that what they thought to be the case could not now be counted as knowledge at all. This might be the way in which the messages call for our attention - shuttled as they seem to be between certainty and mystery. The least phrasing in a real poem and the combinatory logic at large in its design are served by the dragonfly. For its absence they also grieve.

   He flaunts his cybercostume. He has broken away again from his antibody, Ariel. Hither and thither he struts. Caliban has come to town.