Language: German
Poet: Ror Wolf
Translator: Hunter Bolin
Region: Germany
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wake drenched in drool
A poem by Ror Wolf, translated from German by Hunter Bolin
Ror Wolf (1932–2020) was a writer and artist from Germany. Taking cues from authors such as Jean Paul, Robert Walser, and Peter Weiss, his work––which he terms a ‘reality factory’––is as endlessly entertaining as it is experimental in method. Almost none of it has been translated into English.
Hunter Bolin is a former expat from California.
Einige unnötige Andeutungen über irgendetwas
Auf Wiedersehn, wir werden demnächst sterben,
und das kommt auch nicht alle Tage vor,
wir werden kalt, wir werden und verfärben,
und jemand kommt und wird uns dann beerben.
Der Wind im Schädel pfeift uns aus dem Ohr.
Man hat uns unsre Hüte abgenommen,
und unsre Bäuche hat man aufgeschnitten,
wir haben davon nichts mehr mitbekommen,
erst sind wir steif und bleich davongeschwommen,
und später sind wir tief hinabgeglitten.
Der Nebel steigt, man hört das Wasser zischen,
am Montag sind wir leicht davongetrieben,
mit Schollen, Schratzen, Barschen, Schützenfischen,
die stumm und schnappend rasch vorüberwischen,
zerschlitzt und ausgenommen, wie beschrieben.
Zweidrittel dieser Welt vom Meer bedeckt,
das haben wir uns anders vorgestellt,
am Montag, eingeschlafen, blutbefleckt,
und aufgewacht, von Hunden abgeleckt.
Es ist schon so: Man steht bevor man fällt.
Das Gras, das dürre Gras ist abgebrannt,
die Sonne finster und der Regen rot,
das Land ist weggewischt, das ganze Land.
Der Mond schwillt auf, der Mond stößt an die Wand.
Laut ist das Leben, leise ist der Tod.
Die Kälte, die durch unsre Körper kriecht.
Die Kucken, der auf unsrem Tisch verdirbt.
Und wir, mit einem Tuch auf dem Gesicht,
wir wissen, wie das dicke Ende riecht.
Der Mensch: er lebt so lange bis er stirbt.
Some Avoidable Allusions to Aught
So long! the hourglass is ticking down,
for death is all sudden when it appears,
we will grow cold, we will look all burnt out,
then someone will come take us underground.
The wind in our skulls will spew from our ears.
Our hats have been taken from off our heads,
and our stomachs have been cut wide open,
the reasoning why was never discovered,
first we swam away all wan and rigid,
then later slid down to bottomless ocean.
Fog is on the rise and you can hear the hissing
water though Monday spells evacuation,
with the percids, schraetzers, flounders flitting
archerfishes mutely darting, snatching all,
as described, then gilled: post-evisceration.
The earth’s two thirds an oceanic flood
yet we still imagined something different,
come Monday we’ll drift off all cover’d in blood,
then wake drenched in drool from man’s best bud.
That’s how it is: one lives until one isn’t.
The grass, the arid lawn’s consumed by fire,
the sun it is black and the rain is red,
and the land is expunged in its entire.
The moon glides up and gets caught on a wire.
For loud are the living, and quiet the dead.
The core of our bones will shiver from cold.
The cake will spoil in front of our eyes.
Yet somehow we know, despite the blindfold,
The fat lady’s song and the reek of her mold.
That’s mankind: it stays alive until it dies.
This poem by Ror Wolf is animated by a polar tension which counterposes a rigid formal structure with content that signals the extinguishing of meaning-making altogether.
The poem is constructed of six strophes with five lines each, and adheres fastidiously to an ABAAB rhyme scheme. Michael Lentz, the editor of the volume, notes “These lines contain eleven-syllables for female cadence and ten-syllables for male cadence, Stephan George’s preferred measure, which was also used by George Trakl and a number of expressionist poets.” (212) The formal rigidity of the George school is echoed in Ror Wolf’s poem, but the content only expresses one thing, which is simultaneously everything: nothing. Being is just a brief moment within the larger fact of nothing.
The title declares that the entire mission of the poem is perfunctory, or “avoidable” in commenting on “aught”, namely, on the shadow death casts over this life. The poet’s vocation of presenting the memento mori—symbolized by the hourglass—seems to be a cause for shame rather than heroic celebration. In any case, death’s imminence fails to produce any meaningful reflection: crucially, the poem’s symbolism is all surface-level and banal: grass that is no longer green, a darkened sun, a red rain. What has shifted in this apocalyptic setting is the schema of coloration, and the poem’s de-formative capacity is found most acutely in this register.
In the course of his ongoing critique of Stefan George’s cultural endeavor to erect a rigid Gestalt of Germanness that understood itself to be the historical successor to Greek classicism, Walter Benjamin remarked that “George’s own array of symbols is defensive in character, often with a note of desperation.”¹ In Ror Wolf’s poems, this desperate symbolism is exaggerated, pushing it definitively into the realm of parody. The fish—once a simple symbol of fertility, of the depths of the unconscious—are nominated by their taxonomic classification, producing an alienation effect which overwhelms the reader and eclipses the fact that what’s being described is the fish being cut into pieces.
The tragedy of death in the poem does not provoke sadness—but instead suggests that play—in imagination, in humor—only takes on a redemptive character in the face of death.
¹ Walter Benjamin, Stefan George in Retrospect, Selected Writings 2 part 2, p. 707
