The Comfort of Poisons
When their growers harvest grapes, hops, and barley,
Not only do they reap the sun’s power,
The moon and night act upon these plants too,
And each one’s sap calls for an anti-sap.
Poison sleeps in wine, fermentation in every fruit,
Death listens in grain, tobacco, poppies.
Nevertheless, without this death, our diet
Would disgust, discontent, be monotonous.
The poison only masters life’s emptiness,
Food from sunlight requires its opposite.
God himself places this evil in our way
As a baser need of the soul’s well-being.1
1 The soul’s well-being (Heils): the German word for salvation is actually a cognate of health and understood to be the soul’s.
Small Requiem
No one knows how poor he is,
As he, inside the tight corners,
Is carried down the stairs feet-first
Through the flower-reeking hall.
Many, with painfully long black strides
Ushering him on to the grave,
Take furtive looks at the clock.
No one knows how poor he is.
No one knows how rich he is.
Who flew from one day to the next
Has without knowing it gathered,
Has sucked the hours’ thick syrup.
And now he bears a dear burden,
The gathering’s wax and honey,
Homeward back to the beehives.
No one knows how rich he is.
The Death of the Priest
Collected and composed, he lies steady,
So not one drop of dying escapes him.
With his hands pressed together on his chest,
He wants his death to serve as a clean measure.
The black nun, who at no point will leave him,
Kneels far back. His passing suffers no nearness.
She ministers to him as a rattling vestige
Of breath sings a psalm, concise and tenacious.
His eyes sag with an unrelenting firmness,
In which a fine, self-assured smile lets go,
Toward the corner, where the spider spins the thread.
He awaits the angel there in his straits
To pierce through the thin wall of hereofness,
To beckon him with his measured gesture.
—
Franz Werfel (1890–1945) was a Prague-born Austrian writer best known for his novels, such as The Forty Days of Musa Dagh and The Song of Bernadette. He began his career, however, as an Expressionist poet in the second decade of the twentieth century, and continued to write and publish verse throughout his career. His poetry has enjoyed a revived interest in Europe, especially among younger literary scholars. The three poems published here are from a cycle published in the 1930s: Ein Totenpsalter (A Funeral Psalter), Psalms for the Dead, and the like.
James Reidel is a poet, writer, and translator. He is the author of two collections of verse, Jim’s Book (Black Lawrence Press, 2013) and My Window Seat for Arlena Twigg (Black Lawrence Press, 2006), and his work has been published in numerous print and online journals, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Conjunctions, and others. He has published two Mudlark chapbooks (Nos. 57 and 69) devoted to Franz Werfel’s poetry in translation. He has also translated two novels by Werfel, including Pale Blue Ink in a Lady’s Hand and an expanded and revised translation of The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, both published by David R. Godine in 2012. Additionally, he has translated works by Robert Walser, Georg Trakl, and Thomas Bernhard. His study of the life and death of Manon Gropius, the daughter of Walter Gropius and Alma Mahler, Werfel’s stepdaughter and the “angel” of Alban Berg’s Violin Concerto, is forthcoming from Seagull Books.