A poem from the German Grotesque

Twilight: A Translation of "Die Dämmerung"

 Grotesque Gedicthe & Forgotten Poets 
Joseph LaBine

Here I offer my English translation of Alfred Lichtenstein's poem "Die Dämmerung" (1911). It's a beginner attempt at best but it is still good pre-reading for the original in German.. I am working from the Holzinger edition Alfred Lichtenstein: Gedichte und Prosa  (Berlin, 2013). I also notice that while many (if not all) of Lichtenstein's poems are translated into English and available via the Poem Hunter website,[1] these translations or transliterations are poor representations of the poetry and often sacrifice form & line break. The loss is the art of the piece.

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“Twilight”

A fat man plays with a pond.

The wind has caught itself in a tree.

The sky looks flushed and pale,

as if it ran out of make-up.

On long crooked crutches stooped down

and chattering, two cripples creep in the field.

A blonder poet[2] might seem mad.

A little horse stumbles over a lady.

On a window a fatter man sticks.

A lad wants to visit a soft woman.

A greyer clown puts on his boots.

A pram shrieks and dogs curse.

[1] Access the Poem Hunter entries via this link: http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/twilight-97/

[2] Lichtenstein’s use of “blonder” here is similar to Nietzsche’s figurative representation of the Nordic race as the ‘blonde Bestie’ which appears in Zur Genealogie der Moral (1887).