Alfred Lichtenstein

“ In the sky the fine red of evening is burning.
Perhaps in thirteen days I'll be dead.
Romantic Journey
Thousands of stars twinkle in the gentle sky.
The landscape glows. From the distant meadow
Mute marching men slowly come closer.
Only once a young Lieutenant, a page boy in love,
Steps out—and stands lost in thought.
The baggage train waddles along at the rear.
The moon makes everything much stranger. ”

“ The sky is drunk.
Like false pearls, little stumps
Of chopped up light lie around and reveal
A glimpse of streets, a few clumps of houses.
Everything else is rotten and devoured
By a black fog, which, like a wall,
Falls down and is rotten. And the rain
Crumbles like rubble in the grip—thick—gray—
As though the whole contaminated darkness
Wanted at every moment to sink.
Down in a swamp you see an auto flash,
Like a strange, drunken plant.
The oldest whores come crawling
Along out of wet shadows—tubercular toads.
There goes one creeping by. Over there a pig is being stabbed. ”

“ Twilight
A fat young man plays with a pond.
The wind has caught itself in a tree.
The pale sky seems to be rumpled,
As though it had run out of makeup.
On long crutches, bent nearly in half
And chatting, two cripples creep across the field.
A blond poet perhaps goes mad.
A little horse stumbles over a lady.
A fat man is stuck to a window.
A boy wants to visit a soft woman.
A gray clown puts on his boots.
A baby carriage shrieks and dogs curse.
The Night
Sleepy policemen waddle under streetlights.
Broken beggars grumble when they sense people. ”

“ We burrow our way through high-stemmed woods,
We pass by spaces that seem endless.
We pass through the wind and attack the towns, which speed up.
But the odors of the sluggish cities are hateful to us—
Ah, we are flying! Always alongside death...
How we despise and scorn him who sits on our lives!
Who lays out graves for us and makes all streets crooked—ha, we
laugh at him,
and the roads, overcome, die with us—
Thus we shall auto our way through the whole world... ”

“ A platinum moon now streams through a gap in the houses.
Next to green lanterns under a bridge
Lies a gypsy woman. And plays an instrument.
Girls
They cannot stand their rooms in the evening.
They creep out into deep starry streets.
How gentle is the world in the streetlights' wind!
How strangely buzzing life melts away...
They go by gardens and houses,
As though very far off there might be a light,
And they look upon every horny man
As a sweet gentleman savior
After the Ball
Night creeps into the cellars, musty and dull.
Tuxedos totter through the rubble of the street. ”

“ You cast me with street lamps like briars.
Ah, when one flows in the night through your lamps
After women, silky, plump.
A man gets dizzy from the eye-play.
The little moon-candy sweetens the sky. ”

“ Landscape
(for a picture)
With all its branches a slender tree casts
The shine of darkness around poor crosses.
The earth stretches out painfully black and broad.
A small moon slips slowly out of space.
And next to it strange, unapproachable, huge
Airplanes hover heavenward!
Sinners filled with longing look up, with belief
And tear themselves out of their tombs. ”

“ Savors quite a bit of sausage in the background.
Cloudy Evening
The sky is swollen with tears and melancholy.
Only far off, where its foul vapors burst,
Green glow pours down. The houses,
Gray grimaces, are fiendishly bloated with mist.
Yellowish lights are beginning to gleam.
A stout father with wife and children dozes.
Painted women are practicing their dances.
Grotesque mimes strut towards the theater.
Jokers shriek, foul connoisseurs of men:
The day is dead... and a name remains!
Powerful men gleam in girls' eyes.
A woman yearns for her beloved woman. ”

“ And the pale moon slowly rises.
On yellow fields in red trousers, the French are ablaze,
Ashen pale from death and powder.
Among them German medics squat.
The day becomes grayer, its sun redder.
Field kitchens steam. Towns are put to the torch.
Broken carts stand at roadsides.
Panting cyclists, hot and tanned, loiter
At a scorched wooden fence.
And orderlies are already moving
From regiment to division.
The Battle at Saarburg
The earth grows moldy in fog.
The evening is as oppressive as lead.
Electric sparks crackle and whimper all around,
Breaking everything in two. ”

“ On the corners wheelbarrows with bananas squat.
Just a bit of shit makes a tough kid happy.
The human beasts glide along, completely lost
As though on a street, miserably gray and shrill.
Workers stream from dilapidated gates.
A weary person moves quietly in a round tower.
A hearse crawls along the street, two steeds out front,
Soft as a worm and weak.
And over all lies an old rag—
The sky... pagan and meaningless.
Into the Evening
Out of crooked clouds priceless things grow.
Very tiny things suddenly become important. ”

“ A gentle tear-stained god lays the grey powdery hands
Of afternoon over everything.
The World
(Dedicated to a clown)
Many days tread upon human animals,
In gentle oceans hunger-sharks fly.
Heads, beers glisten in coffee-houses.
Girls' screams shred on a man.
Thunderstorms come crashing down. Forest winds darken.
Women knead prayers in skinny hands:
May the Lord God send an angel.
A shred of moonlight shimmers in the sewers.
Readers of books crouch quietly on their bodies. ”

“ The unity of space is not required, therefore not observed. In twelve lines the twilight is represented on a pond, tree, field, somewhere... its effect on the appearance of a young man, a wind, a sky, two cripples, a poet, a horse, a lady, a man, a young boy, a woman, a clown, a baby-carriage, some dogs is represented visually. (The expression is poor, but I can find nothing better)
The author of the poem does not want to portray a landscape that is thought to be real. The poetic art has the advantage over painting of offering "ideal" images. ”

“ Now the sky also piously enkindles its candlelight.
... Huge above everything my human face wanders—
Ash Wednesday
Yesterday I still went powdered and addicted
Into the many-colored sounding world.
Today everything has long since drowned.
Here is a thing.
There is a thing.
Something seems like this.
Something seems otherwise.
How easily someone blows out
The whole flowering earth.
The sky is cold and blue.
Or the moon is yellow and flat.
A forest has many individual trees.
There's nothing more to cry about.
There's nothing more to scream about. ”

“ Sometimes the representation of reflection is important. Perhaps a poet goes mad—makes a deeper impression than—a poet stares stiffly ahead—
Something else compelling in the poem: fear and things that resemble reflection, like: all men must die... ”

“ Only he who knows longing knows what I suffer.
Monday in the courtyard of the barracks
The heat sticks closely to the gun and to the hand.
It pricks the eyes. Nothing remained forgotten.
The troops stepped, half drunk, into the fire.
The non-coms stand rigidly in front.
The glaring earth is a dead carousel.
Nothing stirs. No one drops down. No streaked sky flies. ”

“ A horse stumbles over a lady. Dogs swear. Certainly one must laugh in an odd way when one learns to see: that a boy actually uses a pond as a toy. How horses have a helpless way of stumbling... how human dogs express their rage... ”

“ Most still deny that, and for that reason recognize, for example, in the "Twilight" and similar pictures nothing but a mindless confusion of strange performances. Others believe, incorrectly, that these kinds of "ideal" pictures are possible in painting (for example, the Futurist mish mash) .
The intention, furthermore, to grasp the reflex of things directly—without superfluous reflections. Lichtenstein knows that the man is not stuck to the window, but stands behind it. That the baby-carriage is not screaming, but the child in the baby-carriage. ”

“ Among rough houses whores hobble back and forth,
Sadly swinging their ripe behinds.
Much sky lies broken in these dried-out things...
Whiny cats painfully shriek bright songs.
The Cabaret in the Suburbs
The sweaty heads of waiters tower above the room
Like lofty and powerful capitals.
Lice-ridden boys giggle nastily.
And shining girls give painfully beautiful looks.
And distant women are so very excited... ”

“ The representation is "grotesque") , to notice the unbalanced, incoherent nature of things, arbitrariness, confusion... is not, in any case, the characteristic of "style." Proof is: Lichtenstein writes poems in which the "grotesque" disappears, without notice, behind the "ungrotesque."
Other differences between older poems (for example, Twilight) and later ones (for example, Fear) in the same style are detectable. One might observe that ever increasing idiosyncratic reflections about landscape clearly break through. ”

“ They are not much different from poetry that praises gardens. The content is the distress of love, death, universal longing. The impulse to formulate them in the "cynical" vein (like cabaret songs) may, for example, might have arisen from the wish to feel superior. Most of the eighty poems are insignificant. ”

“ Examples: The Athlete: in the background is a demonstration of a view of the world. The Athlete... means that it is terrible that a man must also intellectually move his bowels.—Rubbers: a man wearing rubbers is different without them.
IV The earliest poetry forms a second group:
Twilight
The intention is to eliminate the difference between time and space in favor of the idea of poetry. The poems want to represent the effect of twilight on the landscape. ”

“ In the background an old man and a silk handkerchief.
Morning
... And all the streets lie smooth and shining there.
Only occasionally does a solid citizen hurry along them.
A swell girl argues violently with Papa.
A baker happens to be looking at the lovely sky.
The dead sun, wide and thick, hangs on the houses. ”

“ III The following poems can be divided into three groups. One combines fantastic, half-playful images: The Sad Man, Rubbers, Capriccio, The Patent-Leather Shoe, A Barkeeper's Coarse Complaint. (First appeared in Aktion, in Simplicissimus, in March, Pan and elsewhere) . Pleasure in what is purely artistic is unmistakable. ”