Love Poems

BERTOLT BRECHT

LOVE
POEMS

Translated by

David Constantine and Tom Kuhn

Foreword by Barbara Brecht-Schall

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CONTENTS

A Personal Foreword by Barbara Brecht-Schall

Translators’ Introduction

Baal’s song

O you can’t know what I suffer . . .

A bitter love song

However that may be, there was a time . . .

Song of love

The youth and the maiden

Half in my sleep . . .

The days of all your bitternesses . . .

On vitality

Through the room the wild wind comes . . .

Down in the willow grove . . .

The seventh psalm

Heh. Psalm

The eleventh psalm

12th psalm

Remembering Marie A.

The river sings praises

To M

On the way from Augsburg to Timbuktu . . .

Balaam Lai in his thirtieth year . . .

Now in the night . . .

Need for art

There at the beginning . . .

Balaam Lai in July

Song of lost innocence folding the linen

Ballad

Discovery about a young woman

Ballad of the faithless women

The song of Surabaya-Johnny

The guest

He was easy to get . . .

Again and again . . .

Tercets on love—The lovers

Spring

The first sonnet

The third sonnet

Eighth sonnet

Buying oranges

When we had been apart . . .

The twelfth sonnet

The thirteenth sonnet

Thoughts of a stripper during the act of undressing

Nanna’s song

The madam’s song

Song of the widow in love

The actress in exile

When I’d reported to the couple, thus . . .

I shall go with the one I love

To be read mornings and evenings . . .

Kin-Jeh said of his sister

Our unceasing conversation . . .

Kin-Jeh’s second poem about his sister

Fruitless call

19th Sonnet

The good comrade M.S.

The 21st sonnet

Sonnet

Sonnet No. 19

Then at the last, when death . . .

Wreckage

Remembering my little teacher . . .

In the ninth year fleeing from Hitler . . .

My general has fallen . . .

After the death of my collaborator M.S.

When I came back from Saint-Nazaire . . .

Instruction in love

The song of fraternization

The plum song

Sauna and sex

Weaknesses

When I left you, afterwards . . .

My love gave me a little branch . . .

Seven roses the rosebush has . . .

When it is fun with you . . .

Smoke

Love song from a bad time

Send me a leaf . . .

When I have to leave you dear . . .

Notes

A PERSONAL FOREWORD

Papa loved women, many women. Anyone who knew him would not dispute this fact, and he was faithful to each of them. I still do not understand the attraction that they felt for him. To be completely honest, Bidi—the nickname that I used for him, a name he had acquired as a little boy in Augsburg—did not wash enough and wore long underwear, well after it was fashionable. But even as a young girl, I remember that women, like flies to honey, would always find him witty and charming. His passion, whether expressed to women, to his art, or to his children, seemed all-encompassing.

In now reflecting on my father, who died when I was twenty-six, this love, which formed so mammoth a part of his being, was most keenly expressed, I believe, in his poems. Yet my father, who as Hannah Arendt once wrote “staked his life and his art as few poets have ever done,” curiously remains far better known for his plays than for his poetry, especially in English-speaking countries. At the time of his death in 1956, no one, including my mother, Helene Weigel (she would call him “Brecht,” never “Bidi”), had any idea just how many poems he had written, but today we know that he composed over two thousand that encompass the totality of human existence—from nature to politics, including, quite prominently, love and sex. These poems, when they eventually appeared in Germany, became an enormous success, but initially it was not easy to get the love poems published, especially those whose explicitness created some hesitation at the time.

Even as a young girl, I always loved the poems. I remember him writing in the morning on several desks, since he had so many other things simultaneously going on. He was not, you might say, the type to take a shower before breakfast, but would simply put his trousers over his nightshirt and appear in our kitchen, then in Santa Monica, where we lived in the later years of the war, in a white clapboard house at 1063 Twenty-sixth Street. I would get him a cup of coffee or tea, but then he would start working immediately, whether at poetry or plays. I’ve been asked if he read his poems out loud to the family, which he would do only occasionally, very occasionally, only when he’d need a rhyme and would ask me for one, or if we happened to have guests.

From the time I was little, I felt immensely spoiled by my parents, who went to great lengths to make sure that I felt special. Nothing demonstrates this more than the story of our family’s escape from Germany in February of 1933. Just as the Reichstag burned down, Papa lay in the hospital in Berlin, recovering from appendicitis. My mother went to his room and asked what they should do, and he told her they must leave immediately. Perhaps just as serious as his condition was the fact that I was not in Berlin, but with my grandfather in Augsburg. The situation appeared so dire that they could not even wait for me. Even though he was hardly recovered, they left the hospital and took the next train to Vienna, still five years away from the Anschluss. The problem remained how to squire me, a little girl, out of a country whose borders were now patrolled and sealed. Arriving in the Austrian capital, they met up with Irene Grant, an English woman and a Quaker, who had a passport not only for herself but for her young son. It could not have been more perfect. She agreed to help, so I, a three-year-old girl, left Germany as a four-year-old boy, and was reunited immediately with my hugely relieved parents, who then promptly left Austria. We did not go far though, settling in Copenhagen, because my father wanted to remain geographically close to Germany, believing that the German people would come to their senses and soon toss the Nazis out of power.

In 1940, seven agonizing years later, we had, it seemed, become a family of permanent exile. Rather than having returned proudly to a restored democratic country, we continued to languish in Denmark, the situation far worse than anyone had imagined. Germany had already invaded Poland, England and France had declared war on the Nazis, and by this time the Danish-German border was anything but secure. You’d think that given the gravity of the political situation as well as the parade of refugee artists and visitors who needed to see Papa, he would have known little about my inner life, but an essay, which he simply called “Barbara,” written some time while in Denmark in 1940, suggests just the opposite. “Barbara—ten years old—is as thin as a sparrow in March,” he writes of this bookworm of a daughter, who even then found chocolate wonderful. “She has a tiny face with vibrant blue eyes,” he observes. “She is a strange creation, wild as a small hurricane, tender as Belgian lace. She can almost draw blood with her questions and is particularly generous in voicing her opinions.” Even though I’ve always thought that I take far more after my mother, I have to admit that the occasionally irascible, sensitive free spirit whom he describes as his daughter may take far more after him than I might care to admit.

Our lives as exiles continued to pose challenges, long after our move to the States and even after the end of the war, but Papa always went back to his poetry, which clearly must have been very important to him, since it took up so much of his time. My mother, Helene Weigel Brecht, who after our return to Berlin was one of the great actresses in the world and was known to everyone as Heli, recognized the value of his poetic work. In addition to looking after Papa’s Berliner Ensemble as its director (Intendant), Heli, whom father had originally met in the theater in Berlin, also took control of his literary legacy, and was determined to make the poems better known. When she died in 1971, my half sister and brother came to me, and though I was sick in bed, told me, “Barbara, you are not doing anything much, so please take care of Papa’s work.”

It seemed to all of us quite natural that I, like my mother, would be good in taking care of such things, although some people were furious that a woman could decide what could and could not be done with the plays. Despite the prominence of these plays, I’ve also devoted a great deal of time to getting all of Papa’s poems in print, and would constantly ask my colleagues which poems had not yet been published, whether because of political or prudish caution (the love sonnets, for example, were left out of the original publication). Over time, the poems—which he deliberately wrote so clearly and simply that even the nodding donkey that he kept on his desk could understand—have multiplied, so much so that they now form, I’m proud to say, an important body of twentieth-century German poetry.

Translated here by David Constantine and Tom Kuhn, Love Poems begins a major collaboration by these two gifted Oxford scholars to bring the vast body of Papa’s poetry into English. Upon a lifetime of reflection, I have found that the poems will do different things to each who reads them, but most important, I want people to enjoy my father’s poems and for them to be remembered.

—BARBARA BRECHT-SCHALL,

from an interview with Robert Weil,
Berlin, January 2014

TRANSLATORS’ INTRODUCTION

T. S. Eliot, writing on Tennyson, found in him “three qualities which are seldom found together except in the greatest poets: abundance, variety, and complete competence.” Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) is a great poet, one of the three or four best in the whole of German literature (a literature not short of first-rate poetry). He is abundant: the Berlin-­Frankfurt edition of his complete works contains more than two thousand poems. He is various, on many topics, from shifting points of view, in all the registers. He is widely eclectic, a thieving magpie of much of world literature, he took from Greece and Rome, China, Japan, Britain, America, his own compatriots, the living and the long dead, across frontiers of space and time. His technical virtuosity in traditional forms and in forms he invented or developed for his own needs, is breathtaking. He works effectively in hexameters, in tight rhyming quatrains, sonnets, ballads, unrhyming verse in irregular meters and in numerous other shapes and forms as the poetic occasion demands. For any just assessment of his total poetic oeuvre we should have to consider his dramas, too: the tense, sometimes violent verse of Saint Joan of the Stockyards, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, and (out of Hölderlin’s idiosyncratic translation) Antigone; the poignant lyricism of passages in The Good Person of Szechwan, the parodistic Shakespearian blank verse of Arturo Ui; the songs in many plays; and more, much more, besides. Brecht was a thorough poet. Throughout his writing life he thought constantly about the idea and the practice of poetry, about forms, about their nature, possibilities, best uses; and he adapted his thinking and his practice continually to answer the violently disrupting demands of the times and the places he lived in. This constant reflection on poetry, and the lifelong making of poetry, produced in Brecht a rare coherence of important things to say and of apt ways of saying them.

In the English-speaking world Brecht is still best known as a dramatist and theoretician on drama; and even his standing there is perhaps less than it should be since some in Britain and America—those who have not read his work, or not with an open mind—wrongly think of him as dogmatically bound into a politics which, so the “reasoning” goes, has no relevance since the walls came down. We will not argue against that wrong view here. But any doubters about Brecht might be helped into a closer understanding of him through the poetry. Poetry, by its very nature, resists being reduced to any dogmatic, let alone fundamentalist, view of the world. Poems may debate with an ideology but won’t be bound by it. Brecht knew that; he knew very well what the peculiar resources and effects of poetry are. He knew that poetry can help in ways which are peculiarly its own.

Even in Germany, the true scope, variety, and force of Brecht’s poetry did not begin to become apparent until after his death and the compiling of the complete editions of his work. And readers without German, after the three-volume Methuen translations published in 1976 and long out of print, have not been in a position to extend and refine their enjoyment and understanding of Brecht the poet. Our translations of a large selection of his poetry, already well advanced, will go some way, we hope, towards giving him his due in America and Britain and throughout the English-speaking world. Meanwhile this volume of love poems will be the forerunner and sign of the abundance to come.

Brecht, like Goethe, was a lyric poet all his writing life. He is known, very properly, for his engagement, as a writer, in the bitter and violent politics of his age, but he should also be known, quite as much as Goethe, as a poet driven by Eros. Like Goethe, Brecht was always more or less in love, and in his total oeuvre love, or let us say Eros, is expressed, discussed, enacted in an astonishing variety of modes, forms, tones, and circumstances. The first person singular in poetry—even in lyric poetry—can only very rarely be conflated with or confined to the person writing the poem. This is well known, but in Brecht’s case it perhaps needs saying again and with some emphasis. In his poetry, no less than in his plays, he is a versatile inhabiter of roles: literary, historical, and biographical, as well as many others, male and female, that he fabricates and tries out in situations that interest him. He is a poet of many personae—which word comes from the Latin personare, meaning “to sound through,” one sense of the word persona being the mask a Roman actor wore and spoke his lines through. The wearing of a mask, the adoption of a persona in poetry, far from serving evasiveness and mendacity, is an effective way of getting at the truth and making it evident. And that is the case with love poems as much as with any other sort.