I smelled hyena rutting in the bars.
I met jackals in the taverns.
I heard the roar of baboons on the terraces.
Vultures I saw, tearing through wires,
Scorpions filling themselves with bright poison.
I saw iguanas raging in the compounds,
locust swarms forcing their blood
onto a lustful sky;
yet I saw no trace of human.
*
A dust cloud came,
a red oppressive
one,
a mistbody,
sank out of sight.
The subway stuck fast,
the bus crushed against the wall,
noon was
a reddish night.
And smelled of leather,
of steppe and animal sweat.
Women fell into spasms of lust;
Children froze mid-play;
and it rained sand.
*
(December)
The Bonechurch, Winter
adorned with glassy daggers,
and the Cross, on which the Frozen One hangs,
glistens in crystalline glare.
Come, Lord of noiseless death
and read us the Frost Mass;
it is time to solidify.
from Prison Slips
Wolfdietrich Schnurre
translated from the German by Chris Holdaway
Listen to an excerpt of the original German read by the translator:
Wolfdietrich Schnurre’s collection of poems Kassiber (Prison Slips) first appeared with Suhrkamp Verlag in 1957. Dotted throughout were eight poems all bearing the title “Kassiber,” meaning a secret message sent by prisoners to other prisoners, or to the outside world. In the 1964 edition Kassiber / Neue Gedichte (Prison Slips / New Poems; Suhrkamp), Schnurre removed the second and third “Kassiber” poems and retitled the eighth as “Dezember” (December). In his collected poems from 1979, Kassiber und Neue Gedichte (Prison Slips and New Poems; Paul List Verlag), he restored the third poem, retained the eighth as “Dezember, and added a ninth “Kassiber” poem in the section “Neue Gedichte 1965–1979” (New Poems 1965–1979).
The changes to the “Kassiber” poems constitute a particularly visible instance of themes of guilt and reflection on Germany in the Second World War in Schnurre’s work, the wavering textual history materially representing his struggle to find trust even in his own words. I wanted to present the strain of thought worked through in the “Kassiber” poems over many decades as an uninterrupted sequence: from oppressively apocalyptic images to moments of defiance and clarity. It should be noted, however, that Schnurre never presented them as a contiguous sequence; they were always scattered throughout his collections, separated by varying quantities of other poems, and united only at a distance by their shared title.
This publication includes the second, fifth, and eighth “Kassiber” poems.
The changes to the “Kassiber” poems constitute a particularly visible instance of themes of guilt and reflection on Germany in the Second World War in Schnurre’s work, the wavering textual history materially representing his struggle to find trust even in his own words. I wanted to present the strain of thought worked through in the “Kassiber” poems over many decades as an uninterrupted sequence: from oppressively apocalyptic images to moments of defiance and clarity. It should be noted, however, that Schnurre never presented them as a contiguous sequence; they were always scattered throughout his collections, separated by varying quantities of other poems, and united only at a distance by their shared title.
This publication includes the second, fifth, and eighth “Kassiber” poems.
Wolfdietrich Schnurre (1920–1989) was a post-war German writer, known as a member of Gruppe 47 (Group 47), for which his 1948 story “Das Begräbnis” (The Funeral; Ja. Zeitung der jungen Generation, 1948) was a founding text. He was drafted into the German army during the Second World War and was later imprisoned for attempted desertion. After the war he wrote criticism, short stories, poems, and novels. His book of poems Kassiber (Prison Slips; Suhrkamp Verlag) was first published in 1957. He is known also for the hybrid autobiographical novels Als Vaters Bart noch rot war (When Father’s Beard was still red; Verlag Die Arche, 1958), and Der Schattenfotograf (The Shadow Photographer; Paul List Verlag, 1978). He received the Georg Büchner Prize in 1983.
Chris Holdaway (1989–) is a poet, publisher, and translator from Aotearoa, New Zealand. He is the author of Gorse Poems (Titus Books, 2022) and directs the literary arts publisher Compound Press. He studied poetry and translation at the University of Notre Dame, and translates poetry into English from French, German, and Spanish. More at chrisholdaway.com
