There are two interpretations of this poem. Take a deep breath. This is going to get messy.
Disclaimer: Poem copyrighted to Till Lindemann. This post does not include photos/illustrations of said poem from 'Messer'. The original German text is also not included. This is only a interpretive translation and accuracy is not guaranteed.
This is my first attempt at translating this rather enigmatic poem. At first, this poem only had the exact same kind of enigma to it that most of Till's poems had.
For Three Weeks She Has Laid Motionless
For three weeks she has laid motionless
Upon my Baroque-age table
Only breaking her hip, the stake
Makes a marriage movement [1]
The sight makes my eyes flee
I cannot hold my gaze
I attempt to cool her lumbar [2]
So I give her the medicine
My hands are clammy with sweat
Her whole body seems to be frozen
Some Mozart might help the ears
For she may still only hear [3]
With pulled knees, I turn
And shape myself upward [4]
I exhale steam from my mouth
Three weeks the lap-cloth has been unchanged [5]
She turns red above her legs
I do not let her suffer
Cannot dress, but I nevertheless clean her [6]
And let her sleep to the Magic Flute
Notes: Keep the lines in italics in mind.
Comments: He's giving 'her' medicine and dressing her, and the tone of the poem makes it clear that he is quite exhausted. And he's been doing this for three weeks. My first thought was that it was perhaps about an infant Nele, helpless and ill from a hip injury, that he was caring for. After all, it would make sense. And then I started thinking a little more and thought maybe this might not be the case. The lines in italics are the ones I question the most, so we'll go through them.
[1] - 'Marriage movement', 'Ehestandsbewegung', was a phrase that I needed to search for. It seems to be a euphemism for 'push-up exercises', which is still a very weird choice of words regardless.
[2] - 'Lenden', 'lumbar', may be also plural for 'loins'.
[3] - This line is ambiguous as to whether it means that she can literally do nothing but hear, or if he's just trying to reach out to her via Mozart.
[4] - Till uses a lot of lathe and wooden carving/shaping metaphors here for some reason. 'ein Zupf' is capitalized so I assumed this was a noun, but the only meaning I can find is 'plucking' or 'pushing up' which is not a noun at all.
[5] - Not sure what to make of 'Schosstuch', literally 'lap-cloth'. Perhaps an apron?
[6] - I admit to elaborating on this one. The full line is 'kann sich doch nicht sauber kleiden'. An alternate translation I can squeeze out would be 'Can't dress (itself? themselves?) in clean clothes' but I'm really confused on this one.
So given all of those things, I think this poem about 'Nele'... is not actually about Nele. There's of course the fact that the figure has been completely motionless for three weeks, which given Till's unusual fixation on writing poems about necrophilia and death, just gives kind of more strange implications. I would like some help with this one - if you have the full text, please comment. And although I've never put full texts of those poems in this blog and never intend to, I'm afraid to say that you'd probably be able to find most of them online anyway. So yes, a complicated poem that turned out to be... hmm. Not sure what to feel.
I had a similar idea of this one, but one of my European pals says it refers to a "police incident" in the German press of the time - a man who kept his dead girlfriend's body on his table for weeks before he gave her up to the authorities.
ReplyDeleteSo it may be like "Mein Teil" or "Wiener Blut" or "Klavier" - an exercise in trying to understand sexual insanity.
I wondered if it might be about a woman's menstrual cycle. Approximately three weeks out of four where nothing happens and the top of her legs turning red, suggest this. Lap-cloth could be a sanitary towel.
ReplyDelete