Till Lindemann's 'Messer' - "Tod Nach Noten"

A difficult poem, Till's own Danse Macabre.

(Poem no. 04 out of 54, located pg. 18 of ‘Messer’, 2010 print.)

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.



Death After Music

Born in distress
And laid next to a sow
Fatally for its teats
With milk in both ears
So openly causing offence
Having aged in transience
Thank death for no rebirth

But blessed are the dead;
They snuffed it on framed notes
Small, vitrified spirits
Digging into the souls
The tall, dead Master
A waltz of idiots
The heatbeat sets the rhythm
And so we die - by notes.

Original Meter: Not particularly consistent meter. Truncated iambic tetrameters are the majority, but otherwise there isn't a smooth meter throughout.

Original Rhyme Scheme: ABACBAC DDEFEFGD.

Comments: This is a pretty difficult poem. Precisely because of this the translation has not been changed much - I did the needed work the first time around and it was a real pain, for this one especially. For those who have the Rosenrot album, you may recognize the first stanza from the booklet. For a short simple poem it's also got a lot of words that Till must have felt like making up for the hell of it.

'Thank death' is 'Tod sei Dank' in the original text, a pun on 'Gott sei Dank' ('Thank God') as far as I know.

'Noten' can be 'notes' or 'music' in this context. I have used both; the former for the text and the latter for the actual title.