Lost at Sea steht auf seinem Grabstein. Am 27. April 1932 ist der amerikanische Dichter Hart Crane im Golf von Mexiko ertrunken. Über Bord gesprungen. Wie es der Dichter →Ken Beattie in seinem Gedicht For Hart Crane beschreibt:
Pushed
from this ship
by his own hand
Hart's image merges.
No St. John or Scylla
to embellish his swim,
but stark realization
the leap toward wonder
rests with him...
his own priest
casting his
own line.
from this ship
by his own hand
Hart's image merges.
No St. John or Scylla
to embellish his swim,
but stark realization
the leap toward wonder
rests with him...
his own priest
casting his
own line.
Crane gilt als einer der wichtigsten Vertreter der literarischen Moderne in Amerika. Er hat es schwer gehabt, in Deutschland bekannt zu werden. An mir kann das nicht liegen, denn er war schon hier in den Posts Hart Crane, Brooklyn Bridge und White Buildings. Der erste, der Hart Crane nach Deutschland brachte, war der Dichter Joachim Uhlmann, der 1960 die Gedichte Weiße Bauten übersetzte. Ihm folgte 1966 →Dieter Leisegang, der bei Adorno studiert hatte, mit einem zehn Seiten schmalen Band, der Moment Fugue hieß, das titelgebende Gedicht finden Sie →hier. Dann dauerte es beinahe noch vierzig Jahre, bis endlich mal jemand Cranes Hauptwerk →The Bridge übersetzte. Man muss Ute Eisinger für die Übersetzung des Langgedichts sehr dankbar sein. Klaus Reichert auch, der das kluge Nachwort geschrieben hat. 2013 kam noch einmal Weiße Bauten: Gedichte heraus, diesmal in der Übersetzung von Christian Lux. Ein riesiger Teil der →Collected Poems wartet immer noch auf Übersetzer.
Ich habe heute ein Gedicht, in dem sich Hart Crane selbst vorstellt. Robert Lowell, der Crane the best writer of his generation genannt hat, hat es für ihn geschrieben:
Words for Hart Crane
When the Pulitzers showered on some dope
or screw who flushed our dry mouths out with soap,
few people would consider why I took
to stalking sailors, and scattered Uncle Sam’s
phoney gold-plated laurels to the birds.
Because I knew my Whitman like a book,
stranger in America, tell my country: I,
Catullus redivivus, once the rage
of the Village and Paris, used to play my role
of homosexual, wolfing the stray lambs
who hungered by the Place de la Concorde.
My profit was a pocket with a hole.
Who asks for me, the Shelley of my age,
must lay his heart out for my bed and board.
or screw who flushed our dry mouths out with soap,
few people would consider why I took
to stalking sailors, and scattered Uncle Sam’s
phoney gold-plated laurels to the birds.
Because I knew my Whitman like a book,
stranger in America, tell my country: I,
Catullus redivivus, once the rage
of the Village and Paris, used to play my role
of homosexual, wolfing the stray lambs
who hungered by the Place de la Concorde.
My profit was a pocket with a hole.
Who asks for me, the Shelley of my age,
must lay his heart out for my bed and board.
Wenn Lowell ihn the Shelley of my age sagen lässt, dann war das nicht ironisch gemeint, Lowell meinte das wirklich. Ein Gedicht von Hart Crane habe ich natürlich auch noch:
Repose Of Rivers
The willows carried a slow sound,
A sarabande the wind mowed on the mead.
I could never remember
That seething, steady leveling of the marshes
Till age had brought me to the sea.
Flags, weeds. And remembrance of steep alcoves
Where cypresses shared the noon’s
Tyranny; they drew me into hades almost.
And mammoth turtles climbing sulphur dreams
Yielded, while sun-silt rippled them
Asunder ...
How much I would have bartered! the black gorge
And all the singular nestings in the hills
Where beavers learn stitch and tooth.
The pond I entered once and quickly fled—
I remember now its singing willow rim.
And finally, in that memory all things nurse;
After the city that I finally passed
With scalding unguents spread and smoking darts
The monsoon cut across the delta
At gulf gates ... There, beyond the dykes
I heard wind flaking sapphire, like this summer,
And willows could not hold more steady sound.
A sarabande the wind mowed on the mead.
I could never remember
That seething, steady leveling of the marshes
Till age had brought me to the sea.
Flags, weeds. And remembrance of steep alcoves
Where cypresses shared the noon’s
Tyranny; they drew me into hades almost.
And mammoth turtles climbing sulphur dreams
Yielded, while sun-silt rippled them
Asunder ...
How much I would have bartered! the black gorge
And all the singular nestings in the hills
Where beavers learn stitch and tooth.
The pond I entered once and quickly fled—
I remember now its singing willow rim.
And finally, in that memory all things nurse;
After the city that I finally passed
With scalding unguents spread and smoking darts
The monsoon cut across the delta
At gulf gates ... There, beyond the dykes
I heard wind flaking sapphire, like this summer,
And willows could not hold more steady sound.
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