Else Lasker-Schüler, from the clamor to the whispering

Great-granddaughter of a rabbi, daughter of a wealthy and cultured family, she married Dr. Lasker at the age of 25: her role as a good bourgeoisie and a doctor's wife lasted five years.

In 1899, already settled in Berlin (she had been born in Wuppertal, in present-day North Rhine-Westphalia), she left her husband and gave herself fully to Bohemia.

During the first two decades of the 20th century, Else Lasker-Schüler was a central figure in Berlin's artistic life, based at the Café des Westens on the Kurfürstendamm, and an unofficial organ in the magazine

run by her second husband. the poet, Georg Lewin (whom she renamed Herwarth Walden, after Thoreau).

Alfred Döblin and Oskar Kokoschka were part of that circle, which we know today as expressionism and which was the first bridge between symbolism and avant-garde.

Or, to put it in Lasker-Schüler terms, the first Styx that, once crossed, had no turning back.

She was a pioneer in that movement: in the search for a more lively diction, capable of encompassing the registers that go from clamor to whispering.

And in the deep interrelation between poetry and visual arts, which in Paris was going to explore 10 or 15 years later than this first book of his, which is now published in Spanish.

She dressed in long robes, a multitude of necklaces and bracelets;

in one of her best-known photos she is seen playing the flute and dressed in the oriental style: Prince Tino of Bagdad was one of the pseudonyms she used.

Another was Jussuf of Thebes;

in his poems biblical names are mixed with Greek and Saxon mythology.

In 1937, the Nazis stripped her of German nationality, after burning her books.

Lasker-Schüler had lived in Zurich since 1933;

after several comings and goings, she settled in Jerusalem, where she died in 1945. In addition to being a poet and playwright, she left behind a graphic work that only in recent years has been the subject of various exhibitions and catalogs.

From her first publications she was recognized as the most important poet in the German language: this is how Gottfried Benn, who was her disciple and lover, judged her.

Then he denied it out of condescension to the Nazis and finally, in 1952, he praised her: “His themes were perhaps Jewish;

her fantasy, oriental;

but her language was German, an exuberant, lavish, tender German;

a modern and sweet language, sprouted at each turn from its creative core.

Always herself, the enemy of what is satisfied… ”.

Karl Krauss always admired her: the first time he published her in

presented her as "the most powerful lyrical personality of modern Germany."

With Georg Trakl they dedicated poems to each other, and he considered her as the voice most akin to his own.

Kafka, on the other hand, hated her "verbal ostentation."

Friedrich Dürrenmatt defined her as the "savior of the German language in barbarous times" and compared her to Rilke.

"But it is volcanic in nature, with higher peaks and steeper chasms," he said.

Styx

was his first book, published in 1901: it is the river that divides the kingdom of the living and the dead.

As Cecilia Dreymüller points out in the preface to this bilingual edition, this title indicates her desire to be, from the beginning, somewhere else, on the other side.

On that shore are not only those who have already left, like her beloved mother, to whom she dedicates a very beautiful page ("On the roof the hand of the clouds, / The wet and wandering hand of the shadows, / Look for my mother ").

There is, above all, the realm of passion, of art without academies, of eroticism without repression.

Like the strident colors of the paintings by Franz Marc or Georg Grosz, his great friends and collaborators, or Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, his poems burn as soon as the book is opened: “From my insomniac eyes it flames / A squeaky restless light”;

“My joy groans like the cry of a martyr / And it breaks loose and frees itself from its bonds”;

"My laugh was released from me, / My laugh with the eyes of a girl, / My young, jumping laugh ... / My crazy, reckless spring laugh / Dream about death."

"My arms surrounded him like flames / ... And all the suns sang songs of fire."

"My desire bubbles in the longing for my blood / Like wild wine burning in blades of fire", and that within "A hot song of love from the worlds!"

(blood) is one of the most frequent words.

The series of alliterations that he forms with

(flourish) and

(blue) will run through his poetry to the

Klavier of his latest book:

In Spanish, that book,

,

circulated mainly in Spanish

, translated by Sonia Almau (Igitur), which included a short anthology of the rest of her work.

One might have thought, a priori, the relevance of a new, broader anthology.

But after reading

is difficult to deny the wisdom of the decision to publish this complete book: the “62 lyrical soldiers” that make it up, as defined by its author, in addition to forming a not accidental battalion, sing and roar in Spanish with a recent strength, as if the translation renewed the novelty that they supposed in their first training.

Although it seems a paradox, this freshness is due to the meticulous work of Carlos D. Capella, who spent years translating this book and polishing its nuances.

Lasker-Schüler is a returning pioneer who continues to demand that we give her eyes and ears wide open.

Stygian

Else Lasker-Schüler

Bilingual edition

Translation of Carlos D. Capella

Foreword by Cecilia Dreymüller

Tres Molins, 2020. 163 pages.

17 euros

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