27. Edith Sitwell

„Façade“, „By the Lake“

„Dead, the leaves that like asses’ears hung on the trees
When last we wandered and squandered joy here“

Übersetzung:
„Tote Blätter hingen wie Eselsohren an den Bäumen
Als zuletzt wir hier uns in Freude versäumten“

(…)

Façade: Jodelling Song

„We bear velvet cream,
Green and babyish
Small leaves seem; each stream
Horses‘ tails that swish“

Übersetzung
„Rahm ist hier wie Samt
Grün und kinderweich
Das Blätterdach; der Bach
Wie ein Pferdeschweif“

Walzer, Polka, Kinderreim, aus 21 solcher Nummern besteht das Werk Façade, das 1922 in London uraufgeführt wurde. Die Dichterin stand dabei hinter einem Vorhang und rezitierte ihre Verse durch ein Megafon. Das Publikum buhte, aber der Auftritt machte Edith Sitwell bekannt.

/ Eva Pfister, DLR

Robert K. Martin summed up Sitwell’s literary career in Dictionary of Literary Biography: „Sitwell’s reputation has suffered from the exceptional success of Facade,which was often treated as if it were the only work she had ever written. Inadequate attention has been paid to her development as a social poet, as a religious poet, and as a visionary. Her career traces the development of English poetry from the immediate post-World War I period of brightness and jazzy rhythms through the political involvements of the 1930s and the return to spiritual values after World War II. Her technique evolved, and, although she always remained a poet committed to the exploration of sound, she came to use sound patterns as an element in the construction of deep philosophic poems that reflect on her time and on man’s condition. Edith Sitwell needs to be remembered not only as the bright young parodist of Facade, but as the angry chronicler of social injustice, as a poet who has found forms adequate to the atomic age and its horrors, and as a foremost poet of love. Her work displays enormous range of subject and of form. With her contemporary [T. S.] Eliot she remains one of the most important voices of twentieth-century English poetry.“ / poetryfoundation

“Tournez, Tournez, Bon Chevaux De Bois”

BY EDITH SITWELL

Turn, turn again,
Ape’s blood in each vein!
The people that pass
Seem castles of glass,
The old and the good
Giraffes of the blue wood,
The soldier, the nurse,
Wooden-face and a curse,
Are shadowed with plumage
Like birds, by the gloomage.
Blond hair like a clown’s
The music floats—drowns
The creaking of ropes,
The breaking of hopes,
The wheezing, the old,
Like harmoniums scold;
Go to Babylon, Rome,
The brain-cells called home,
The grave, new Jerusalem—
Wrinkled Methusalem!
From our floating hair
Derived the first fair
And queer inspiration
Of music, the nation
Of bright-plumed trees
And harpy-shrill breeze . . .

*  *  *  *

Turn, turn again,
Ape’s blood in each vein!

from Coterie, 1919

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