A Translation of "Über Gedichte," a Lecture on Modern German Poetry by Ingeborg Bachmann

On Poems

Ladies and Gentlemen,

A beginning has been made, and the foundation-stones of the first misunderstandings have been laid.  At the beginning the beginning seems like the hardest part--but once you have finally started speaking, uttering a thing or two, the continuation proves to be even more difficult.  Such being the case, I would prefer for us to go on a ramble rather than discuss something specific, and as we ramble to and fro to bend over to pick up a word that was dropped at the beginning.

There is nothing more daunting for someone who has written poems himself than to present a survey of contemporary lyric poetry; his knowledge is for the most part slighter than one assumes; moreover, whatever new is being produced in other countries will remain hidden from all of us for a long time; for the most part we become familiar with it after a lag of one or two generations; we know Eliot, Auden, and Dylan Thomas--perhaps simply because he died recently, because he is a legendary drunkard; we know Apollinaire, Eluard, Aragon, René Char almost as the most recent of the French poets; of the Italians we hardly yet know Ungaretti and Montale, of the Russians Blok and Mayakovsky and finally Pasternak, owing to a questionable political dust storm, and this is not merely because poems are rather rarely translated; even if we happen to have another language or several other languages at our command and try hard to keep a watchful eye on the other side of every border, our present view of poems is still very much a blurry one.  When they possess a new power of comprehension, this power is appreciable only within their respective languages and does not manifest itself to the outside world like that of novels and plays.  There is scarcely a single new novel, a single new play, of whose publication or performance in Paris or New York or Rome we would not expect to receive speedy news; there is scarcely any such work that we do not speedily set about reading or are not speedily forced to see.  But poems also happen not to be very marketable, and so their effect even within their own language communities remains extremely minimal even when—as is asserted today in a few countries, including Germany—the most vigorously gifted writers are to be found among the lyric poets. Whether the assertion is accurate or not is anybody’s guess--in any case, there is also another, more disagreeable, side to this, for there is no setting in which dilettantism burgeons more abundantly than in the lyric poem, and there is nothing that gives most readers a poorer idea of whether or not this or that author has really “got something.”  And many people are even so disagreeable as to assume that no volume of poetry in our language could ever have any effect but to encourage twenty more young people to start writing poems themselves.  I am more troubled by the question whether confining ourselves to German poems as representative of modern poetry is simply a mistake.  I do not believe that it is, not in this case, for of course they initially demand to be perceived as what they truly are here and now and by us; their foreign words, their foreign bodies wish first and foremost to be adopted by their own language.  

Admittedly you are not now going to become acquainted with all the modern poets in existence--for that purpose, there are plenty of treatises in which they are ranked and sorted into nature lyricists and lyricists of consciousness and God knows what else, complete with examples; there are anthologies, reprints every month in every magazine, and there are volumes of poetry that can be found in the libraries; with these you can adequately brief yourselves.  For I am incapable of presenting them to you with individualized labels on them and coining some pithy adage about each of them.

So on to our rambles…

CONTEMPLATE YOUR FINGERTIPS

Contemplate your fingertips: is their color already changing?

One fine day it’ll come back, that eradicated plague.

The postman will chuck it like a letter into the rattling mailbox,

put it on your dinner plate like a ration of herring!

the mother will nurse with it like a breast.

What do we do now that no one’s left alive

Who knew well how to keep company with it?

He who is good friends with the horrific

can await its visit equanimously.

We keep on preparing ourselves for happiness

but it doesn’t willingly sit in our chairs.

Contemplate your fingertips!  When they change color to black

it is too late.

This poem is by Günter Eich.  I hope that nobody is inclined--if such a thing were possible--to raise his hand because he has been unsettled by the question, What is the poet trying to say here?  But what observations are we capable of making; what could actually emerge from a preoccupation with this poem?  I for one am inclined to assume that this poet drafted his design in a different way than poets a generation and two generations before him.  It is quite hard to picture him as a prophet or as an artist, as a magician, as [---]; there is not a jot of self-importance, of presumption, in his conception of himself, for throughout the work such a conception is evident; his claim, his position, is constantly being asserted.  Here there is already a change in which one can observe that something has taken place here, namely an alteration in the position of the producer himself.  And yet despite the resignation on so many [---] no abdication, no retreat is available to the speaker even though the place from which he is speaking has been shifted into a fatal solitude, shifted not voluntarily, not arrogantly, but rather as a punishment imposed by a society in the midst of society, a place in which he does not feel at home, and staying awake becomes difficult for a person who must, can, will, be watchful.  A watchful man is speaking; he is a sleepless quarry of exposure dwelling in our midst...  

When the window is wide open

And the earth’s ghastliness is blowing in

The infant with two heads

--one of them slumbering, the other screaming—

screams at us from the world’s length

and suffuses the ears of my beloved with horror.

The vocables of reality simply are what they are [in Günter Eich’s poems]; their stage is populated by window, garbage dumps, rubbish, freight train, rain-, rust-, and oil-stains, thermos, bakery, factory, subway; the world is questioned but not left at a loss for answers.  The only entity left at a loss for answers is this I, which is pursued, warned, and asked to issue warnings of its own.  What this specifically means, ladies and gentlemen, is that nowadays there can no longer be any talk whatsoever about a sacred song, about a mission, about a chosen community of artists.  By way of deliberately drawing your attention to an extreme version of this tendency, I shall quote a profession of faith made by a member of Stefan George’s circle during its heyday:

We are of the proud belief that for these years we have not merely gathered the best that a plenary assemblage of tribes in a specific domain of human ability was capable of producing; rather, we hope that we have also paved the way in pursuing which those who are to come and become after us will discover an ever-purer artistic firmament. ¹     

But for all the weightiness of this “pure artistic firmament”’s foundations, it proved unsustainable, and these spirits, who at that time quite understandably rose up against a trite, insipid school of naturalism and whose achievements we shall not forget, have somehow managed to survive the collapse of their artistic firmament.  Expressionism soon dealt the first counterblow, and under the impact of the First World War isolated human voices asserted themselves, sometimes in execration, sometimes in exhaustion.  And new aesthetic revolts followed, revolts that must also be talked about, specifically because they led to never-endingly influential linguistic discoveries and discoveries about reality, although in one respect they have been disavowed for exemplifying what we now regard as the worst tendencies.

I am thinking here even of surrealism with its idea of beauty:  the surrealists insisted that beauty had to be terroristic, breathtaking, and demonically bewildering, that surrealism was going to lead us to our deaths, and in the second surrealist manifesto, André Breton, the spokesman for the new literary movement, wrote that surrealism was by no means an artistic school, that, rather, it was striving for total insubordination, for outright sabotage, that everything must conspire to annihilate the ideas of the family, the fatherland, and religion--so far, so good; this was quite impressive--but then came the apodosis: that surrealism was striving for nothing other than power. “The most simple surrealist act consists of picking up a revolver, going down into the street, and shooting randomly into the crowd as long as one can.”

This prescription was of course never subsequently put into practice by the surrealists; oh, no; and yet you probably also know that all writers and painters were discredited, ostracized, threatened with death under the German dictatorship, and yet there remains an unexplained residue, a suspicion that without realizing what they were doing, its victims allowed their language to converge at its limits with the language of power.  Naturally surrealism had intellectual weight, an anti-bourgeois animus; it was serious about wishing to shock; it had nothing in common with the factitious praxis of murder that was carried out later on by a completely different party.

Much more questionable still were the beauty-proclamations of the futurists, for they called--understandably, to be sure, in a thrust, a violent burst of desire--for the embracing of the technical world in its beauty and, to be sure, for recognizing it as nothing but beauty.  It was Marinetti who with a young man’s flair for fanaticism cried:

We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing automobile with its bonnet adorned with great tubes like serpents with explosive breath ... a roaring motor car which seems to run on machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.

(from an unattributed translation)

In the later futurist manifesto, which coincided with the outbreak of the Ethiopian colonial war, one reads:

For twenty–seven years we Futurists have rebelled against the branding of war as antiaesthetic.. . . Accordingly we state: ... War is beautiful because it establishes man's dominion over the subjugated machinery by means of gas masks, terrifying megaphones, flame throwers, and small tanks. War is beautiful because it initiates the dreamt-of metalization of the human body. War is beautiful because it enriches a flowering meadow with the fiery orchids of machine guns. War is beautiful because it combines the gunfire, the cannonades, the ceasefire, the scents, and the stench of putrefaction into a symphony. War is beautiful because it creates new architecture, like that of the big tanks, the geometrical formation flights, the smoke spirals from burning villages, and many others. . . . Poets and artists of Futurism! . . . remember these principles of an aesthetics of war so that your struggle for a new literature and a new graphic art ... may be illumined by them!²

This is the way the apotheosis of l’art pour l’art can sometimes look.   Here the flashover was formulated distinctly enough.

Please do not suppose that I am so narrow-minded as to dwell insistently on questions of guilt in artistic matters and to push such questions into the foreground.  Let us calmly take yet another step forward.  I by no means regard it as a matter of pure chance that Gottfried Benn and Ezra Pound---a writer whom a few of our young poets must discover for themselves at this moment of all moments, an American who had the most convoluted ideas about revitalization and a renaissance of the Renaissance--that in the case of both of these poets (and they are both poets; of this there can be no doubt), it was only a step from the pure artistic firmament to currying favor with barbarism.

But there is a maxim from which Karl Kraus can never be dissociated and which one hopes never to tire of emphasizing: “Everything of any merit in a language is rooted in morality.”  And morality here does not signify anything that can be popularized or liquidated, like bourgeois or Christian morality--not a codex--but rather that airstrip on which the standard of truth and lies must be established ever anew by every new writer.  Just now we were hit by a maxim: “War is beautiful because by means of gas masks, flame throwers…” and so forth...

And here is a poem of our time in which a gas mask also makes an appearance; this poem has been included in an anthology of love poems from recent years, and you can see the different sort of light into which its objects have been thrust; a light that signalizes the shattering of an entire aesthetics of delirium: “Frog Prince the Bridegroom” by Marie Luise Kaschnitz:

How hideous

Your bridegroom is

You virgin Life

His countenance a gas mask

His girdle an ammunition pouch

His hand

A flamethrower

Your bridegroom the frog prince

Rides with you

(A bike flies hither, once thither)

Over the houses of the dead

Between two

Apocalypses

He presses himself

Into your lap

Only in the darkness

Do you touch

His wettish hair

Only at daybreak

Only at

Daybreak

Only at

Do you behold his

Mournful

Lovely

Eyes

The only things that are still called beautiful here are the bridegroom’s eyes, his mournful eyes.  “Mournful” precedes the word “beautiful.”  And at the beginning this man with a flamethrower, with an ammunition pouch, this man with a claim to power, is referred to in a line that reads “How hideous your bridegroom is...”

There are such things as new specifications that are met, new definitions, even in poems.

At this same moment, in Sweden, the oldest living German female poet is writing something that applies to young people and likewise describes what they are doing and what they have to do: this poet is Nelly Sachs.

Here she is writing about a young man who lacks a sense of direction, a young man who is in conflict with all the lights of heaven:

From the races

acclimatized to rocking chairs

he divests himself

having strayed outside himself

in his fiery helmet

he vulnerates the night.

(Reminding us “who are building the new house,” of the foundation on which we are building, of how many graves, how many sites of sins, this foundation consists; and at the same time imploring us not to sigh, not to waste our minutes on weeping, but rather to insure that our walls and equipment are as receptive as Aeolian harps.)

But here the prophetic and psalmodizing mode is not be confused with artistic prophesying; this is no gesture, but rather a movement arising from the experience of suffering. And could it be accepted in any other spirit? Have we not become both quite sensitive and quite sober and excessively dismissive of intoxication with language on the one hand and conservative verbal Biedermeiers on the other; now affectedly ill and now affectedly healthy; are we not on the point of being permanently impervious to fascination by any word at all?  Do we not perhaps desire nothing more than to establish a legal relationship between language and humankind?

And shall we not make use of this legality or of no legality whatsoever, and do we wish to forge a path through the errors and the yielded truths, or no path whatsoever?

What does the literature that lies behind us really amount to?: words hewn from the endocardium and a tragic silence, and fallow fields full of talked-to-death words and sloughs of fetid, rotten silence; everything, language and silence, has already been imparted, and in a twofold fashion. And we are constantly being beckoned and tempted by both of them; our sympathetic participation in error is of course fully secured, but where does our sympathetic participation in a new truth begin?       

How does a poem--because we are trying to talk about new poems--how does a poem begin to participate sympathetically in such a truth?

[Hans Magnus] Enzensberger’s

THE WOLVES’ PLEA TO THE LAMBS:

must the vulture feed on forget-me-nots?

what do you want the jackal to do,

skin himself?—and the wolf? must

he pull out his own teeth?

what don’t you like

about politruks and popes

what on the lying TV are you

dumbly peeping at from the laundry basket?

who sews the stripe of blood

on the general’s trousers? who

carves the capon before the usurer

who proudly hangs the tin cross

before his snarling navel? who

takes the gratuity, the silverling

the hush-penny? there is

much stolen, few thieves; who

rewards them with applause, who

pins on their insignias, who

pants after their lies?

look in the mirror: timid,

shrinking from the labor of truth,

averse to learning, consigning

all thinking to the wolves

your nose-ring your costliest jewel

no hoax too unsubtle, no solace

too feeble, extortion itself

is always too kind to you.

you lambkins are sisters,

interchangeable ones, who bleat:

you blend into one another.

brotherliness rules

among the wolves:

they roam in packs.

all hail the predators: you

enticements to rapine throw

yourselves on the fetid bed

of obedience. lying even

as you whimper. you long

to be torn to bits. you

aren’t changing the world.

“You aren’t changing the world.” Indeed.  And what about poetry itself?  What effect does it have?  Is it not perhaps the case that because a poem like this makes us unhappy, because it manages to do this, and because there are new poets who can make us unhappy, there is also a jolt within us, a jolt instinct with insight, a jolt under whose influence we comprehend the larger one that is taking place?  There is a really wonderful letter by Kafka about what he demands from a book:

"If the book we’re reading isn’t waking us up with a punch to the skull, why are we bothering to read the book?  So that it will make us happy…?  Good Lord, we would be happy already if we didn’t have any books at all, and if push came to shove we could always write the kinds of books that make us happy ourselves...A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us.  I believe this."

Perhaps it has been bothering you for I while now that I have said nothing about the new forms in the new poems, and hardly anything about the new language in them.  But in connection with this poem I would like to say something on these topics in a roundabout way.  There were recently published two books by a man who was not really a literary historian but rather something of an outsider; I am referring to the pair of studies entitled Die Welt als Labyrinth [The World as a Labyrinth] and Manieirismus in der Literatur [Mannerism in Literature] by Gustav René Hocke.  These books deal with the authors I have mentioned, along with many others, complete with illustrative quotations; and the thesis propounded in them is basically as follows: the provocative formal and thematic phenomena that we have been observing not only in literature but also in the other arts since about 1850 are not new, and this is not the first time that they have come upon the scene; rather, the modern artists themselves have been adhering to a hidden tradition; their audacious linguistic sallies and their “intellectual vices,” as he terms them, are ultimately of Greco-Oriental origin. The second revolution took place in the middle of the sixteenth century and faded away in the middle of the seventeenth.  In the domain of literature, the last such revolution dates from Baudelaire’s debut.  These three epochs have been subsumed under the generic heading of “Mannerism” for the sake of more firmly defining the anti-classical constant in European intellectual history.  The poets of these periods are trying to be “modern.”  They are characterized as such: they eschew immediacy, love obscurity, grant admittance to sensuous imagery only in abstruse, highly camouflaged metaphors; an intellectual system of signs is utilized towards the end of apprehending the real or super-real; their works are enigmatic, hieroglyphic, and this is why they evade aesthetic scrutiny with the help of classical standards.  I have no intention of going beyond this outline and can only urge you to read both studies, even at the risk of your temporarily smelling a whiff of “mannerism” everywhere and in everything and forgetting your judgment thanks to your astonishment.  But this highly stimulating book with its important findings has triggered an extremely remarkable reaction.  For it admittedly cannot exit the stage without first letting a few drops of wormwood fall on the new linguistic drilling-grounds, on the metaphor laboratories and the fission of verbal nuclei.  Because somebody has always stolen a march on this sort of thing, whether in 1600 or in 1900.  I hear tell that a couple of hundred years ago a man by the name of Athanasius Kirchner constructed a metaphor machine that could generate a complete poetic image out of nothing. We are now witnessing at least the third occurrence of abstract orthography: letterism, which Isidor Isou inaugurated as a last resort a couple of years ago in Paris in order to slit open the alphabet in order to conjure up Being with the aid of a few new supplementary characters, has a precursor in the third century, and another one is Hugo Ball, who in the first year of Dadaism in Zurich wrote letterist poems, admittedly with a different intention; namely, a polemical one.  This state of affairs seems a bit sad to many people who believe that revolutions and reclamations of land in literature must be primarily sought in formal experimentation and sometimes overlook the fact that the latter can only take place in the aftermath of a new idea.

On the other hand the discovery of “mannerism” was honey to many critics because they were now at last being handed a couple of solid criteria for the judgment of modern literature, criteria as applicable to verbal salad-mixing as to true verbal might.  Thank goodness, we’ve always already been here before; none of it is actually new; we don’t need to be intimidated anymore when we run into metaphors like “black milk”; of course the exact same thing can be found in Marino’s “red sea” (of the sixteenth century); we’ve always already been here before; ultimately we understand it, and understanding everything means pardoning everything.  Or else, if the critic is a member of a different, barbed armor-clad species, it means this is all passé, and so it’s not interesting anymore; this has already been done better, it’s a shoddy imitation, a carbon copy; the Surrealists did this too, and did it better, the Poètes maudits also did it better, and naturally the ancients did it better still: remember Marino, remember Góngora, remember, remember.  

But whom should we resolve to remember as we reflect once again on this poem [“the wolves’ plea to the lambs”]?  Is its author a mannerist?  He has written poems in which neologisms like “manitypistin” and “stenoküre” occur, so yes: he certainly is one (but with what intention?: that is the real question!).  And if we were compiling an anthology of younger authors, as long as we stuck to hunting down formal structures, to gaping at metaphors, at similarities, at the authors’ exploitation of an anonymous lexicon, at their canny facility with certain fashionable cocktail recipes, we would certainly have a very easy time figuring out what they were fundamentally all about.  But at the same time we would fail to see the most important thing; namely, when we are dealing merely with affectations, with finger exercises, or merely misbegotten trial runs, and we would fail to see when someone is actually trying to commit a robbery and is being robbed by language and robbed by truth, when the inimitable is devouring the imitable.  Because of course all of them, almost all of them, have, I believe, some tincture of the merely fashionable about them, and we also keenly sense this when we take up older works of long-established stature; we sense that their period lexica and period figures of speech hold their own only thanks to the firm and fairly robust context in which they appear.

But why--and you are perhaps still unsure of the answer to this question--did I happen to select these particular poems, and what am I trying to demonstrate by discussing them?  Perhaps the good “disposition” of these authors.  This conjecture is certainly plausible.  But what is a disposition, and who does not emphatically claim to have one?  To be liberally and amicably disposed, and from there it is no longer any great distance to well disposed, but well-disposed to whom?  And if the radicalness of every form of aestheticism has bequeathed to us a certainty that is binding, it is the certainty that with a good disposition it is no longer possible to produce a good poem.  I do not know whether it was really true, as a few people, including Benn, believed, that it was necessary to remind the Germans of this over and over again because they had still never managed to grasp it and were still highly receptive to “versifying” and “atmospheric images.”  So let us remind ourselves of it one more time, even though, if one thinks of the young people who have published poems in the last ten, fifteen years, one gets the feeling that hardly anybody caters to this plebiscitic desire anymore.  Much more onerous is the desire of a few for art [----] critics with their diagnoses and prognoses; for them everything is always in a crisis, they demand that the crises should be overcome; and recently even mannerism has been expected to be overcome, and then there are the crisis in the novel and the crisis in the theater; everything is expected to be overcome or integrated to some extent.  But when one finally ponders these sentences one begins to get cross, for who after all is expected to be overcome by whom here?

You can overcome an adversary or a pain or a weakness, but as for a crisis in the novel or in culture or in one of those flayed conceptual monsters—nobody can overcome such a thing.  The statements are worthy ones; they are often creditable; they often hit the mark, but the questions that affix themselves to them are poorly framed, of practically no importance, and merely squeeze the former out of the small circle of genuine questions that are posable at all.  Admittedly the sting of these questions can be felt only by the individual, and by those who have been more moved by a couple of apothegms from afar than by an entire assortment of problems, and one of those apothegms, apothegms that do not even ask to be vulnerated, is for example that of Bertolt Brecht: “What kinds of times are these when a conversation about trees is almost a crime because it encloses a silence about so many foul deeds?”  This is why people of later birth are somewhat shy about showcasing their worries about form, about expression, about intellectual capacity, worries that have been agonizing from time immemorial.

In a few passages in Günter Eich’s work there is talk about discomfort caused by beauty, discomfort caused by happiness; that whole tension between horror and beauty, which of course condition each other; the cult of beauty and of horror has given way to another one.  The poems, which are highly heterogeneous, are not savory but rich in insight, as if in an age of extreme linguistic distress they were obliged to make something out of their extreme contactlessness in order to ablate the distress.  From this achievement they derive a dignity, a dignity that they do not even dare to aspire to.

Having strayed outside themselves in their fiery helmet they vulnerate the night. This is also true to a large extent of the poet about whom I will speak in conclusion.  About Paul Celan.  He made his first appearance among us with an epitaph, his “Death Fugue,” and with some highly illuminating dark words that undertook a journey to the end of night.  And this I in these poems also forgoes an oppressive blueprint, an extorted authority, and gains an authority, even as it asks for nothing for itself other than: “Make me bitter, count me with the almonds, count me with…what was bitter and kept you alive…”

But today I have brought along his most recent collection of poems, “Sprachgitter” [“Speech Grille”] because it tours a new and still little-known territory.  The metaphors have completely vanished; the words have cast off every vestment, every veil; not a single word flies towards another one any longer; another one intoxicates.  After a painful figure of speech, an extremely severe inspection of the references of word and world, it arrives at new definitions.  The poems are entitled “Matière de Bretagne” or “Railway Embankments, Waysides, Waste Places, Debris,” or “Blueprint of a Landscape” or “Debris Barge.”

They are uncomfortable, palpating, reliable, so reliable in being called what they are that their titles must go exactly as far as they do and no further.

Poem:³

But suddenly, on account of the severe retrenchment of scope, it is once again possible to say something, to say it quite directly, unencryptedly.   It is possible for somebody who says of himself that he is chafing at reality and questing for reality as he commences to speak with his existence.  At the end of his great poem “Engführung” [“Stretto”], there is a particularly striking passage, and I would like to close with this passage--and before I do, I would also like to mention that for Celan the stars are “the work of man,” that here they are to be understood as a human construct.

………….A

Star

still has some light

Nothing,

nothing is forsaken

1. Blätter für die Kunst. 3 Folgen, 5 Bände, Auslese aus den Jahrgängen 1892–1898. Verlag Georg Bondi, Berlin 1899. Text aus der Einleitung. S. 24. [Art Journals.  Three Series, Five Volumes, Selections from the Years 1892 to 1898.  Georg Bondi Publications, Berlin 1898.  Text from the introduction, p. 24.]
2. As Bachmann’s editors point out, here she is quoting Marinetti indirectly (if at all [for they add that Marinetti’s daughter was unable to find the passage in her archive of her father’s works]) via Walter Benjamin’s essay “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter der technischen Reproduzierbarkeit” (“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”), which is also the source of the attribution of the context of the passage to the Ethiopian colonial war.  The translation is Harry Zohn’s from the Hannah Arendt-edited collection entitled Illuminations.
3. According to the editors, in her typescript Bachmann did not indicate what poem was to be read here.

THE END

Translation unauthorized but Copyright ©2018 by Douglas Robertson

Source: Ingeborg Bachmann, Frankfurter Vorlesungen.  Probleme zeitgenössischer Dichtung [Frankfurt Lectures. Problems in Contemporary Literature], Munich and Berlin: Piper, 2016.  This is the second of a series of five lectures that Bachmann delivered at Goethe University Frankfurt during the 1959-1960 winter semester and recorded for Bavarian Radio in April 1960.

An Alternative Translation of Minetti by Thomas Bernhard

Dramatis Personae

MINETTI, a distinguished stage actor

A LADY

A GIRL

The girl’s BOYFRIEND

RECEPTIONIST

PORTER

AN OLD MAN WITH A LIMP

AN ELDERLY COUPLE

A LILIPUTIAN

A DRUNK MAN

A CRIPPLE
A WAITER

MASKED REVELLERS

Scenes One, Two, and Three: an old hotel at Ostend

Epilogue: the Atlantic [sic] Coast at Ostend

Scene One

The lobby

An old English elevator stage left

A reception desk, a receptionist leafing through old hotel register books at stage right

A lady (in a red dress) sitting on an old sofa smoking Virginia cigars in the background

A porter enters stage left carrying an enormous old suitcase and sets it down in front of the reception desk

RECEPTIONIST looking up

What is this

PORTER softly to him

A funny old gentleman

The receptionist and the porter gaze in the

direction from which the porter has carried in the heavy suitcase

LADY drinking, then to the receptionist

To be left standing

all alone

Don’t forget my champagne

If necessary two bottles

I intend to drink it by myself

by myself

Bursts out laughing and gazes in the same

direction as the others

Of course it doesn’t matter

I must defend myself  you know

emphatically

Defend myself

The world is literally

populated by madmen

incredible

The degeneracy is typical

having turned to the receptionist

A snowstorm

an actual snowstorm

gazing in the same direction as the other two

Then I’ll put on my mask

I am coping with New Year’s Eve

I have my methods

drinks

I’ll go to bed wearing my monkey-mask

and wait

and with the mask on my face on my head

I’ll drain the whole bottle of champagne at one go

This is the third year in a row

that I’ve been ringing in the New Year like this

as if observing an unusual-looking person

in certain circumstances

two bottles

a ruse naturally

a flirtation with asphyxiation

A perversion

I’ve put on some weight

Three times already I’ve had to patch up the monkey mask

drinks

to patch it up

I fold my hands underneath the monkey mask

But not at home

at the hotel you know

here at the hotel

as if going over a to-do list

Hold out until eleven

and then go upstairs

to your room

put on the mask

drink all the champagne

and get into bed

With the mask on your head

and the stockings on your legs

bursts out laughing

And if that doesn’t do the trick

then another bottle as well

drinks and looks at the suitcase, then back in the opposite direction

I’m sure this is the gentleman

who’s the owner of the suitcase

Enter MINETTI in an old ankle-length winter coat, black leather shoes with spats, a broad-brimmed hat, and a raincoat slung over his left arm, dragging an undone underpants strap behind him along the floor; he walks slowly, surveying his surroundings, until he reaches the center of the lobby, when he stops and says to the receptionist

Minetti

pulls a change-purse out of one of his coat-pockets and searches in it for s specific sum of change; having found the change, he stretches his arm out with the lightning speed towards the porter to offer the change to him, but the porter does not touch it.

Here

The porter takes the change

Minetti looks at the ceiling and at all the walls and into all four corners of the lobby

How much it’s changing

how much it’s slowly changing

to the lady

thirty years ago

thirty-two years ago to be precise

was the last time 

to the porter

Room sixty-four

sixty-four

looks at the ceiling again

Changing completely

Change is always marching forward

It’s all just a question of time

the lady drinks

A question of time

the elevator is summoned from upstairs

Minetti introducing himself to the lady

Minetti

who has renounced

classical literature

looks at the ceiling again

Detest progress

detest progress

to the lady

Don’t you think

that one must detest progress

from a certain point onwards

thumps his coat with both hands

A snowstorm in Ostend

what a monstrous aberration

to the lady

I have

an appointment here

with the general manager of the theater

in Flensburg

I am an actor

looks at the ceiling

It’s changed so much

I love Ostend

The grayness

The coast

The Atlantic coast

The elevator arrives with a fairly large group of masked revelers who pour out into the lobby laughing and screaming, then almost knock over Minetti as they hurry past him through the lobby and out the front door

Minetti shouting at them as they leave

Outrageous

outrageous

As the lady drinks she notices Minetti’s underpants strap

Minetti to the receptionist

I’m expecting the director of the general manager of the theater in Flensburg

At the celebration of the two hundredth anniversary of the theater in Flensburg

I’ll be playing Lear

Shakespeare

I haven’t acted in thirty years

it’s been thirty years since I last appeared on stage

to the lady

Lear you know

King Lear

The most significant work of drama

in the entirety of world literature

quoting lines from the Shakespeare play as he looks back in the direction he has come from

Thou think’st ’tis much that this contentious storm

Invades us to our skin

So ’tis to thee

But where the greater malady is fix’d

the lesser is scarce felt

looks at the ceiling

Lear

points with his umbrella at the rearward stage-right corner

There in that corner

I spoke with Ensor

with Ensor in person

points at his suitcase

In this suitcase

is a mask for Lear

personally made by Ensor

This mask

for Lear

is the most precious thing

in my possession

to the lady

The mask is Lear

points with his umbrella at the corner again

In that corner

A philosophical settling of accounts no doubt

insistently

James Ensor

I wanted the Lear mask

to be made by Ensor

and Ensor

made me the mask

loudly

A colossal perversity

to wear world literature in its entirety

on one’s head

and on one’s face

points at the corner again

I suddenly believed

he was Shakespeare

as I was just talking with Ensor

Drama is a colossal art form

I said to Ensor

make me the mask

for my debut as Lear

I said

the lady drinks

But the man hadn’t the faintest understanding of Shakespeare

He wanted

to study Lear

but I told him

don’t study Lear

forget classic literature in its entirety

in its entirety do you understand

The man hadn’t the vaguest clue about Shakespeare

and no clue whatsoever about Lear

and no clue whatsoever about world literature

But Ensor made the mask

for me

the most colossal mask

that has ever been made

In this mask I’ll perform

at the celebration of the two hundredth anniversary of the theater in Flensburg

I gave the general manager my word

An actor like me

can’t leave the general manager of a theater

in the lurch

looks at the ceiling

Lear

in Ensor’s mask

the lady drinks

An old man with a limp enters stage right, receives a room key from the porter, and limps back offstage

Minetti to the receptionist

Didn’t the general manager

leave some kind of message with you

What time is it anyway

RECEPTIONIST

Half-past nine sir

MINETTI checking his pocket-watch

Half-past nine

I was delayed

in the snow storm

dusts down his coat once again, then

Has anybody at all

asked about me

RECEPTIONIST

No sir

the lady drinks

MINETTI

No telephone call

RECEPTIONIST

No sir

No telephone call sir

MINETTI

This will all be explained

explained

to the lady

explained

to the receptionist

I’ll wait here

wait here

wait here in the lobby

to the lady

It’s possible that you know the general manager of the theater

in Flensburg

he comes here this time of year

every year

He agreed in a telegram

to be here at the hotel

at nine

looks at the ceiling, then

It was a real conquest

to get me to play Lear

one more time

and also a crowning moment

Just one more performance madam

then never again

I’ve sworn it

never again

just one more performance

Thirty years I’ve shunned the stage

thirty years of nothing

I have renounced all classic literature

except Lear

Now just one more time I’ll play Lear

in Ensor’s mask

My nerves are frayed

it’s this appalling climate you see

the lady drinks

Minetti very softly to the lady

He didn’t understand

a thing about Shakespeare

nothing

as if he

had never heard a thing

about Shakespeare

and then

turns around and points at his suitcase with his umbrella

this mask

I always have this mask

with me

in this suitcase madam

No trips without this suitcase

and in the suitcase is Ensor’s mask

I’m not selling out

just Lear one more time

It is the general manager’s desire

for me to play Lear

at the celebration of the two hundredth anniversary of the theater in Flensburg

peers into the corner and then points at the corner with his umbrella

A timid person my dear

and at the same time a redoubtable one

I was worried

All artists worry

Worry

Worry

art and worry

These people determine the course of history

Mutually antagonistic atrocities you know

loudly and declamatorily

What is

the so-called art of painting

I asked Ensor

to his face

He said nothing in reply

The so-called art of acting

he asked

Nothing

the elevator is summoned from upstairs

An accident

a promise of a guest performance

A lady from Rotterdam

with a terrible cold

with whom I promised to make my debut in Rotterdam

as Lear

Then I ran into Ensor

and came to an agreement with Ensor

in this hotel

just as I have just now

come to an agreement with the general manager

And Ensor made me the mask

and I played Lear in Ensor’s mask

quite softly

Sometimes we have everything

at our disposal

An elderly married couple enter the lobby from stage right, receive a room-key from the receptionist, and go to the elevator, which has arrived from upstairs filled to capacity with laughing young masked revelers.  The revelers, who are carrying wine-glasses and wine-bottles, run laughing and screaming through the lobby and out through the front door; the elderly couple get into the elevator and ride it upstairs.

Minetti, after having observed the elderly couple closely

Lear

in Ensor’s mask

Accidents

are the epitome of the horrific

LADY suddenly

Your underpants my dear sir

your underpants have come undone

drinks

Minetti bends over and sees the unfastened underpants strap and tries to refasten it but fails to do so.

First your underpants come undone

they come undone first

drinks and laughs

first

your underpants

your underpants

MINETTI

My underpants naturally

naturally my underpants

gives up trying to fasten the underpants

the porter tries to fasten the underpants and ultimately succeeds in doing so

The times are changing

tugs at the collar of his shirt

The underpants strap

the lady drinks

Increasing exhaustion

Exhaustion increasing

the porter returns to the reception desk

Because

I have renounced                                                                      

classic literature

RECEPTIONIST interrogatively

A room with a bath

Mr Minetti

MINETTI defensively

No room

no room

I’ll wait here

looks at the clock

possibly I’ll stay here

who knows

I’m the general manager’s guest

points at his suitcase with his umbrella

If it’s in the way there

put it somewhere else

the porter picks up the suitcase and makes as if to carry it away

Drop it

leave it there

put it down there

the porter puts the suitcase down a meter from where it was before

There

there

the porter picks the suitcase up again

Minetti points with his umbrella at the spot where he wants the porter to put down the suitcase

There

there

over here

the porter puts the suitcase down at the designated spot

Ensor’s mask

the porter returns to the reception desk

The classless society

understands nothing

understands nothing

We are incessantly developing

a tragedy

or a comedy

when we’re developing a tragedy

at bottom it’s actually just a comedy

and vice-versa

with soundness of mind as our medium

I’ll have you know

Time and again only the art of acting

the lady drinks

Existence

The art of acting

I’ll have you know

Its construction is a dramatic theatrical one

Its medium a theatrical one time and again

Thought

The art of acting

Theater

Existence

while we are serving the art of acting

a colossal construction

in which we are all involved

My brother the mathematician

with whom I spoke about the integral

in this building

thirty-three years ago

took the one road

I took the other

he took the road of science

I took the road of art

the artistic road madam

I became addicted to an insane idea

when I became addicted to the art of acting

hopelessly lost

in the material of the art of acting

do you understand

I myself used to lead my brother’s existence

mathematics ad absurdum

The art of acting as a reason for existing madam

what an enormity

The obscuration

the occultation

of the soul

Undaunted

by the odium and opprobrium

Severed all ties with other human beings

severed all ties with each and every one of them

to the receptionist

Severed all ties with the material sir

for the art of acting’s sake

in defiance of the audience

in defiance of them

in defiance of them

in defiance of them

always only in defiance of them

My brother went this way

points in one direction with his umbrella

I myself

points in the opposite direction

went that way

If we want to reach our goal

we always have to go in the opposite direction

to the lady

In the opposite direction madam

to the receptionist

Ever greater solitude

ever greater incomprehension

ever greater misunderstanding

ever deeper disapproval

Once we have reached our goal

we have surpassed

we have surpassed our idea

surpassed the entire community of humankind

surpassed nature

checks his watch

Once we have abandoned the material

it is but an instant

a brief instant

the briefest of instants

until we’re dead

The pulling of a grimacing face is all that’s left

nothing else

A gesticulation

The horrified head

nothing else

all our lives we

are putting on an act

that nobody understands

But we take this road

no other one

this road and no other

until we’re dead

and all our lives we have no idea

if it’s mathematics

if it’s the art of acting

to the lady

It is insanity madam

he thinks the general manager of the theater is entering the hotel and about to approach him, but it is a Lilliputian in a sailor’s uniform who receives a room-key at the reception desk and walks through the lobby to the elevator and takes the elevator upstairs.  Minetti takes a step back, and then says to the lady

I thought the general manager

had come in

the porter makes as if to lift Minetti’s suitcase

Minetti lunges at the porter and hits his fingers with his umbrella

The suitcase stays here

here

here

the porter returns to the reception desk

Perhaps

maybe

I won’t stay

Maybe I’ll travel on

travel back

to Dinkelsbühl

after a pause

I’ve been putting on the mask

all my life

society is horrified

I myself have been horrified all my life

we fear

what we can’t see

the lady drinks

Minetti to the lady, waving about his umbrella all the while

The actor

the artist

the madman do you understand

The bankrupt

the hypersensitive of the stage

the violent criminal

the violent art criminal

the lady drinks

The actor approaches the writer

and the writer annihilates the actor

as the actor annihilates the writer

extinguishes him do you understand

Settling the bill

Settling the bill

If when we’re settling the bill

we leave out the writer

the writer leaves out the actor when he’s settling the bill

In every case

we’re driven to insanity

And if the actor settles up with the writer

and if the writer settles up with the actor

nature goes crazy

then art my lady becomes

an artist-scape

These hundreds and thousands and hundreds of thousands of endeavors

exertions reduced to nothing

we’re afflicted with every possible incitation and violation

and stricken dead

annihilated

we can do whatever we like

points at the audience with his umbrella

There

such a madman such a lunatic must be saying to himself

from down there

you’ll be killed

to the lady

Do you understand madam

the world is brimful of annihilating art-existences

as if in an aside

odium

opprobrium

annihilation  

looks at his watch

How dare this old loon

keep rambling on like this

you’re thinking

bends over to see whether or not his underpants strap has come undone again

It hasn’t come undone again

my underpants strap madam

hasn’t come undone again

How dare he keep rambling on like this

when he should keep his mouth shut

always on the point

of mortally wounding madam

of plunging into the abyss madam

starting at stage left the Lilliputian paces up and down the lobby

Minetti looking at the Lilliputian

When everyone is silent

he is the one

who talks

thus his entire existence is always

a different existence

his head a different head

what he himself is silent about

is something different

he behaves differently

taps his head

dies differently

to the receptionist while tapping his head

In this head sir

everything is different

Everything is different sir

different books read

different philosophies studied

completely different people encountered all my life

a completely different

yes a completely antithetical relationship to nature

contemplates his shoes

and everything is nothing but a mistake

to the lady, who is drinking

isn’t it madam

as a result a person like me destroys

something different

than what other people accuse him of destroying

as he walks into the center of the catastrophe

looks at the ceiling

This hotel

is full of misunderstandings

that are bound

to drive a person like me insane

just as the entire world is bound to drive such a person insane

the lady drinks

Then it suddenly seems to me

as though it were all nothing but intellectual rubbish

as if in an aside

Emotion

Destruction

Intellectual rubbish

tries to sit down and sinks down exhausted onto the sofa and next to the lady

And nothing but purposefulness madam

in which we are all perishing

perishing madam

looks at the clock

The mind artist

who has fatally wounded himself as a head artist

who is walking into the center of the catastrophe

Scene II

As before

MINETTI with his underpants strap undone again

Suddenly the falling crash

into comfortableness

appallingly

irresponsibly

The world wants to be entertained

but it deserves to be disturbed

disturbed disturbed

wherever we look we see nothing

but an entertainment mechanism today

Everything deserves to be shoved

into the art catastrophe madam

into the most incredible of all art catastrophes

shoved in do you hear

shoved in

after a pause

The young person

who I used to be

he went into the fatal art of acting

and fatally injured himself

Nobody today

fatally injures himself

we exist in a repulsive society

that has renounced fatal self-injury

staring into space

Lear

in search

of the work of art  

constantly searching for the intellectual object

brooding and burrowing

towards the artwork

lady drinks

madam

headlong

With the artwork

in defiance of society

in defiance of dimwittedness

suddenly thrashing the air with his umbrella

Chase them out

with head hung

Crown dimwittedness

with the cap of intellect

loudly, indignantly

with the cap of intellect

crush dimwittedness

crush society

everything

under the cap of intellect

instigate a spectacle

and crown dimwittedness with the cap of intellect

Do you hear madam

The actor tears off

the writer’s mask

and puts it on

and chases out the audience

while he crowns the audience with the cap of intellect

We mustn’t capitulate

mustn’t capitulate

if we give in

it’s all over

If we give in for just an instant

exclaiming

Not for an instant

softly, calmly

Vigilantly

crown dimwittedness

with the cap of intellect

time and again

every day

ruthlessly

defying everyone

defying everything

all our lives

all our lives do you understand

the lady drinks

Minetti to the porter

Never letting ourselves be put off

dear sir

never letting ourselves be put off

softly, while tracing the horizon with his umbrella

Then suddenly

silence

reigns in the presence of the spoken word

aside, quite slowly and softly

Do you hear

The sea

Mathematics

Hardship

Horror

Ambition

Abandonment

Wind

Coast

This word coast

almost singing

Coast

Coast

and then

Fog

Perception

Jealousy

suddenly shouting

Help

quite softly

Murder

addressing the lady point-blank

If only the O still rules

or only the U

or the I

crowing like a rooster

Cock-a-doodle-do

Cock-a-doodle-do

Cock-a-doodle-do

after a pause

Blasphemy

addressing the lady point-blank

Considerations

Movements madam

Reflectiveness

Wordlessness

Soundlessness madam

It’s a process of derision

a process of detraction

and a process of derision all one’s life

staring into space

The science of the head

and of the legs

notices the unfastened strap of his underpants, beckons the porter over and points at the strap with his umbrella

There

there

the porter bends over and starts fastening the strap

the lady drinks and laughs

Minetti to the porter

Harmony
Disharmony

An artistic body sir

an artistic body

everything’s an artistic body sir

to the porter, helping him finish fastening the strap with the tip of his umbrella

enough

enough

the porter jumps up and returns to the reception desk

Ear

Eye

Lunacy

Control of one’s body

Control of one’s mind

to the lady

Magnetism madam

Displaying the whole of classic literature

in a single instant

perceiving it

and destroying it

annihilating it

simultaneously

in a single instant

Standing history in its entirety on its head

or one’s head on the entirety of history madam

looks at his watch

In Flensburg madam

In celebration of its bicentenary

with his head hung

These people are

always ailing

always catching colds

the ones who are most resilient

who fancy they are

addressing the lady point-blank

The general manager of the theater

is a boyhood friend of mine

a distant relative

a very distant one

in Flensburg

Mustn’t let exhaustion

surface

repress it

with one’s intellect

the lady drinks

Minetti to the receptionist

Only young people

have a connection

to insanity

a natural connection

only young people

have an intelligent motive

The elevator arrives from upstairs and a large group of laughing and screaming young masked revelers emerge and race through the lobby and out the front door 

Minetti watching them as they exit

Fanaticism

Intelligence

and fanaticism

to the lady

New Year’s Eve fanaticism

New Year’s Eve

the same group of people come back into the lobby and get into the elevator and ride it upstairs

New Year’s Eve fanaticism

Youth is audacious

looks at his watch

General managers of theaters

are the epitome of unreliability

of unpunctuality

An actor has never

been able to count on the punctuality of a general manager

to the lady

In Lübeck

in the Hanseatic city of Lübeck

forty years ago I’ll have you know

when I was the general manager of the theater

before I decisively

renounced classic literature

I loathed

constantly acting in classic plays

I loathe classic literature

I loathe classic art

everything classic

Except for Lear

Deposed I’ll have you know

chased out of town by the senators

to Dinkelsbühl

Sooner or later

all general managers of theaters are chased out of town

Out of that horrible city Lübeck

All those cities along the sea stink

but Lübeck stinks most mercilessly of all

to the lady point-blank

I loathe the Baltic Sea

I love the North Sea

Ostend you understand

Dunkirk

portentous

very portentous

suddenly

But my favorite place of all is England

England

of all countries I love England the most

Shakespeare and Scotland Yard

or vice-versa

as if balancing his umbrella on the tip of his right shoe

But a Continental actor in England

is an impossibility

A person like me

is absolutely

doomed to lead a Continental existence

all his life madam

Here in Ostend I fancy

I’m inhaling the English air

the English air

An absolutely Continental existence madam

is a curse

addressing the lady point-blank

One time

somewhere near Folkestone

I was thrown out of an inn

and into the English Channel

on New Year’s Eve

While clinging to a copy of the weekend edition of the TIMES

I had myself pulled out of the water

such being the case I owe my subsequent existence

to the TIMES

To be sure madam

I have often asked myself

whether it wouldn’t have been better

to forget about the TIMES

I would have spared myself a lot

to the receptionist

No news at all

A nine o’clock appointment

and no news at all

RECEPTIONIST

No news at all

Mr. Minetti

MINETTI to the lady, while pointing at the corner with his umbrella

James Ensor and Shakespeare

You must have seen the two of them

There in the corner

looks at his suitcase

I’ve been carrying around this suitcase

for thirty years

and in the suitcase is the Lear-mask

made by Ensor

and several newspaper cuttings

about me

Reviews

articles about me

Above all the articles

about the lawsuit

that the city of Lübeck had filed against me

In point of fact I lost

the lawsuit

Naturally

A person like me

loses every lawsuit

Our corrupt society

wins every lawsuit

Justice was on my side

but the city of Lübeck won the lawsuit

I lost the lawsuit madam

because I had renounced classicism

The individual

no matter how firmly justice is on his side

loses every lawsuit

Enter a drunk man, who receives a key from the receptionist and walks to the elevator and rides it upstairs

That lawsuit cost me

everything I had

quite softly

Because I renounced

classic literature

Thereupon I sentenced myself

to thirty years of solitary confinement in Dinkelsbühl

I know what I’m talking about madam

Life is a farce

that pretentious eggheads call existence

I was chased out of Lübeck

ever since then I’ve loathed Lübeck

My native city

For thirty years I have refused

to appear on a classical stage

I would have played Lear

with Lear it’s something different

Naturally this has caused me to go to rack and ruin

thirty years of Dinkelsbühl

Vigilante justice madam

I own nothing but that suitcase

The general manager of the theater

My boyhood friend

A Frisian

A Frisian madam

A Frisian

suddenly with great pathos

All of Germany was against me

and annihilated me

Woe betide anyone

who dares to lock horns

with public opinion

Thirty years of Dinkelsbühl

Everything that had even

a classical sort of look to it

I abhorred

I am in flight from classicism madam

A significant artist has to be in constant flight from classicism

Thirty years of unemployment in Germany

in Dinkelsbühl

because I renounced classicism

He jumps up because he believes the general manager of the theater has just entered, but the only person who has just entered is a cripple on crutches and wearing a dog-mask; he asks for the key to his room and moves through the lobby to the elevator and rides the elevator upstairs

Minetti, watching the cripple as he exits

Lear

and others

after a pause

Anyone who is consistent

becomes subject to social annihilation

sits back down

the lady drinks

I have had every possible opportunity

but I haven’t been able to exploit

any of these opportunities

A fanatical devotion to truth

Paranoia

Hypersensitivity madam

the lady drinks

It’s a vow I’ve taken

I’ve taken a vow

pulls a photograph out of his coat pocket and hands it to the lady

Here in this picture

you can see me

as Lear

My farewell performance in Lübeck

the lady contemplates the photograph, compares the photograph with Minetti

Lear

in Ensor’s mask

stares straight ahead

A portrait of the artist

as a young man

the lady gives the photograph back to him

I played Lear

all over northern Germany

but nobody

understood Lear

They understood neither Shakespeare

nor Lear

nothing

to the lady point-blank

It’s depressing madam

puts the photograph back into his pocket

When you travel around with Lear

and nobody understands Lear

and nobody understands Shakespeare

and nobody understands the actor

who’s playing Lear

clutches at his head with both hands

It’s lunacy 

after a pause

Then I was sued

then I was dismissed

then I went to my sister’s in Dinkelsbühl

in Dinkelsbühl

if you know

where that is madam

and I went into hiding there

planted vegetables

wintered cabbage

plucked onions

loudly, flying into a rage

Lear went into hiding

leaning on the umbrella, staring straight ahead

And now I’ll play Lear again

after thirty years

in Flensburg

stands up and goes to the suitcase and points at the suitcase with the umbrella and says to the lady

Because I have been consistent

consistent madam consistent

The elevator arrives from upstairs and some laughing and screaming revelers rush out of it

Scene III

In the bar.  Minetti and the girl on a sofa.

The suitcase in the foreground on the floor

The girl is sitting next to a small transistor radio that is softly playing jazz music

MINETTI

You don’t believe it

I’m famous

I was famous

Minetti

who renounced classic literature

I played Lear in Lübeck

Shakespeare

The art of acting

is an insidious art my child

points at the suitcase

In that suitcase

I have the proof

At first

I started with quite simple tricks

with the simplest tricks

like making people disappear

for example

A magician

nothing but a magician do you understand

all over northern Germany

and all the way down the coast to Biarritz

with my father

but suddenly in my wrist

here look

shows his right wrist, shakes it

an inflammation

my career was over

My father was devastated

Our whole family was on the brink of ruin

I made people disappear my child

onstage

three people at a time

or four

or five

suddenly that inflammation in my wrist

do you understand

shakes his wrist

Then I remembered my original vocation

and I became an actor

an absolutely dedicated servant of dramatic literature

I gave up the art of performing magic tricks

for the art of drama my child

for dramatic literature

Shakespeare Strindberg do you understand

suddenly

How long have you been waiting so far

GIRL

Not long

MINETTI

     We’re both waiting

     the girl turns up the music

You’re waiting for your boyfriend

I’m waiting for the general manager of the theater

I have an appointment

with the general manager from Flensburg here

he has invited me

to play Lear in Flensburg

You don’t know what that means

Lear Shakespeare my child

looks all around the room

During this storm

You’re probably going to a ball

with this boyfriend of yours

What kind of mask are you going to wear

You will be wearing a mask I take it

the girl shakes her head

No mask

No mask my child

Thirty years

it’s been since I last played Lear

since I last played any part onstage

on any stage in a proper theater

I have renounced classic literature

But of course I need only don the mask

The mask was made by Ensor personally

I saw Ensor

together with Shakespeare

There

points at the lobby

An incredible encounter

hold on

pulls the photograph out of his coat pocket and shows it to the girl

That’s me

Lear

in Ensor’s mask

points at the picture

when I was a very young man

the girl takes the photograph from him

A sensation my child

rises and recites from the play

O reason not the need

our basest beggars are in the poorest thing superfluous

allow not nature more than nature needs

man’s life is cheap as beast’s

We mustn’t permit ourselves to be demeaned

to be demeaned my child

But there’s no such thing as a recipe for living

Now I’ll show you the proof 

opens the suitcase and takes various old newspapers out of it

Here

reads from a page

Our theater owes so many of its peaks

to this significant artist

and this evening in the role of Lear

and in Ensor’s mask

he has overshadowed

everything else in the entire canon of dramatic literature

overshadowed it all

overshadowed it all

reads from another newspaper

The art of this actor

is at its peak

at its peak

at its peak my child

reads out of another newspaper

One of our greatest actors

who this evening has once again

given a monumental performance

suddenly

Enough

nauseating nauseating nauseating

it’s nauseating my child

takes the newspapers and sticks them back into the suitcase and pulls out a pile of other newspapers

Not much later they filed the lawsuit against me

chased me out of Lübeck you understand

I

was chased out of northern Germany

because I had renounced classic literature

chased out as a general manager

and as an actor

In Dinkelsbühl I woke up again

in Dinkelsbühl

having taken the pile of newspapers to the sofa, he kneels down in front of the sofa and leafs through the newspapers

Everything

that was written about the lawsuit

Aspersions

Aspersions and perversions

rooted in nothing but spite

Claims that I ran the theater into the ground

That I put the people’s nose out of joint

that I

that when I renounced classic literature

I committed the greatest possible crime against theater

That I made the theater into a laughingstock

and ultimately annihilated it

defrauded the audience

deluded and defrauded them

picks up a newspaper and reads

Here it says

Mr Minetti is a disgrace to the city of Lübeck

What was your father

GIRL

A train engineer

MINETTI

A train engineer

Where

GIRL

In Liège

MINETTI

In Liège

in that hideous city Liège

my poor child

sits down next to the girl on the sofa

one fine day you up and left it

the girl nods

You did the right thing

Wherever you’re from

you’ve got to get out of there as soon as possible

because otherwise you’re finished

peers into the lobby to see if the general manager is coming in; then looks at his watch

I myself failed to turn my back on Lübeck

in time

and I paid for that crime

Anybody my child who accepts a position as the general manager of a theater

is committing suicide

If we hadn’t learned a thing or two

and if we hadn’t had our art to depend on

we’d certainly have sunk ever deeper into despair with each passing day

peers into the lobby to see if the general manager is coming in, then

At first they’re all punctual

but then

they’re the epitome of unpunctuality

I almost believe

he’s never going to come

but ultimately he’s the one who wants something

not me not me

you’ve made

Once you’ve made

an appointment with somebody

it’s an enormity

to stand him up

Minetti never stands anybody up

But general managers of theaters are megalomaniacal

there was a time

when people said

there’s nobody else to equal him

Then they filed the lawsuit against me

because I renounced classic literature

The city of Lübeck broke its contract

The city of Lübeck has me on its conscience

My native city has its native son on its conscience

A person’s place of birth is his murderer

suddenly

Do you want to see it

the girl does not know what he means

The mask

Ensor’s mask

The Lear mask

that Ensor made me

I’ll show you the mask

tries to open the suitcase but fails and gives up

It’s not meant to be

my child

Later

perhaps

then

decisively

In Flensburg I’ll put the mask on again

and play Lear

whom I haven’t played

in thirty years

most recently in the senate

nowhere else since

a so-called closed performance

No applause

nothing

my child

Complete silence

after the final curtain

nothing

not a pair of hands stirred

An enormity

Then they filed the lawsuit against me

The actor is the victim of his own idee fixe on the one hand

on the other he’s the abject victim of the audience

he attracts the audience

and repels it

I for my part

have always repelled the audience

the greater an actor is

and the more accomplished is his artistry

the more violently the audience is repelled

The audience pours into a theater to see a great actor

and in reality it’s repelled by his artistry

and the more incredibly accomplished is his artistry

the more violently the audience is repelled

People applaud

but they’re repelled

Or people are as repelled as the senators in Lübeck

who were so repelled by my artistry

that not a single pair of their hands stirred ever again

People come to a theater

to see a great actor

and they are immediately repelled by his uncanniness

If an actor evinces his uncanniness

and he can’t help evincing it

the audience is repelled

The actor must evince it

Uncanniness or nothing

with excessively precise articulation

nothing but uncanniness

The audience pours in from all directions

pours in pours in from all directions

to see the actor

and the actor greets the audience with nothing

but uncanniness

The audience is put to the test

The audience must be appalled by the actor

First he’s got to hoodwink it

and then he’s got to appall it

The great actors have always appalled their audience

at first they have hoodwinked it

and then they have appalled it

lured it into the historical trap

into the intellectual trap

into the emotional trap

lured it into the trap

and appalled it

The actor’s worst enemy

is his audience

If he knows that

his artistry will improve

At every moment the actor must tell himself

the audience is lunging at the stage

He must act in this state of mind

in defiance of the audience

in defiance of their human rights do you understand

All my life I’ve acted

in defiance of the audience

so that I could withstand the tension

so that I wouldn’t be enfeebled

My father the magician

was my teacher

my only teacher do you understand

the epitome of ruthlessness

The man of understanding

from him I learned

to hear

and see

to understand my child

People have no ears

to hear with

they have no eyes

to see with

they have no understanding

We live in a completely un-understanding society

who can’t comprehend that my child

looks at his watch

aside

Only a single time

for the two hundredth anniversary celebration

quite softly

The train ticket

from Dinkelsbühl to Ostend

cost me all my money

If he doesn’t come

stands up and walks to the threshold of the lobby; returns with a disappointed air

to the girl

You don’t understand people

the only reason they exist

is to diddle one another

aside

possibly

the whole thing

is a mystification

a mystification

I think

it’s the general manager

but a Lilliputian comes in

or a cripple

Every time the door opens I think

it’s the general manager

to the girl

I’ve lost the evidence

the telegram

in which the general manager

invites me to come to Ostend

sits down next to the girl

For thirty years

I’ve been putting on the Lear mask

at dawn every day

in front of the mirror my child

for thirty years a couple of moments of Lear at dawn every day

in Dinkelsbühl

I’ve acted in Berlin

in Moscow

in Minsk

in Constantinople

An actor’s mind like no other

Hypocrisy

nothing but hypocrisy

suddenly in a single instant

I renounced classic literature

I loathed classicism

everything classical

at that moment I had the whole world against me

Whether they care to admit it or not

all their lives artists are dependent

on the so-called cultivated world

and if an artist renounces classical art

and the so-called cultivated world drops him

he is a dead man my child

looks at his watch

At first I believed

I would retire in disappointment

naturally in disappointment

for the briefest period to Dinkelsbühl

into that sleepy little nest

in which the cabbage heads say good night to one another

but I stayed a full thirty years

in Dinkelsbühl

thirty years my child

in which I studied the entire canon of classic literature

so that I would eventually learn

why I was renouncing it

I said yes to Lear

but no to the entire remainder of classic literature

In the attic of my sister’s house in Dinkelsbühl

I played Lear on the thirteenth of every month

in front of the mirror

always punctually at eight in the evening

in Ensor’s mask my child

so as not to get out of practice

And with commensurate declamation

every single day

Lear-lines

always the same Lear-lines

and on the thirteenth always the complete Lear

once in English

and once in German

in my own translation naturally

An artist is a true artist

only once he has become thoroughly mad

once he has thrown himself into madness

unconditionally

made himself a method of it

The true artist my child has made the madness

of his art into his method

let the world write and say whatever it likes

He just has to make sure he isn’t a coward

Naturally an artist must never be a coward

Society took away the ground from beneath my feet

when they took the stage away from me

and the senators filed their lawsuit against me

and ruined my existence

but amid all that base chicanery my artistry

never faltered

to the contrary

But what an effort it’s taken my child

vehemently

To be in artist

in my sister’s attic in Dinkelsbühl

I’ve never asked myself

whether it is admissible or not never

Each day brings nothing but proof

of the maliciousness and shamelessness

and of the unsoundness of mind of the people

who call themselves human society my child

Each and every day humankind seeks refuge

in classic literature

because in classic literature it’s unmolested

and in classic painting

and in classical music

which is nauseatingly ubiquitous

In classicism society is unmolested

by itself

But an artist has to renounce

the process of this shamelessness

to the girl point-blank

But what does a beautiful girl like you care

about what a crazy man like me thinks

suddenly incensed

I am the incensed artist

in contrast to the other one

the appalled one

in contrast to the other one

addressing the girl point-blank

Wait my child

The longer you wait

the more beautiful you are

aside

It’s a fairy tale

a fairy tale is what it is

peers out into the lobby, then to the girl

The general manager

is an old friend of mine

we were at school

together

He’s been the general manager in Flensburg

for twenty years now

A Frisian do you understand

Frisian

he’s Frisian

Do you know how tiny Dinkelsbühl is

You can tell I’ve been living

in Dinkelsbühl for thirty years

This is what a person

who’s been living for thirty years in Dinkelsbühl looks like

These old trousers

this old coat

these old shoes

looking the girl directly in the eye

Don’t go to Dinkelsbühl

not to Dinkelsbühl

softly

You love him don’t you

how old is he

GIRL

Seventeen

MINETTI

Seventeen

When I was seventeen

I was beginning

to preoccupy myself with Shakespeare

Not with Lear

But at eighteen

I was already playing Lear

already at eighteen

If he’s seventeen has your boyfriend

got big plans

really big plans

Is he from Ostend

the girl nods

Minetti firmly

Don’t leave Ostend

I squandered all my savings

on a one-way ticket to here

I couldn’t afford

a round-trip ticket

a group of laughing and screaming revelers run unseen through the lobby

People use this day

to save themselves

when they get drunk

put on masks

I’ve been staring at the door

for the longest time

but he’s not coming

quoting from King Lear

Thou wert better in a grave

than to answer with they uncovered body

to the girl

Have you got any siblings

GIRL

Yes

MINETTI

Brothers

GIRL

Two brothers

MINETTI

Where do your brothers live

GIRL

Liège

MINETTI

In that horrible city Liège

Having siblings

is a nice thing

I had a brother

he’s buried in Lübeck

every year

I’ve visited the grave

the place

where he’s buried

Thirty years now since the last time

suddenly incensed

They chased me out of Lübeck

decisively

forever

quoting from King Lear

Thou wert better in a grave

than to answer with thy uncover’d body

the girl turns up the volume of her radio

It’s unfortunate

that I left for Ostend

Without saying a word

I took off

They’ll try to find me

Southern Germany is horrible

but the north

is even more horrible

Did I tell you that Ensor

promised me the mask

for Prospero

When I play Prospero

I told him

I should have played Prospero

Prospero

points into the lobby

a storm is drawing near

There in the corner

Ensor promised me the mask

I said

I would have time

In twenty years perhaps

I said

Lear now

Prospero in twenty years

Twenty years after Lear Prospero

But Ensor is dead

I have never played Prospero

but in Dinkelsbühl I’ve never stopped dreaming

of playing him

in Dinkelsbühl

in the attic I’ve dreamed

my child

Thirty long years

I’ve gotten up

and stepped up to the mirror

and played Lear

People said

I was crazy

the girl turns down the volume of her transistor radio

but I thought

those people were crazy

Time and again Lear Lear Lear

When I had long since been written off as crazy

pacing up and down

as Lear

The storm is picking up force

Until I receive a proposal

to play Lear

in a proper theater

Until I’m invited to play Lear in the theater

Artistry deteriorates easily my child

when the artist neglects it

lets himself get distracted

neglects it even for a single instant

forcefully

I haven’t been neglecting it my child

haven’t been neglecting it

I’ve been suffering odium

opprobrium

For thirty years I have been opposed

and oppugned in Dinkelsbühl

stands up and turns his left and right coat-pockets inside-out in that order

I’ve lost it

the telegram

the piece of evidence

To play Lear

at the two-hundredth anniversary celebration

in Flensburg

looking at the door

Suddenly we fall prey

to an idea

and we can’t do anything at all

but pursue this idea

cocking an attentive ear

The entire coast is raging

how the coast is raging

it’s raging the coast

Ostend’s in a snowstorm my child

Enter a fairly large group of laughing and smiling masked revelers from the lobby

a few of them stop in front of Minetti

THE FIRST REVELER points at Minetti with a bottle

This man has been waiting

two hours for the general manager of the theater

THE SECOND ONE

That’s what the receptionist says

THE THIRD ONE

And the lady in the red dress says it

THE FIRST ONE

Says it

THE SECOND

Says it

THE THIRD

Says it

They all burst into laughter and withdraw

MINETTI trembling with rage, shouting at them

Outrageous

outrageous

quite softly

Outrageous

The girl turns down the volume of her radio

The shamelessness of these people

knows no limits

The classless society

has gone crazy

He sits down exhausted on the sofa

The girl turns the volume of her radio back up

Minetti to the girl

Don’t leave Ostend

The girl shakes her head

Ostend’s your town

after a pause

I never should have gone

to Dinkelsbühl

softly

I no longer dared to leave

For thirty years

I was worried

constantly worried

that I’d forget my lines

That I’d no longer

be able to play Lear

sits down next to the girl and looks at the suitcase

We’ve stuck together

for thirty years

that suitcase and I

A conspiracy

rises and goes to the suitcase and opens it and takes a newspaper out and sits back down beside the girl and reads to the girl from the newspaper

Today the sacked theater actor Minetti

left the city of Lübeck

The citizens breathe a sigh of relief

folds up the newspaper and stands up and presses it into the suitcase and shuts the suitcase with the help of his right knee and sits back down next to the girl and looks at his watch

Eleven sharp

The GIRL turns up the volume of her radio and asks

Do you like music

Minetti stretches his legs out to their full length and nods shortly afterwards

Enter from the lobby the LADY walking almost with a marching gait, but not completely drunk; with her head held high she walks up to and past Minetti and the girl, and as she passes she says

Good night sir

and sleep well

She is now trailed by a waiter with two bottles of champagne on a tray

MINETTI following the pair as they exit, then eavesdropping on them

I like music

very much

the girl’s boyfriend appears in the bar, and the girl jumps up and runs up to him; the two of them kiss; the girl realizes that she has left the radio on the sofa and makes as if to take it with her but only turns the volume up slightly and returns to her boyfriend and looks at Minetti one more time.  Then exeunt the couple.

Minetti with his legs stretched far out and eyes closed, listening.

Epilogue

The Atlantic coast at Ostend.  Minetti on a bench.  In front of him his suitcase.  Ever more violently driving snow.  The cripple with the dog mask, limping ever faster past Minetti from stage right, vanishing stage left

MINETTI following the cripple with his eyes

then aside after a pause

Go

Rises and checks to see if he is unobserved and opens the suitcase and takes out the Lear mask and closes the suitcase again only with the help of his right knee and checks again to see if he is unobserved and sits back down on the bench and takes a small silver canister out of his left coat pocket; from the canister he takes several tablets, which he swallows with lightning speed.  Then he no less quickly puts on the Lear mask and turns up his coat collar and sticks his hands into his coat pockets and remains sitting perfectly still and staring straight ahead for a fairly long time and then says

Go now

even drunker now, laughing loudly and screaming, the group of masked revelers that passed by him earlier in the bar approach him from stage left and pass by him

THE LAST of the masked revelers lingers a moment and recognizes Minetti and points at him with his index finger and exclaims

The artist

The dramatic artist

and runs away

Minetti remains motionless until he is completely buried in snow

The end

Translation unauthorized but Copyright ©2018 by Douglas Robertson

Source: Thomas Bernhard, Stücke 2 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1988), pp. 204-250.  Minetti premiered at the Staatstheater Stuttgart on September 1, 1976.  There are two authorized translations of the play--Gitta Honegger’s in Theater 30, no. 1 (2000) and Tom Cairns and Peter Eyre’s (Oberon Books, 2014).