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Magic Hoods: Selected Prose Poems

Foreword

Walter Helmut Fritz (born 1929 has been a highly respected poet since not long after the appearance of his first collection in 1956. In addition to numerous volumes of verse, he has published more than 200 prose poems, ranging in length from almost aphoristic brevity to miniature short stories of sorts. The present number of the University of Cincinnati Occasional Papers in German-Americana constitutes but a small sampling of this œuvre.

Reinhold Grimm is making his third appearance in the Papers, the second as translator. His versions of Fritz’s prose poems have appeared in such journals as Northwest Review and Literary Imagination, and we are pleased to increase the availability of these texts. Readers with an interest in this genre, a scholarly bent, and a knowledge of German may wish to consult Grimm’s article “Theorie und Praxis des Prosagedichts bei Walter Helmut Fritz,” Studi germanici (Rome), 38.1 (2000): 103-128.

 The original texts of “Time,” “Tunnels,” and “Pulsating” are found in Fritz’s collection Zeit des Sehens (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1989), the remaining originals in his Was einmal im Geist gelebt hat (Heidelberg: Wunderhorn, 1999).

Jerry Glenn

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A Miniature

It belongs to the manuscript. A mirror of the universe, not finished, not unfinished. Countries, mountains, oceans, plants, animals, and humans; the seven planets’ orbits. A space which emerges, which can be inhabited, which grows around you with lairs for joy and for shudder. Drawn with the pen, painted with the brush. An image. Everything in its place. Nothing that’s blown away. Brightly bounded and yet without bounds. Here the morning, there the evening. If you look long enough, both seem to change their positions.

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Inside and Outside

At first, dwellings made of reed; later on, of loam mixed with straw; of lumps of clay dried in the heat; of bricks. Windows were sparse, for the sake of security and because of the sandstorms. Lightness came through the door. From there, one could see as outside in the morning—after the impenetrability of the night—the sun pitched his camp and began to teach the long duration, the strident fear, the shapeless quietude, the distance as a prison. From time to time, someone jumped past or struggled along.

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Even by This Map of the World

on a leaf of parchment, you will be surprised. The Mediterranean Sea is discernible. As for Africa, though, there is a hitch with its contours. Kings are beheaded there after one year. Humans have only one eye, wear foxtails, or their feet are so huge as to serve them as a shelter from rain. Lots of emptiness in the North, coldness advancing. In the East, you can see on mountains—there are gaps of perception in front—a city with strong walls, with merlons, with a distant name: the Paradise.

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A Washerwoman

as they call the wagtail here in Burgundy, darts by, jerking its tail up and down, alights on a rock in the creek, is reflected in the water, flies away, flies across young green grass, across nettles, dandelions, hazels, which all seem to form a festive parade; has soon disappeared beyond an uneven slope, a footpath. A flourishing day. Swiftly graspable in flight?

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Everything Afresh

Now he thinks it’s possible. Then he doubts it. Then he is convinced of it. Then he thinks it’s impossible. Then he is unhappy since he hasn’t found a solution. Then searching in vain seems quite natural and just to him. Then he realizes he becomes the more vigilant the more the goal recedes. Then he believes that everything has now been lost. Then he believes he hasn’t to lose anything. Then panic grips him at the very thought of a possible loss. Then everything begins oscillating. Then everything begins afresh.

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The Cook

The townspeople call him a benefactor. His dishes are delicate, they say, and nourishing. Today he’ll serve a pumpkin soup, green peppers, shoulder of lamb, and cinnamon ice cream. All the shopping was done by himself. One has to simplify the preparation, he believes, to simplify.

He goes to the kitchen door and smiles at the beautiful woman who has already been his customer several times, and whose knowing look reminds him of the wonderful gift of lust. Even now he grasps her charm, not just when she’s leaving. He is a lover of flames; his desire to be kindled will never vanish.

A cookbook, that’s what he’d like to write, collecting the experiences he has gained in the course of his work. Apart from recipes, it is to include a history of the pots and pans made of earthenware, bronze, and iron. A chapter on steaming, stewing, grilling, braising, and baking must not be lacking. In his reflective mood, he contemplates the bowl of his pipe. As to his wine, he takes it for a walk through his mouth.

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What Are People Doing?

In Karlsruhe’s Kunsthalle, a picture by the painter Matthias Gerung: “Melancholy in the Garden of Life.” A landscape wherein more than a hundred people can be seen. In their midst, elevated by her tallness, a woman. She has wings and buries her head in her hand. A rainbow in the sky, a flash of fire.

What are people doing? They dance, bowl, ride on horseback, bathe, hunt, catch fish, work in the fields or the mines, build homes, run away, have no choice, devote themselves to dice, to shooting contests, to music, stand on their heads, besiege a city, execute, and inter. In everything they are doing, some fading away meddles in.

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Bumblebees

For bees the day would prove too cool. Brought black into the world, a brownish-yellow band across their thoraxes and their abdomens, some bumblebees are now visiting the willow. In their thick, velvety wool, with stumpy bodies, gregarious, in the earliness of their lives. Soon they will be around everywhere. They take up the pollen, are full of zeal. Their flight, their sway, their buzzing. Later on, they return to their nests in hollows, under the ground or in tree trunks or in the crevices of rocks. In the fall when they will die, that which is ungraspable will also change color.

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Magic Hoods

Words that—like poplar seeds—have tufts which carry them over countries and oceans, through the years. When they are arriving, brightness begins to spread. Today, Elazar Benyoëtz has sent them on their journey. They bring news of loss and gain, confidence and reticence, encountering and bidding farewell: of boundless clarity; of the inner disintegration one needs so as to know something about oneself; of the inhumanity of humans; of the luminous rays that thoughts cast into the darkness before they have been engulfed by it. Words without ruses, which makes us realize what time, space, life, and death are: magic hoods.

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Unsteady on Her Legs

The little girl, perhaps two years of age, was groping her way along the wall that separated the outdoor restaurant from the neighboring plot. She fell down several times, got up, licked at the brickwork, discovered a metal pipe fixed to the wall, banged a spoon against it, found a cluster of grass that grew from a chink between the stones, and stuffed it into her mouth.

From one of the balconies a woman looked down who had obviously escaped from a family quarrel, since she turned around at one point and called through the still open door: Stop it, for heaven’s sake! It sounded so fierce that many a customer looked up at her; even the little girl didn’t busy herself with the wall any longer but ran to her father, who had all the while, sitting at one of the tables with an immobile, withdrawn face, been staring straight ahead. Now he showed a smile that for moments broke up the grief in which he seemed to be so enshrouded.

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Time

You see, he says, the windows are shut and yet the entire place is covered with dust. I struggle against it day after day; it penetrates everywhere during the last weeks of the year when the storms blow from the North.

He teaches literature at the University of Dakar. I am spending an evening with him at his home; two of his students are also there. He tells us that every week he places—just like his ancestors—fresh water in one of the rooms, ready for his deceased relatives, since life after death doesn’t differ from their earthly existence; only it takes place in the invisible realm. They are, he says, always present: at meals, feasts, deaths, a wedding, a childbirth; often their presence is even more intense than that of the living.

One of the students hails from Peru. He reports on the building of a bridge out of pampas grass across the gorge of a river in the Peruvian highlands. Every two years, at regular intervals, it is built afresh. All the inhabitants of the surrounding villages collaborate without any payment. It takes them three days. Before it starts, there is a sacrificial ceremony: everyone puts something especially dear to him in the fire. Everyone, he says, makes an offering so that the bridge may later shine like gold in the sun. The fire keeps on burning throughout the whole building process. Pampas grass produces large bushes. Its blades are about six feet long, narrow, grayish green. From their midst, there rise the stems, which are adorned with silky, silvery particles. The locals beat the leaves with stones and twist them to form plaits of more than two-hundred feet. Every twelve plaits combined result in a rope as thick as one’s arm, the ropes joined together, in the bridge.

I haven’t been at home anymore long since, he adds. That which I previously experienced is now a film.

The other student hails from a village in the neighborhood of Dakar. He has fourteen siblings. In a year’s time he will have concluded his studies. He reads to us from a story he likes in particular: it’s by Camara Laye, an author born in Guinea in 1928. A black snake occurs in this story. The mother believes it to be the father’s protecting spirit. The father says it had first appeared in a dream of his, telling him the day when it would appear in reality. When he saw it for the first time, fear gripped him. He mistook it for a snake like all other snakes and had to restrain himself from killing it. But a force that was stronger than his willpower kept him from pursuing it. Later on, he says, he always received the snake without fear. Toward the end of the story we read: “The snake moved right up to him and opened its mouth wide. When it was close enough, my father would fondle it with his hand and the snake would tolerate his caresses while thrills were running through its entire body. . . . The hand was asking questions and the quivering was the answer.”

—I’d have liked to get to know Camera Laye, he says. But his life, too, was already a thing of the past.

The African night was speaking and keeping silent outside under the sky perforated by stars. It lasted—and yet was passing so quickly as if it had been a long time ago. No river nearby to water the roots.

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Tunnels

One tunnel after another. In between the view of valleys, houses, mountain chains, layers of clouds.

Now, that of a garden with white and purple lilacs, located on a slope. They resemble fireworks as we gaped at in astonishment when we were children, and when from metallic salts, whose vapors glowed in spectral colors, worlds of light and sparks arose.

Inside the tunnel. In the windowpanes the reflections of the travelers: ghostlike, afar, withdrawn, moved on nearly without any movement.

Brightness again. Goats, their horns compressed from either side, bent back like sickles. They are pushing forward behind a fence, are fed with grass and leaves by a girl and a boy.

Each time when entering a tunnel, our speed seems to increase. I think of one of my teachers who was so appalled by the quickness of life that he didn’t want to establish himself anywhere. Whenever—every two, three years—he moved into a new apartment, he would place in it only what was absolutely necessary and, after a few weeks, rearrange it: the table away from this window, over to that window. A novel view! He loved bare walls. If indeed he hung a picture on one of them, it would be put elsewhere after a short time. Mostly his yen for such changes overcame him late in the evening, when he was already in bed; or in the early morning, right after getting up.

A landscape with undulating sequences of meadows and fields, of paths and woodland, distinguished by shades of green, sunlight flitting across for seconds each time, now setting off a hill, now the course of a streamlet. Mistletoes spreading themselves on fruit trees. A man and a woman are watching the sparrows that come flying in flocks to eat the berries. Formerly we were told that the mistletoe opens the gates of the netherworld.

Then everything has again been wiped out by the walls of stone in the hollow—how difficult to build it, there where the mountains are said to be wet, water-bearing.

Now a quarry, as if in a watercolor. A road that keeps on extending.

Forced, driven, catapulted into the next tunnel: indifferent people who are speaking, sleeping, reading, attempting to recollect something or to forget it.

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Pulsating

We were on our way through the Ardennes. During the past few days it had been snowing. Children were sledding on the slopes. In a field we saw hundreds of crows at a time, perched on trees and changing into dark blobs, fluttering up and down, flying away in big curves. The fog thickened as the road ascended, and the horizon between the snowy expanses and the sky was no longer distinguishable. Shadowy, now and then, a farm could be made out, a steeple; afterwards, some cross-country skiers, the veined filigree of bushes. A passing car splashed slush against our windshield. In Clervaux the abbey towered high above moss-grown walls and the slated roofs of the houses. Two telephone booths: in each of them a man was making a call, in front of each two women were waiting. A glove in the snow, as red as the stoplight at the construction site beyond the outskirts. Later on when the fog was beginning to dissipate again, round mountain tops were arching. A girl came toward us on the road, her hands clasped over her head. The waters of the river Our kept rushing through the village of Vianden.

On our return I noticed that the apartment transformed itself under the sway of these memories, that it tightened, extended, started pulsating. It was an adventure to feel the way it was losing its firmness, turning expansive and cool, pervious to the day and evening with their whispers, to the views of the landscape, the poverty and pomp of the snow. The reflection of the city lights in the sky: a fin. And the extravagant thought that all the things we perceive have a boundary, to be sure; but that we are never, under any circumstances, in a position to conceive of space without imagining more space beyond its boundaries, and thus into infinity.