As part of this local chamber music series, Benvenue House director Tanya Tomkins commissioned me to write an original poem in response to Schoenberg’s Verklarte Nacht. This somehow evolved to include a translation of the Richard Dehmel poem that inspired Schoenberg and a craft talk on my process (which included references to both David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas and the children’s cartoon Avatar). An engaged, passionate audience made the whole thing a lot of fun, while Left Coast’s performance bright out the authentic feeling in Schoenberg’s early piece.
Below is the translation (preceded by Dehmel’s German original) and my poem “Five Kinds of Light,” after Schoenberg and Dehmel.
VERKLÄRTE NACHT
Zwei Menschen gehn durch kahlen, kalten Hain;
der Mond läuft mit, sie schaun hinein.
Der Mond läuft über hohe Eichen;
kein Wölkchen trübt das Himmelslicht,
in das die schwarzen Zacken reichen.
Die Stimme eines Weibes spricht:
„Ich trag ein Kind, und nit von Dir,
ich geh in Sünde neben Dir.
Ich hab mich schwer an mir vergangen.
Ich glaubte nicht mehr an ein Glück
und hatte doch ein schwer Verlangen
nach Lebensinhalt, nach Mutterglück
und Pflicht; da hab ich mich erfrecht,
da ließ ich schaudernd mein Geschlecht
von einem fremden Mann umfangen,
und hab mich noch dafür gesegnet.
Nun hat das Leben sich gerächt:
nun bin ich Dir, o Dir, begegnet.“
Sie geht mit ungelenkem Schritt.
Sie schaut empor; der Mond läuft mit.
Ihr dunkler Blick ertrinkt in Licht.
Die Stimme eines Mannes spricht:
„Das Kind, das Du empfangen hast,
sei Deiner Seele keine Last,
o sieh, wie klar das Weltall schimmert!
Es ist ein Glanz um alles her;
Du treibst mit mir auf kaltem Meer,
doch eine eigne Wärme flimmert
von Dir in mich, von mir in Dich.
Die wird das fremde Kind verklären,
Du wirst es mir, von mir gebären;
Du hast den Glanz in mich gebracht,
Du hast mich selbst zum Kind gemacht.”
Er faßt sie um die starken Hüften.
Ihr Atem küßt sich in den Lüften.
Zwei Menschen gehn durch hohe, helle Nacht.
– Richard Dehmel, 1896
TRANSFIGURED NIGHT
Two people walk through a bare, cold wood.
The moon keeps pace with them
and draws their gaze. It slides across the tops
of the oaks; no cloud obscures its glow.
The points of the boughs reach for its light.
The woman speaks.
I’m carrying a child, and not yours.
I walk in sin beside you. When I say sin –
I mean a sin against myself. I lost
the thread of happiness (I mean the possibility
of believing in its possibility). And yet I longed
For some meaning: a mother’s joys
And duties. And so – I dared.
Shuddering myself into a stranger’s arms.
Willed it, and made it a blessing. But life
has its ways of getting back at us.
Call it revenge: so here you are.
She walks, trips, makes her way onward.
She looks up; the moon is still there.
It sees her. It is drowning her in light.
It does not stop its seeing.
The man speaks.
May the child you conceived
Be no burden on your soul. Look
how the universe shines, on you
and on everything. We float together
on a cold sea. But even now that glow
moves inside you. It moves
from you into me, and me into you.
It will transfigure the child, a child
born with my light inside it.
And you have brought the light into me,
made me new, reborn in your glow.
He wraps his arms around her full hips.
Their breath entwines in the cool air.
They walk together into the high, bright night.
tr. Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet
Translation commissioned for Benvenue House performance of Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht, December 2012
FIVE KINDS OF LIGHT
it is ours driving up and over the heavily canted bridge, ours at night
not sleeping, ours sitting late in the office staring into screens
we hear it
stumbling along the long rows of trees, moving to drown it out
stopping just enough to step forward
again into it
ours late nights up again with a sick child, terrified and amazed
at the headlights’ calm survey of the blinds, ours plunking it out on the keyboard
once again from the top despite a cascading lack of talent
for whatever miracle we have been asked to perform
•
it is lifting
and falling, it is a means
of being in the world (having lost the intermediary word:
body struck mute and radiant seen)
in the theaters in the balconies of scuffed velvet on the late-night couches
alone or together, swimming in irony or indulgence under the flickering screen
and still through it all the tidal pull—
•
it makes a place to pour ourselves into, it has shaped
our cells, it is handed back and forth
(sometimes contraband sometimes insistent offering) and we submit
ourselves to it,
we feed it into our ears and our eyes
•
in a tangle of cables and tubes under the overturned truck on the riverbank
where they have given up the search
where the baseboards
have been scrubbed away under so many mops
where the ice
forms around a hole in the road
where
•
in the closet, in the box, under lock and key, under duress
alone in a room in front of a window
gathered with others at the altar of our celebration
waiting on streetcorners and in the backs of cars
sweeping the kitchen floor, glass slipped through our fingers
on the train holding an extra ticket
in the nursery in the departure lounge afterwards deep in the ordinary
time of strip malls and medians, kicking stones
around the shore of the half-dead lake it is
broken and filtered and coming through despite what stones we pile up around our heads
it pushes us into the world with its insistent hands
poem commissioned for Left Coast Chamber Ensemble performance of
Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht, December 2012