Chapter 18“Vampire Longing” — Hunger for Life»VAMPYR SEHNSUCHT« — LEBENSHUNGER
📖 This chapter with the German alongside →
My picture “Vampyr Sehnsucht”1 was now nearing its end. For the vampire-woman with the bat's wings I had found a very good model. For the sleeping youth, however, “Genio” had offered himself as a model. But when he once lay for a trial, the thing proved impossible. At most he would have been suited to a sleeping Vitellius. — This picture — to me one of my dearest — later won many laurels in my great Paris Preuschen Exhibition of the year 1900. I conceived longing in the shape of a vampire-woman that falls upon a man in his sleep and sucks his heart's blood. All the unlived wishes, dreams and longings that haunt the defenceless and suck the marrow and life out of him were to be embodied in it.
Where is the artist whom the vampire Longing does not plague his whole life long?
Now the ring of my Symbolist pictures had soon closed. I still lacked only the “Lebenshunger” and the “Holy Life.” In it I wanted to paint a Leda with a black swan — the “miracle” of sensual pure love. The picture was later to be shown for the first time in my “Indian Exhibition.”
First I threw myself head over heels into my great picture “Lebenshunger.”
A naked woman, imploring the sphinx of life for happiness. And in answer the sphinx strikes her claws into her brain. I had discovered a very suitable Assyrian winged sphinx with the breasts of Isis in the Berlin Museum. This I used for it. — “I am afraid of the Pfingst2,” said the otherwise so fearless little Inge.
The picture is particularly successful in its colour.
The painting is described in the poem “Lebenshunger,” the title verses of my Astartenlieder, which were now appearing with Cäsar Schmidt in Zürich, again like the “Mondberg.”
Despite its strong painterly effect — the quintessence of the picture is spoken by the last words of the poem:
“It breathes like death out of twining rose-scent, And what is love-sick is never sated.”
Notes
Sources, identifications, and points where the German carries something English cannot. Added by this project; not in the original.
- ↑“Vampyr Sehnsucht” — “Vampire Longing” — longing as a vampire-woman that attacks the sleeper and drinks his heart's blood. German gives every noun a gender, and she paints along the grammar: die Sehnsucht, longing, is feminine, so longing takes flesh as a vampire-woman — exactly as der Tod, masculine, had become the emperor of “Mors Imperator.” English has to be told what the German article already knew. The grammar even complicates her closing sentence: Weib, woman, is grammatically neuter, so the vampire-woman is an “it” (»in ihm«) — the pronoun English reserves for things.
- ↑Pfingst — Her small daughter's word for “Sphinx.” Sphinx, in a small child's mouth, comes out as “Pfingst” — which to a German ear is the stem of Pfingsten, Whitsun. The otherwise fearless child has turned the monster into a church holiday, an accident no English spelling could keep. Inge was born in May 1896; the chapter gives no year, and its place in the book is not a date.