Chapter 31InterludeZWISCHENSPIEL
📖 This chapter with the German alongside →
Like children are my thousand longings. They tremble about the circuit of my life with bright, iridescent colours, like a play of rainbows.
Now light, now glaring, now delicate, now deep, they wrap me as in a cloak of drops spraying a millionfold.
Teardrops!
Like children are my thousand longings! But when they are children no longer, and have become men1, men with poisoned arrows, then from each of the thousand bows the arrow-poison whirs into the defenceless heart, which bleeds to death of it — — deadly slowly — deadly surely!
Like men of bronze my thousand longings stand, guarding my defenceless heart so that it may not yet die of their thousand death-arrows — because it has not yet suffered enough!
Like women are my thousand longings, malicious, slavering, rutting women. — “Look at us, we are happy, and we are loved — but you are alone, you are lonely — lonely — and you shall suffer!”
And the children and the men and the women tear at my lonely soul, feed on it like harpies and serpents.
— — Like children my thousand longings stand!
Notes
Sources, identifications, and points where the German carries something English cannot. Added by this project; not in the original.
- ↑have become men — The poem is built on the three grammatical genders of German, and it moves through them in order: the longings are first neuter (Kinder), then masculine (Männer), then neuter again by way of a word for women (Weiber). Sehnsucht is feminine, so “meine tausend Sehnsüchte” are grammatically female before the poem starts; what it then does is put them through every other gender the language has. Kind is neuter. Mann is masculine. Weib — the word she chooses over Frau — is neuter, so the slavering, rutting women of the fifth section are, in German, grammatically its rather than hers; the language declines to call them female even as the poem does. Nothing of this survives translation, which is why it is set out here. It is the same grammatical argument as the curse in chapter 25, where a neuter Genie cannot force down its own womanhood, only turned on herself: the longings that begin as her children end as women taunting her for being unloved, and the whole apparatus of gender is used to say that the tormentors are not other people at all.