This week a poignant valediction from the fine East German poet Peter Huchel (1903-1981). It is another of those German poems dense with symbolic meaning, and I am by no means confident that I have sussed out all those meanings, but for what it is worth here is my take on it.

Theophrastus was a Greek philosopher, a friend to Plato and Aristotle, renowned for his interest in the natural world and known as the father of botany. Huchel is likening himself to Theophrastus but in his case the garden he has faithfully tended is a literary one, where he and others of his kind have ‘planted conversations like trees’: as well as writing books he edited a prestigious free-thinking poetry magazine, ‘Sinn und Form’ (Sense and Form). After the building of the Berlin Wall he began to experience the unwelcome attentions of the East German authorities, and was forced to give up the editorship of the magazine and live in isolation under Stasi surveillance.

This poem appeared in the magazine’s last issue. It is at once resigned and defiant. So now he is at the end of his stewardship, his breath comes shorter and the garden is dead. But at noon the light of poetry still dances on the urns that commemorate the great writers of the past, and when it does he urges his son to preserve the garden’s memory and the memory of his patient tending. And there is hope: an olive tree (a symbol of peace and endurance) splits the crumbling wall and a voice still speaks from the hot dust. It is tempting to see ‘das mürbe Gemäuer’, the crumbling wall, as a reference to the Berlin Wall, but the timings don’t quite work: the Wall went up in 1961 and the poem appeared in 1962 but would almost certainly have been written well before, as if in anticipation of the coming censorship, and anyway Huchel did not use direct political references, so we can just take the use of this particular image as a happily proleptic coincidence.

The translation that follows is my own.

Der Garten des Theophrast

Meinem Sohn

Wenn mittags das weiße Feuer
Der Verse über den Urnen tanzt,
Gedenke, mein Sohn. Gedenke derer,
Die einst Gespräche wie Bäume gepflanzt.
Tot ist der Garten, mein Atem wird schwerer,
Bewahre die Stunde, hier ging Theophrast,
Mit Eichenlohe zu düngen den Boden,
Die wunde Rinde zu binden mit Bast.
Ein Ölbaum spaltet das mürbe Gemäuer
Und ist noch Stimme im heißen Staub.
Sie gaben Befehl, die Wurzel zu roden.
Es sinkt dein Licht, schutzloses Laub.

Peter Huchel

The Garden of Theophrastus

To my son

When at noon the white fire of poetry
Dances above the urns,
Remember, my son. Remember those
Who planted conversations once like trees.
The garden is dead, my breath comes shorter now,
Preserve the hour, when here went Theophrastus,
To fertilize the soil with oak tan,
To bind the bark of wounded trunks with bast.
An olive tree splits the crumbling walls
And the hot dust has still a voice.
They gave the order: grub the root out. Now
The light fails on your undefended leaves.