BOOKS
303
VIRTUOSO OF DECADENCE
Poems. By Stefan George. German-English Edition. Translation by Carol
North Valhope and Ernest Morwitz. Pantheon Books. $2.75.
This selection from the works of Stefan George, in the attractive
format of the double-text Rilke translations, is the first official homage
to the memory of George paid by the remnant of his Circle now resident
in
America.
Its limitations are sufficiently evident. In the first place it is pre–
tentious. The dust-cover speaks of George, Dante, and Shakespeare, and
a translator's note ranks George with Goethe and Nietzsche. Ernest
Morwitz's introduction re-affirms the myth of Maximin who
is
compared
not only to Alexander but to Jesus. George, it is insisted, was not only
the great poet of the epoch. He "comprised the present and the future";
he
was "the judge and propret of his people." And the best that Morwitz
can do by way of a rationale of George's philosophy is this: "In Maximin
the poet sees the incarnation of sacred youth which, at intervals through
the centuries, must be re-embodied in a single form to reunite the scat·
tered forces."
The choice of poems is, moreover, disingenuous. It is too obviously
designed not to give offence in a country where neither homoerotism nor
faacistic aestheticism are the vogue. Unhappily neither the social function
of the George Circle nor the nature of George's genius can be understood
without the help of some poems touching on these suspect themes. In
any case Morwitz's selection does not pretend to be based on merit alone,
and he includes a poem (p. 198) showing that George was not anti–
llelllitic. But he omits an even more striking poem which begins:
Mit den frauen fremder ordnung
Sollt ihr nicht den leib beflecken
Barret! la.sset pfau bei afje!
(With the women of an alien order you should not stain your body. Stop!
Let
peacock mate with ape! [i.e. leave miscegenation to animals] ) .
And no representative selection from George's work could omit
Der Krieg
which embodies his ambiguous half-pacifist, half-Prussian attitude to
the war or
Der Dichter in Zeiten der Wirren
in which George demands
a hero, ominously equipped, with "das voelkische Banner," to whip home
the
decadent preachers of a false brotherhood, establish a new discipline,
and plant a new Reich.
Furthermore, the translations are unsatisfactory. They will please
neither those who have no German nor those who read them with the
original in mind. Not that they are slipshod. On the contrary. The
translators tell us, and we believe them, that they have tried to reproduce
the
technique of George's verse-rhyme-scheme, even internal rhymes and
ll&onance, alliteration-in English. "The effect achieved by the contrast
between light and dark vowels or by a procession of dark or light vowel
10unds was maintained. The use of consonants was imitated: sibilant
