{"id":8023,"date":"2012-03-30T19:55:08","date_gmt":"2012-03-30T23:55:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=8023"},"modified":"2012-03-30T19:55:08","modified_gmt":"2012-03-30T23:55:08","slug":"karl-may-1842-1912","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/karl-may-1842-1912\/","title":{"rendered":"Karl May (1842-1912)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Today one hundred years ago the German novelist Karl May died. The importance of his work for any\u00a0German-language\u00a0adolescent growing up in the 20C \u00a0was enormous\u00a0(at\u00a0least\u00a0until the sixties\/seventies when a series of bad movies ruined the imaginative hold the novels had). For me, young Luxembourgian sofa-bound reader, the 72 volumes of the “travel tales” represented the first truly nomadic moves \u2014 even if these happened as yet only in my head. Later I would voyage along several of the dotted lines that informed the maps his books printed as front & end-papers, from the Chott el Djerid between Algeria & Tunisia to Yuma, Arizona. In the early eighties, when based in South London, I wrote a poem called WINNETOU OLD (named after May’s most famous hero, the Mescalero Apache chief Winnetou). Permit me to post a couple stanzas from the poem (though some of spacing can’t be reproduced here) as well as Nicole Peyrafitte’s great cover for the book (The poems were first published in Sulfur<\/em> magazine, & then as a chapbook from Meow Press).\u00a0Tonight\u00a0I’ll fall asleep while rereading one of his early novels set in present day Syria & Turkey, a free download on my iPad. In German \u2014 the few English language translations in existence are not worth checking out, I believe, as the magic of the foreign realms of the Wild West where Old Shatterhand, Hadji Halef Omar & Winnetou met, seem to \u00a0lose all magic in translation. Strange but true. If you can, do however try to see \u00a0Hans-J\u00fcrgen\u00a0Syderberg’s film “Karl May,”\u00a0<\/em>a superb meditation on the man & writer.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\nfrom WINNETOU OLD
\n***<\/p>\n

staccato stasis    howl this alphabet
\ngo away    don’t hurl this relapse into bone again
\nno gain this stone-monkey Europe    post no inter-
\nglacial basin    from its dead foam no Aphrodite    no
\nfat-assed goddess    kalypigian woman scraggy pigeons of
\nParis Rome London Berlin    carriers of Krakow diseases
\nkill the messengers from Budapest    the plague is
\nno turbulence<\/p>\n

breath    learn how to breathe    with eyes
\nclosed    break now the slippery line    carry on Winnetou
\nold now    called Taranta in the vision
\n a clearing a one-room school-house
\npart Swiss chalet    part frontier log cabin
\npart greek temple    an old mescalero apache    in rags of white
\nhair    with a ball of light yarn    in his right hand
\nitschli dead    he walks in rubber Good Year sandals the
\nlight yarn ball raised    his hand raised    all salutes
\nresemble each other<\/p>\n

IBM staccato rage    make it flow    blood not
\nI-slash    make it over again into daily sashimi    cut from
\nbetween your ribs    toro of belly    toro of Gloucester
\nmake merry haha    only through power can we churn the
\nyourappian mind    around & around here come    aus Deutschland
\nthat battering figure of    bone-monkey    break the ice
\nreclaim use of bone    subarctic steppes    double-sealed in
\nDeutschland    aus Deutschland    ein W\u00fcrfel Stroh ein Nichts
\naus Erde    metal-blue Aries    comes across a milled universe
\nUniversum f\u00fcr junge Menschen    comes across the heart-bunker
\nlimits of any city    retrace the subway steppes in strong
\nIndian ink    all alone with Winnetou    old Tamburlaine
\nTurbulence dead already    amazing names more than fishwives
\ncaretakers of the world<\/p>\n

sound gethsemanes    spell through hell’s
\nlandscapes    a cardiovascular ease    a momentary you wakes
\na sentence    now another night lifts    off the rooftops in
\nanger its load    a cynical series of    political nightmares
\nyou turned your back    accused me of lack of romanticism
\nthe fragrance of passion    the smell of death    hides behind
\nthe fragrance of new sheets    bone gags anger that narrow
\nmood    ram’s head hurtling    pike’s mouth gasping water
\nshoots    an old turbulence comes riding<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today one hundred years ago the German novelist Karl May died. The importance of his work for any\u00a0German-language\u00a0adolescent growing up in the 20C \u00a0was enormous\u00a0(at\u00a0least\u00a0until the sixties\/seventies when a series of bad movies ruined...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[82,96,97,1],"tags":[1188,1189],"class_list":["post-8023","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-passings","category-prose","category-reading","category-uncategorized","tag-karl-may","tag-winnetou"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8023","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8023"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8023\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8045,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8023\/revisions\/8045"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8023"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8023"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8023"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}