Weltende (Jakob van Hoddis)

Weltende is a poem by the German poet Jakob van Hoddis, the anagrammatic pseudonym of Hans Davidsohn (1887-1942). The poem is, from its appearing until today, the most famous expressionistic one, though its author has remained quite unknown for a long time, principally in the United States. Van Hoddis was killed in 1942, probably in the Sobibór extermination camp.
German original and its adaption.
Van Hoddis's poem "Weltende" has been often translated into English. But most of translations miss rhyme scheme, rhythm, verse form, and in sum the 'foolhardy' spirit of the original. The following adaption by Natias Neutert affords a little generosity on poetic licence (verse 6: "as if they were midges"), but consider all specifications, such as rhyme scheme, masculine and feminine cadences, and principally the spirit of the original:
Weltende
Dem Bürger fliegt vom spitzen Kopf der Hut,
In allen Lüften hallt es wie Geschrei,
Dachdecker stürzen ab und gehn entzwei.
Und an den Küsten – liest man – steigt die Flut.
Der Sturm ist da, die wilden Meere hupfen
An Land, um dicke Dämme zu zerdrücken.
Die meisten Menschen haben einen Schnupfen.
Die Eisenbahnen fallen von den Brücken."
World's End
The burgher’s hat flies away in a trice.
In all quarters resounds hullaballoo.
Roof tilers plummet down and break in two.
Along the coasts—one reads — the floodings rise.
The storm is here, wuthering seas are hopping
Ashore to crush dams as if they were midges.
Most people have a cold that is not stopping.
The railway waggons tumble down from bridges.
Creation, first and later publications.
The poem, probably written in 1910, was first published at 11. January in 1911 in «Der Demokrat», a free-thinking Berlin magazine, almost four years before the outbreak of the First World War.
At the end of 1919 and the start of 1920 it was published in the anthology of expressionist poetry titled "Menschheitsdämmerung" by Kurt Pinthus, an explosive pioneering work of all those experiments, and till today still the representative collection of Expressionism.
Figurehead of the movement.
The two stanzas „entered the then literary scene with a beat of a kettledrum and advanced to an epoch-making 'earworm' among all Expressionist‘s poems, and it was taken as family crest in trice,“ as the German poet and translator Natias Neutert comments on van Hoddis’ poem in a note. Therefore, Jattie Enklaar/Hans Ester/Evelyne Tax class van Hoddis’ "Weltende" as a „keypoem“. To get an idea of the impact of these eight lines, a contemporary witness may called and quoted: The writer Johannes R. Becher, who later became Minister of Culture of the GDR, described the poem in 1957, one year before his death, as „Marseillaise of expressionistic rebellion" and wrote with sustaining deep admiration: „These two stanzas, o these eight lines seemed to transform us into other people, they lifted us from a world of dull bourgeoisie that we despised and from which we did not know how we should leave.“
„It was a feeling of superiority and freedom, what these verses were able to awaken,“ as the German literary scientist Helmut Hornbogen classified the effect.
Literary historical classifications.
Genre.
The poem "Weltende" is assigned to the genre of early expressionistic "Großstadtlyrik" (big city poetry). The genre traces back, as the Germanist Hugo Friedrich
describes, to the forerunners Arthur Rimbaud and Charles Baudelaire, and to their fight for "...being absolutely modern...“ (Rimbaud), both poets practised a symbiosis of literature and life.
Formatwise.
Formally seen, the poem is held more conventionally as other expressionistic poems with their break of rules of grammair and with a lot of extraordinary expressive neologisms.
Structure of the poem.
The poem is constructed out of two stanzas with always four verses. The rhyming scheme in the first stanza has an embracing rhyme (ABBA), in the second one a cross rhyme (CDCD). Metrical seen an iambic pentameter having some irregularities in the second stanza. The first one is accentuated with masculine cadences, the second one with female cadences.
Title, topic, motif.
The title "Weltende" means the same as end of the world or end time, but van Hoddis used it ironically, because the proper meaning is "natural catastrophe", which is actually the poem's subject matter. The main motif is the struggle between two opposing forces: the "first nature" and the so-called "second nature", build up by mankind with the material of the first one. In a nutshell: nature vs. society.
Interpretation.
The poem can be taken as foreboding, as an early example for the today actor-network theory. Since there is no "lyrical I", that acts. What actually act are the elements of nature. It starts with a freshened wind blowing off the hat from the burglittleSo the wild seas—as the German poet Peter Rühmkorf interprets the poem's scenario—„board (...) the continent as a readily capturable sandpit and treat proud work of man as welcoming giant toy,“ 
Despite of all technological mastery of nature, in moments of a natural catastrophe we got the feeling ‚nature strikes back’ and we are often objectively no more able, to control the situation: we become victims. 
That roof tilers „break in two“ (vers 3) is a way we normally use to speak about fragile puppets. This can be taken as a pointer to the apodictic fact that van Hoddis deals with a dichotomy. One the one hand there is seriousness of the apocalyptic title and some mentioned fatal happenings (vers 3, vers 6, and vers 8), on the other hand there is— as a sharp contrast to all that— the playfullness of the poem, what is obviously full of irony. Therefore, Rühmkorf rightly speaks of „Westentaschenapokalypse“(vest pocket Apocalypse).
Versions and pitfalls of translating.
To have introduced van Hoddis’ poem "Weltende" into the Anglo-American literary scene has been the merit of Michael Hamburger, British poet and translator.
However, his version breaks the given rhyme scheme of the original's first stanza (the embracing rhyme) and fails to capture its female cadences in the second stanza. And the use of the word "jetties"—even if they are „big“— instead of the word "Deiche" (dams), extenuates the original's power of imagery impermissibly .
Weltende
Dem Bürger fliegt vom spitzen Kopf der Hut, 
In allen Lüften hallt es wie Geschrei, 
Dachdecker stürzen ab und gehn entzwei. 
Und an den Küsten – liest man – steigt die Flut.
Der Sturm ist da, die wilden Meere hupfen 
An Land, um dicke Dämme zu zerdrücken. 
Die meisten Menschen haben einen Schnupfen. 
Die Eisenbahnen fallen von den Brücken.
 End Of The World
From pointed pates hats fly into the blue, 
All winds resound as so with muffled cries. 
Steeplejacks fall from roofs and break in two, 
And on the coasts—we read —flood waters rise.
The storm has come, the seas run wild and skip 
Landwards to squash big jetties there. 
Most people have a cold, their noses drip. 
Trains tumble from the bridges everywhere. 
Hamburger's version was published in 1977. More than twenty years later the anthology "German 20th Century Poetry" was published by Reinhold Grimm and Irmgard Hunt. Within one finds a nearly line-by-line-takeover of Hamburger's version by Irmgard Hunt. Only six words—less than ten percent— are exchanged.
 <poem>
 From pointed pates hats fly into the blue,
 All winds resound as so with muffled cries.
 Steeplejacks fall from roofs and break in two,
 And on the coasts—we read —"the tides" rise "high".
 The storm "is here", the seas run wild and skip
 "On land, crushing thick bulwarks" there.
 Most people have a cold, their noses drip.
 Trains tumble from the bridges everywhere.
 </poem>
Others versions, such as Christopher Middleton's, Richard John Ascárate's or Rolf-Peter Wille's demonstrate the widely scope of translating, but in some way or other they all fail the original's versification, its imagery or its spirit, as any comparison suggests.
Works.
Only one single book, titled "Weltende", was published during van Hoddis’ lifetime, in 1918. The following are available editions: