Translations from Hans Arp

     Child of an Alsatian mother and a German father, Hans Arp was born in Strassburg at a time when it was German. When it became French again at the end of WWI, French law mandated that he call himself Jean. Thus his very name draws attention to the nationalist contention that struck him as absurd. An originator of the Moderner Bund (“Modern League”) and an exhibitor with the Blaue Reiter group prior to being a founding member of dada in 1916 Zürich. The creator of sublime abstract sculpture and other visual work, Arp is also a major poet. 

      Educated as an artist in both France and Germany, he was already dodging the draft in Switzerland when he was called up. He recounts writing the date in the first blank of a stack of forms, then proceeding to write the date in every other space, after which he painstakingly added the column of numbers thus produced. He then took off all his clothes, folded them with care, placed the paperwork on top and presented the stack to the officer in charge, upon which he was told he was unsuitable for the military. Later associated with the highly political Cologne dada group, he also participated in the first Surrealist show at the Galerie Pierre in Paris. During the ‘thirties he worked with the Paris-based group Abstraction-Création whose members, including Mondrian, Kandinksy, and Mary Cassatt, considered Breton’s Surrealism to be dogmatic. 

     Arp pioneered abstract art, though his early association with Kandinsky is evident in his preference for van Doesburg’s term “concrete” as more appropriate for forms that originate in the mind and occupy space. Regarding “the law of chance as the highest and deepest of laws,” he employed aleatory elements in works such as his randomly tossed papiers déchirés. He loved to reshuffle image sets (as here in “Roses Stroll the Streets of Porcelain” and “Westoily Roses”). His poetry strikes me as a pyrotechnic display of images, a one-man band, a word-collage. He shares with a prominent school of poets today the proposition that, as Jacques Riviére said of the dadaists in general, for them language "is no longer a means; it is an entity." If his lyric persona is sometimes difficult to follow, this is hardly surprising given his goal of “break[ing] down the language into atoms, in order to approach the creative.” 

     In Arp the background is a vast and cosmic laugh and he does not shrink from whimsy, yet he insisted to the end that dada was no farce. Using the same religious language favored by Huelsenbeck, he notes of his circle of young revolutionaries “our lot of earthly joy was meager. But by way of recompense we were visited by angels.” 

Opus Null 

1. 

I am the great great Thisthatthey 

a rig or ous re gime 

the stem of ozone prima qua 

the nameless one-percenter 

The P. P. Tit and trom as well 

trombone without a mouth or hole 

I’m Hercules’ great earthen bowl 

the left foot of the right right chef. 

I am the entire lifetime long 

the ovary’s dozeneth meaning 

totality of Augustine 

in cellulose gown preening 

2. 

He pulls from out his coffin black 

one coffin, then another 

he wraps himself in a black crepe sack 

and weeps with his front end. 

Half wizard and half maestro 

without a cane the time he’ll beat 

a greeny clockface on his hat 

and falls down from the driver’s seat 

With that he pokes the ghetto fish 

off his well-equipped easel. He 

finds his long cubistic socks are torn 

twice in two and thrice in three. 

3. 

He sits with himself in an arc.

A circle sits right by his side. 

A bag that holds a comb that stands 

must be his sofa and his bride. 

The of-of and his left-hand skin 

his own bag and his own life 

and tick and tack and tipp and top 

he own body falls from the wife. 

4.

His steam dynamo turns out 

hat upon hat from his hat and then 

he stands them in formation in 

a ring just as one does with army men. 

He greets them then and tips his hat 

and three times greets them all as friends 

They always trust a caca-you 

replaced by him with caca-too. 

He sees them not but greets them still.

He’s with them and they’re all about. 

The hats are all included 

they screw the top from his ego.

Roses Stroll the Streets of Porcelain 

1.

just on the edge of the fairy-tale 

     the night knits roses for itself; 

the tangle of things resolves into 

     storks, fruits, pharoahs, and harps. 

death puts down its nattering wreath 

     by the root of the void. 

and the storks chatter on chimneystones! 

and the night is a stuffed fairy tale. 

2. 

and the roses stroll the streets of porcelain and 

knit from the tangle of their years 

     one star after another. 

between stars there sleeps a piece of fruit. 

the empty lands stuffed years laughing foot-

lockers dance! 

the storks eat the pharaohs. 

from chimneystones roseblossoms! 

3.

death eats one year after another

and pharaohs eat storks. 

between fruits sleeps a star. often it laughs lightly 

in its sleep like a porcelain harp. 

4.

growing chimneystones eat harps porcelain 

wreaths dance. 

pharoahs have roots of roses! 

the storks pack chimneystones in their footlockers 

and fly off 

     to the land of the pharoahs! 

The Swallow Testicle 

Oh no, oh no, good Kaspar's dead! 

Who now will hide the burning banners in 

cloudbraid 

     and daily build a black mare's nest? 

Who now will turn the coffee mill in its old, old 

barrel? 

And who will lure the idyllic deer 

     from its petrified paper bag? 

Who'll blow the noses of ships, parapluies, wind-

udders, ancestral bees, ozone spindles, 

     and who will bone the pyramids? 

Oh no, no, no, our good Kaspar is dead! Pious 

bimbam Kaspar's dead! 

The shark will rattle his teeth with heartrending 

grief when he hears his given name -- so 

     I sigh on -- his last name Kaspar Kaspar Kaspar. 

Why hast thou forsaken us? In what form has 

your great and beautiful soul 

     transmogrified? Are you a star? or a chain or 

water hanging from a hot whirlwind? or 

     a transparent brick on the groaning drum 

of rocky BEING? 

Now our tops and toes dry up, and fairies lie half-

charred on the funeral pyre. 

Now the black bowling alley thunders behind the 

sun, and no one winds up compasses 

     and pushcart wheels any longer. 

Who now will eat with the phosphorescent rat at 

    the lonely barefoot table? 

Who now will chase the siroccoco devil when he 

wants to fuck the horses? 

Now who'll explain the monograms in the stars? 

His bust will grace the mantel of all the truly noble men, 

but that's no comfort, no tobacco snuff for a 

deadhead skull. 

 Second Hand 

that I as I 

one and two is 

that I as I 

three and four is 

that I as I 

what time now 

that I as I 

it ticks, it tocks 

that I as I 

five and six is 

that I as I

seven eight is 

that I as I 

if it stands it 

that I as I 

if it works then 

that I as I 

nine and ten is 

that I as I 

eleven and twelve is. 

Baobab 

And she was delivered of a healthy strong boy 

who enjoyed the name Baobab. 

The boy grew and grew 

and grew up to the blue of heaven. 

And Baobab’s people liked to look 

right in the eyes of interlocutors.

However, for one as tall as Baobab 

this no longer could be done. 

So they dug out lots of soil 

and opened a great abysmal hole 

in which Baobab entered by choice 

for he too could never bear 

not to look into the eyes 

of those to whom he spoke. 

The earth that they had dug 

they tossed over their starlet’s edge 

into the bottomless space. 

And after Baobab had had passed 

a hundred years in this hole 

he began to dwindle. 

Every day he was smaller and smaller 

until in the end he evanesced. 

Now those who dwelt in that small star 

sat there with nought 

    but a great abysmal hole 

        and one small strip of land around the hole 

and they looked now into the starlet’s abysmal hole, 

 and then over the edge 

     of their small star 

         into the bottomless space 

Westoily Roses 

1.

the roses will be crucified on hats the lips 

the roses fly forth 

the bloody organs drip on the visible 

throne of the half-grown Near Eastern stones and 

on the white skulls the three shaven 

summers and the three shaven 

crosses stagger forward on crutches like the May 

the lyre body tells of bloody slaughter 

against the hairy stones, 

the lyre body shoots out 

a poison foam 

stony crutches bloody noses hairy stones against 

the shavehead skulls 

2.

the lyre body drips blood on the white shirtfronts 

as though in a battle unpacked and tosses its 

three snowballs behind its three summers. 

from the retorts roll the skulls of the Itosis. 

the lips of the hats return on crutches. 

gloves will be crucified on hats. 

the crosses support one another half-human like 

by the bridegroom and the other half-mannish 

by the bridegroom 

3.

the lyre body tells of the birth from foam of a 

half-grown Near Eastern stone must certainly and 

heath-soul sits on a visible throne and 

tosses the bloodier parts of the foolhardy and 

carthardy 

on the fifth of May. then the foam birth shoots 

poisonous accent-hens against the signature-organ of 

the lyre body clings to the clapper by their balled-

up wings 

and rings out and the winged words fly forth. 

wings shave the hairy hearts. 

the air of the bit shakes and calls who goes there. 

and that’s the way it goes up and then down 

like in a letter. 

4.

it rings out in the heart. 

The foam birth wraps white May air in a 

 snow-letter. 

the half-grown Near Eastern stone throws its 

three gloves over its three hats and clings 

to the roses. 

the lyre body shaved the slaughter-clapper. 

winged roses fly to the snow-lyre.