from “Phantasus”
translated by Babette Deutsch and Avrahm Yarmolinsky
On a mountain of sugar-candy,
under a blossoming almond-tree,
twinkles my gingerbread house.
Its little windows are of gold-foil, out of its chimney steams wadding.
In the green heaven, above me, beams the Christmas tree.
In my round sea of tinfoil
are mirrored all her angels, all her lights!
The little children stand about
and stare at me.
I am the dwarf Turlitipu.
My fat belly is made of gumdragon,
my thin pin-legs are matches,
my clever little eyes
raisins!
aus “Phantasus”
Auf einem Berg aus Zuckerkant,
unter einem blühenden Machandelbaum,
blinkt mein Pfefferkuchenhäuschen.
Seine Fensterchen sind aus Goldpapier,
aus seinem Schornstein raucht Watte.
Im grünen Himmel, über mir, rauscht die Weihnachtstanne.
In meinem See aus Staniol
spiegeln sich alle ihre Engel, alle ihre Lichter!
Die kleinen Kinder stehn rum
und staunen mich an.
Ich bin der Zwerg Turlitipu.
Mein dicker Bauch ist aus Traganth,
meine Beinchen Streichhölzer,
meine listigen Äugelchen
Korinthen.
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on December 25, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.
The first edition of Arno Holz’s poem-cycle Phantasus was published in German by Johann Sassenbach in 1898; Holz issued several new editions of the book, some containing many more pages than the last, all the way up until his death in 1929. Excerpts of the book translated into English by Babette Deutsch and her husband, Avrahm Yarmolinsky, appeared in Poetry vol. 21, no. 3 (December 1922), and again in their collaborative effort Contemporary German Poetry: An Anthology (John Lane the Bodley Head Ltd., 1923). In the introduction to the anthology, remarking on the sheer scope and vision of Phantasus, Deutsch and Yarmolinsky write that “what we find in this poetic encyclopedia is a rich miscellany of the grotesque and the satiric, the lyrical and the burlesque, the elegiac and the fantastic. There is a titanic imagination at work here, now cutting a perfect cameo, now scratching the surface of a fallen meteor, an imagination which can curl up in a petal or span a planet.”
Arno Holz
Arno Holz was born on April 26, 1863, in Rastenburg, East Prussia (now Kętrzyn, Poland). A German poet and playwright, he authored many works, including Phantasus. He was nominated nine times for the Nobel Prize in Literature and died on October 26, 1929.