"Fallen Angel" [by Madeleine Freitag]

1.

The angelic guest wields his gun, the crowd applauds,
and no one knows where he came from or what he has done
to merit the praise of the world and the souls of men.
Nor is he wiser than the mapmaker, nor less obstinate
than a disobedient minor god who loves the fallen angels
and gathers their love in return. And still night descends
and lust arrives with it – lust and good humor, drink
and sleep, and the dreams of glory that charge the sleep
of heroes and heroines in days before the death of faith.
Nevertheless there is always tomorrow night, Saturday night,
when in cities from London to Moscow the proles get drunk,
smash glass, and forget their troubles for the few charged hours
when guns replace words, and the lovers withdraw
into the sacred intoxication of the ancient night sky.

2.

So the world is a map that yields to the eyes of skillful men,
even those without heavenly sponsors. Day comes promptly,
roosters crow, and an obstinate god has his way
with a stiff-necked tyrant. The love of a sister for her brother
is as tender as the kiss goodbye, the shutting of the eyes with kisses.
Nor is lust to be denied; night lets the couple sleep
after seeing the human form divine. The old gods grin.
The new gods are not yet ready to take their place.

Translator's note:
Madeleine Freitag was born in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1969. She spent a year at Oxford learning English and a year at Heidelberg studying the German romantic poet, Friedrich Hölderlin. Married to an accomplished archer who competed in the Barcelona Olympics in 1992, she has lived in Kyoto since 1990. 

Little known as a poet, Freitag has won plaudits for her translation into Japanese of a selection of Thomas Mann’s short stories and essays. She has written fiction under a pseudonym. I met her at the Rotterdam literary festival in June 1999 and we have since corresponded by old-fashioned air mail as Madeleine refuses to use a computer or communicate by e-mail. She abhors social media and says she feels “as alienated from the digital world as from the terrifying continent of my birth.” One reason she writes poems, she says half-kiddingly (I think), is to keep up her German.

Freitag tells me she feels lucky to produce one good poem in a year. “Fallen Angel” ("Der Gefallener Engel") is among the first of her poems to be translated into English. In line eleven, Freitag uses a word more conventionally rendered as peasant; but I feel that Orwell’s “proles” comes closer to her meaning.

The painting above is Luca Giordano's "Fall of the Rebel Angels" c. 1666. -- David Lehman

from The Antioch Review, 2020

Comments

[Jill Newnham]

Have you translated other of her poems?

[[email protected]]

This is my favorite blog and has made me a convert to modern poetry which sport of used to scare me.

[salmawisoky]

Fallen angels are identified with those led by Lucifer in rebellion against God, also considered demons. Drift Boss

[Helen Vendler]

I love this poem.