The life of a fly: it's hardly worth mentioning.

People quickly turn into subtle hunters when they feel annoyed while eating or sleeping.

In the unequal struggle between small and large, the fly can rely at most on two highly developed compound eyes (oculi compositi).

These allow her to react at lightning speed and to get to safety.

There is no mention of this in Kurt Marti's “poem for a fly”.

Peace hangs over the nocturnal scene;

Snowfall dampens all bad things.

There is no danger that the animal will be destroyed with a wave of the hand.

Reading the poem works like a magnifying glass; it enlarges a spatially small world. Only through this enlargement effect does the awakening of a tiny living being - its life span is only a few days - appear as an astonishing event: as a birth. So that what suddenly comes before our eyes does not remain strange, the reference to the "now time" (Jean Paul), which is included at the beginning with the adjective "untimely", ensures.

“I grew up in a petty bourgeois security” - this is how Kurt Marti, born in Bern a hundred years ago, characterized his origins.

In his hometown he attended the free grammar school together with Friedrich Dürrenmatt.

Unlike his classmate, however, he found it late to write with the volumes “Boulevard Bikini” and “Republican Poems” (1959).

The poet then caused a sensation in 1967 with “Rosa Loui.

Vierzg poem ir Bärner colloquial language ”.

Without his turn to his native “dialect” (actually a full language), the renaissance of modern Swiss dialect poetry that began around 1970 would have been hardly conceivable, says Roman Bucheli.

After Marti was initially interested in law, he studied theology under the influence of Karl Barth's political and prophetic presence in Bern and Basel.

We were there

“My parents' house was neither particularly artistic nor Christian, my father practiced as a freelance notary. . . My mother cared for me with love and fearfulness. ”After the war Marti became a pastor for German prisoners of war in Paris and gained political experience that underpinned his life as a reformed pastor, preacher, essayist and committed writer. With a sober republican disposition, he was enthusiastic about liberation theology and formulated the wish: "That God should become a word of action". He encountered the formulaic nature of religious language with Swiss humor: "from the depths / I call / God / for me".

The poem of the blue shimmering fly that hums “in the yellow light / a rice paper lamp” is due to other contexts. It is reminiscent of the mastery with which Jean-Henri Fabre devoted himself to the study of the smallest living beings. Marti also records how things continue with “his” fly (Brachycera) after they wake up: “She hums up on / in front of bookshelves”. Fabre, whom Viktor Hugo referred to as the “Homer of Insects”, in his “Souvernirs entomologiques” does not report on mythological figures, but on the dramas experienced by digger wasps, mortar bees and dung beetles. Equipped only with a magnifying glass and tireless patience, the entomologist explored the life stories of cicadas and scarabs.

Kurt Marti also captures an unrepeatable moment within the microcosm for his readers. “Yes, and / (so I hear you ask) / what do you mean to say to us?” Ludwig Wittgenstein made man and fly change places in the “Philosophical Investigations”. His conclusion: The aim of the philosophy is "to show the fly the way out of the fly glass." The witty poet denies twice with "nothing nothing" that his poem is intended to make more than one contribution to zoology: " I write that down / for the fly ”. Should one buy that from him? It has long since become clear through reading: The awakening of a fly is a world-shattering event - and we were there.