Deep into the past, or more precisely: deep into various pasts, this poem leads you back to the present all the more haunted.
But here, too, it would be more appropriate to speak in the plural, because again it is not just about one, but about several present times.
The decades, centuries and millennia have seldom been traversed so quickly and so boldly as here.
The deepest temporal layer of the poem lies in late antiquity, in the year 360 AD, when Julian, the nephew of Constantine the Great, was made Roman emperor. After he came to power, Julian turned away from Christianity and tried to revive the old religions and cults, which earned him the nickname "Apostate", "the apostate". He was also interested in the famous oracle of Delphi, which, however, had since lost its central position. To find out how the place of worship was at the center of the world, the emperor sent a confidante, the doctor Oreibasios, to Delphi. According to tradition, the reigning priestess, the Pythia, is said to have given him the following answer in hexameters to his (not handed down) question: "Tell the ruler,the art-blessed place lies destroyed, / Phoibos no longer has a roof and no prophetic laurel; / The speaking source has fallen silent; the murmuring water is silent. "
Message from the ecstasy cave
This so-called last oracle forms the starting point of the present poem, but - and this is important - not directly, but via a detour.
It leads to the next layer of the poem, more than 1,500 years away: the year 1962, in which the American poet Kenneth Rexroth, who is hardly known in this country, translated the last oracle into English and preceded a volume with adaptations of ancient Greek poems as the motto.
This gave the oracle's saying a different meaning: It now read as a melancholy admission by Rexroth that he himself did not consider his attempt to bring the ancient poems back to life to life in the twentieth century to be too promising.
And really, his band was not a great success.
At the turn of the millennium, however, it fell into the hands of the German poet Thomas Kling, and he immediately began to recreate Rexroth's English adaptations in German. Among the texts he chose was the last oracle. With Kling it goes like this: “Go tell the king the Daedalic / walls have fallen to earth / Phoibos has no sanctuary / no prophetic laurel / speaking source any more. the chatting / water at last has run dry. ”“ The last utterance of the Delphic Oracle II ”is a second version of this text, in a sense the last oracle reloaded.
In it, Kling imagines the moment when Pythia lets her “dazed voice” be heard for the last time, and he imagines this moment as a communicative collapse of enormous proportions. Unlike in the ancient text, this collapse in Kling is not in the past, but occurs simultaneously: while the Pythia is still speaking, the temple of Apollo collapses here and the “speaking source” dries up. The readers experience in real time how the Delphic oracle and with it an entire epoch goes under.
At the same time, however, it is also about the end of inspired, ecstatic speaking in verse, the end of an archaic conception of poetry that Kling, as a poet of the media age, still represented. Correspondingly, he portrays the ancient events as medially conveyed and moves them into the twentieth century, when one sat in front of tube radios and could watch the fabric covering of the loudspeakers vibrate at high volume. In the meantime, this world has come to an end almost as well as antiquity. What is decisive, however, is that the readers of Kling's poem, as ear witnesses of the last oracle, are still part of a communicative process that began in antiquity and is not yet over in the 21st century, because the “go, tell” that once was which Pythia had said to Oreibasios,is now aimed at them too. You can and should pass on the tradition.
"That's it then, folks"?
Not at all.
Like the large number of younger authors who refer to the poet, who died in 2005 at the age of only 47, the increasing interest of literary scholars in his work and, last but not least, the new edition of “Sondagen”, the volume in which the poem was written in 2002 first appeared, suggests that Thomas Kling's history of impact has only just begun.