What's going on here?
Is that just playful rhyming or a miniature ballad of the end of the world?
Music lovers can hold on to two quotations that mark milestones in European vocal art: "Moro, lasso, al mio duolo" (I die, alas, in my pain), one of the boldest madrigal compositions by the depressed Renaissance prince Carlo Gesualdo da Venosa, and " I have enough", Bach's cantata whose dance-like final aria with the text "I'm looking forward to my death" astounded even his baroque contemporaries.
The 'los of a colossus' that the poem's title suggests seems lethal, but the mood is dactylic upbeat.
The easiest way to get into the lyrical cosmos of Dagmara Kraus is through musical feeling.
Hardly anyone spins the sound poetic tradition more enthusiastically than she does, which in the German-speaking world stretches from Christian Morgenstern through the Dadaists and the neo-avant-garde of the 1950s and 1960s to the present day.
Born in 1981 in Wroclaw, Poland, raised in West Germany and at home in France, the poet uses her trilingualism as an instrument to which she adds countless timbres with sprinklings of other languages and their historical and dialectal variants, enriched with her own word inventions and imaginative vocabulary.
Many of these lyrical fantasies, which are often impregnated with absurd comedy and sometimes refer back to concrete poetry, can be understood on the phonetic level without demanding a meaning from them.
This works best when you hear Dagmara Kraus read in person, with a soft voice and vivid articulation.
Nevertheless, beneath most of these poems lies a finely woven network of allusions and references, in which some comparatists and text linguists have wriggled.
Small end-time poem, tender and curious
In the most recent volume of poetry by Dagmara Kraus, "Los of a colossus" is part of a cycle entitled "moira, nö".
The casual negation behind the Greek goddess of fate – that sounds like a childishly naïve rebellion against the cosmos, since the moíra, fate, is inevitably predetermined for every being.
The word kolossós, which originally referred to any statue in human form, acquired the connotation of the gigantic, and thus also that of megalomania, when it was used for the thirty-meter-high bronze statue of the sun god Helios, which was erected on the island of Rhodes and later at said to have fallen over in an earthquake.
In the history of Greek mythology, Helios and Apollo, the god of light, were at times considered to be one and the same person.
Couldn't "a hunchbacked Dornapollo", the blatant opposite of the Apollonian ideal of beauty, then be the sad remnant of that Helios colossus?
The thorns are reminiscent of a torture crown, and the deathly pale fellow is apparently “lonely” as the last survivor of a great catastrophe.
Because he sits on the "carcass of the atlascollos", on the neck skeleton of Atlas, which consequently can no longer carry the heavens.
When it collapsed, things got mixed up: Instead of the lyre, the junk Apollo plays the Vietnamese Jew's harp "dan moi", and Dürer's figures "knight and devil" (death is already here) suddenly appear in the ancient scenery, which is not the case here adversaries are
Is it decay or atomic mushrooms that are overgrowing Apollo's solo?
And is he playing Gesualdo's Madrigal of Pain, or is the whole picture held together only by the alchemy of vowels and consonants?
The "ailing unfollowerholo / morose colossus of puckelapollo" suggests this suspicion.
Suddenly we are in the present, in which a holo(gram) and a nonsensical neologism like “unfollower” can be paired in terms of sound painting, albeit with a high risk of decay.
And while the etymologies of “marode” and “moros” still give food for thought, the alliteration “zu staub und stern” heralds the birth of new universes, held up only by a dash.
The "bending" may evoke a phenomenon of wave optics or a term from more recent lyric theories, but where is the center that carried it?
And who is polo?
About the Bernese dialect rocker Polo Hofer, who died in 2017?
"Der klub" remains cryptic, "die kräusin" less so - Creusa was one of Apollo's lovers.
At the end, the semi-verse “I don’t like living anymore”, quoted with a minimal deviation from Hölderlin’s quatrain “I enjoyed the pleasant things of this world”, meets Bach’s cantata title.
Two cases of calmed, as it were saturated tiredness of life, the composer as a murmuring (mormorando) and at the same time hesitant (moroso) watercourse – this is how gently this little end-of-time poem ebbs away, which is certainly one of the most tender but also most curious of its kind.