Who cares for the stars and the warmth of the sun?
Your only concern is the battles you’ve won,
the killing fields spreading from pole unto pole,
with minds set on murder as primary goal.
From the West you may conquer the Orient,
but pollute the whole natural environment.
When you pray, it’s to beg an increase in your kill,
unblushing about all the blood that you spill.
God the creator and his natural world
into the chasm of darkness are hurled.
Cursing the heavens till you’re blue in the face,
you plaster the landscape with emblems of race.
You may play it tough, but we’re not surprised
that the victories you claim are a packet of lies.
About brotherly love you’re continually boasting,
while giving your neighbours a terrible roasting,
stealing the food from strangers in need
to satisfy your own insatiable greed,
piling their heads with coals of fire,
hoping to gain the warmth you desire,
for a cosy feeling make others work hard
while greasing your palms with expensive lard,
you blackmail and plunder, you lie through your teeth,
regurgitate madness as if true belief.
Invalids churn out the anthems of glory,
TB and syphilis tell the opposite story.
You’re hunters of men, heroes and traders,
spreaders of infection, hand-grenaders,
you plunder the treasures of fantasy
and bankrupt the world’s economy,
using ideals as a tactical screen
to spring an ambush on victims who scream.
Bolstered by culture, skills, and belief,
your bellies are empty but you’re armed to the teeth.
Pagans who worship the power of machines,
and proudly devise the most devious schemes;
underlings boasting the power of your brain,
constructing a journey to Baghdad by train.
High-flying swindlers, plumbing new depths,
hyenas that creep with cadaverous steps,
airmen impelled by destructive intentions,
slaves of the latest cunning inventions,
technicians who transform wrong into right,
barbarians armed with electric light,
ingenious experts equipping with pride
the journey to death as a comfortable ride,
so Death shares your vision of military strife
as a desperate flight from the Sources of Life!
We might have accepted a peaceful solution,
but your cosmic offences require retribution.
We Martians have no aggressive intentions,
but what we’ve begun we’ll do with a vengeance.
We’re hoping our strategy redeems
the whole universe by using your schemes,
for our pious researchers will mobilize
earthly techniques for wiping out lives.
Viewed from a distance your world we’d ignore,
if you Lilliputians weren’t addicted to war.
It’s not your frontiers that we’ll be storming,
but you are to suffer severe global warming.
The challenge was tough, the results worth a wait:
you are to endure an exceptional fate.
It’s not that we’re planning to conquer the earth.
That would reduce our own sense of worth.
The peace of the cosmos will be protected
provided our boundaries are still respected.
Territorial conquest has had its day:
we’ll settle accounts in a different way.
For the costs of the war you’ll still carry the rap,
since we’re planning to wipe you right off the map,
so for all eternity nobody fears
your threat to the harmony of the spheres.
No inventive thinker, no aggressive race
shall launch an attack on the realms of space;
no thunder of battle, no crude calculations
disrupt the planets’ silent gyrations.
For too long you earthlings have wanted your say,
from now on Eternity carries the day.
It’s been a long wait for all those concerned:
with patience we waited while ambitions burned.
So all aspirations of planet earth,
all dreams of victory, hopes of rebirth
will now be erased with no right of appeal.
Let’s start the bombardment and see how you feel!
(Hail of meteors begins.)
VOICE FROM BELOW
With flags unfurled
we’ll still make gains
throughout a world—
DISTANT ECHO
consumed by flames!
(Incandescent flames.)
VOICE FROM BELOW
Give them a clout!
Surprise attacks!
And raise a shout—
DISTANT ECHO
like thunderclaps!
(Cosmic thunder.)
VOICE FROM BELOW
Who dares to break
our battle line?
No power can shake—
DISTANT ECHO
Watch on the Rhine!
(Total destruction.)
VOICE FROM BELOW
Now we are damned!
Pains never cease!
The Fatherland—
DISTANT ECHO
can rest in peace.
(Eternal peace.)
VOICE FROM ABOVE
The tempest worked, although the night was wild.
Behold God’s image shattered and defiled!
(Great silence.)
VOICE OF GOD
THIS IS NOT WHAT I INTENDED.
Wayside Crucifix on the Western Front
TRANSLATORS’ AFTERWORD AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
As retired British university teachers of German we are aware that our combined efforts to do justice to Kraus’s cornucopian text will fall short, but we hope to have shown that it is not untranslatable, given a blend of perseverance and ingenuity. We approach the task from complementary angles. Fred Bridgham’s publications include The Friendly German-English Dictionary, a study of lexical idiosyncrasies that explores the divergences between the two languages. He is also the editor of The First World War as a Clash of Cultures. Edward Timms is best known as author of the two-volume study Karl Kraus — Apocalyptic Satirist, while his memoirs, Taking Up the Torch, review fifty years of involvement with Kraus research. Over a period of eighteen months we have read and refined each other’s work, with Bridgham producing the original drafts of the bulk of the play, together with the Glossary, while Timms gave priority to the poetry. Each draft has been fine-tuned and doubtful passages debated and amended until an integrated text emerged.
Our contract with Yale University Press specifies that the translation should “neither omit anything from the play nor add anything other than such slight verbal changes as are necessary.” But imaginative writing has to be adjusted to the rhythms of the target language and the expectations of a new audience. Elucidation, enhancement, and equivalence are among the techniques we use: making verbal changes to elucidate obscure conceptual or historical allusions; enhancing the impact of slogans and punch lines; and finding modern equivalents for antiquated phrasing. Thus our version, taking account of cutting-edge research (particularly the Lexicon by Agnes Pistorius), brings out the implications of Kraus’s monumental period piece for a modern audience.
Concepts such as “Nibelungentreue”—the “Troth of the Nibelungs”—would be baffling without explanatory footnotes, for only Wagnerians might surmise what the phrase means. They too would be on the wrong track, for Kraus’s target is not operatic pathos but political propaganda: the claim that Austria and Germany have from time immemorial been linked by an indissoluble alliance. In March 1909, when war with Russia threatened during the Bosnian annexation crisis, Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow used this phrase to express Germany’s unconditional support for Austria-Hungary — a pledge that was to have fateful consequences five years later. How is this to be conveyed without another weighty footnote? Our solution is to use the modern equivalent: the claim that Britain and United States are bound together by an indissoluble alliance. Thus “Nibelungentreue” becomes the “Special Relationship”—and no footnote is needed. This idea is echoed at other points where Austrian-Prussian tensions are indicated by contrasts between British and American English. Such semantic shifts accentuate the paradigmatic value of Kraus’s antiwar satire, media criticism, and critique of globalization.