Liechtenstein, Alfred (writer)

Born on August 23, 1889 in Berlin in the family of a manufacturer. After graduating from high school, he studied law in Berlin and Erlangen . In 1913 he defended his thesis in theater law. In the fall of 1913, he was drafted into the army, the Bavarian Infantry Regiment. From the beginning of World War I participated in hostilities. Before the attack on the French position near the town, Vermandoville wrote the last poem "Farewell", in which he predicted his own death. Lieutenant Alfred Liechtenstein died on September 25, 1914. He died at the age of 25.

He belonged to a circle of young writers grouped around the Berlin Cafe des Westens (Western Cafe).

He began to publish poetry in 1910 in the Sturm magazine and since 1912 in the Aktsion magazine .

One of the largest representatives of German expressionism, Gottfried Benn, believed that the poetry of expressionism began with two poems:

The beginning of expressionist lyrics in Germany comes from the appearance in 1911 of the poem Alfred Lichtenstein 's Twilight in Simplicissimus and the poem End of the World by Jacob van Goddis published in the same year. ^[four]

Many expressionists and literary critics held the same view, some with the proviso that the poem of Liechtenstein was written under the influence of the poem by van Hoddis.

Another expressionist, Johannes Becher , held the polar point of view, who at the end of his life explicitly wrote in his memoirs “The Poetic Principle” ( 1957 ) about the complete secondary nature of Liechtenstein’s poetry in relation to the End of the World by van Hoddis:

That of Alfred Lichtenstein, that of Ernst Blass it is noticeable that everything is from van Goddis. The experience of simultaneity became a template, a bureaucratic poetic product, moreover, mathematically sophisticated, in which each sentence had to be juxtaposed so that arbitrariness and disorder would not allow any connection or commonality to be noticed. ^[five]

Two poems of Liechtenstein, “Twilight” and “The End of Sunday”, were translated by Vladimir Neystadt and included him in an anthology of eleven German expressionists “Alien Lyre” ( 1923 ). ^[6] Other translators of German expressionists, Viktor Toporov and Antonina Slavinskaya , rated Neishtadt's translations for this anthology as follows:

... His translations were more of an acquaintance than an artistic response to the genuine revolution made by expressionists in German literature, and especially in poetry. ^[7]

Lichtenstein’s poems in the translations of Boris Lapin (partly under the pseudonym S. Pnin ) were published in the Moscow Parnas magazine , which has been published in Moscow since 1922 . ^[eight]

Alfred Lichtenstein’s only poem, The Walk, was translated by Osip Mandelstam .

One or more poems of Liechtenstein was translated by Anatoly Lunacharsky . ^[9]

The poem “Twilight” was translated by Boris Markovsky ^[10] and Boris Pasternak ^[11] .

The first large selection of translations of poems and small prose works by Alfred Lichtenstein was published in 2011 by the journal Foreign Literature in a special thematic issue (No. 4), German Expressionism, by two translators - Alyosha Prokopiev (poetry) and Tatyana Baskakova (prose). Tatyana Baskakova was also the compiler of the entire special issue of the magazine.

The poetic selection in this issue was named after one of the translated poems - “Come on, I'll put on a boater ...” and included the following poems:

The prose selection of the magazine includes:

In 1990, the largest translated poetic anthology of German expressionism, “Twilight of Humanity”, compiled by Victor Toporov (the main compiler and translator of the anthology) and Antonina Slavinskaya , poems by Alfred Lichtenstein were not included. (This anthology should not be confused with the classic German anthology of “Twilight of Humanity” by Kurt Pintus of 1919 , in which Alfred Lichtenstein’s poems were just present.) The compilers themselves applied not only to Liechtenstein, but to all the “discarded” names as follows:

... We have prepared for publication a fundamentally different book compared to the anthology of C. Pintus. We wanted to give a summary image of the poetry of expressionism and at the same time its most characteristic patterns.

Every anthology is inevitably subjective and reflects, first of all, the tastes and views of its compiler. In this case, the book is based on the quarter-century work of V. L. Toporov on translations of expressionists. The creative selection of poems for translation had the same reasons and roots as the inclusion of certain works of expressionism in this anthology. <...>

The absence of several sensational names, one or two poems, and these poems themselves is explained by the fact that in translation these verses inevitably lose just the charm, for the sake of which they should be translated. A whole series of names are discarded as peripheral to the main path of expressionism. Other (less significant) had to be abandoned due to lack of space. ^[7]

The same compilers mistakenly claimed that of all German expressionism, Osip Mandelstam translated “one (!) Poem of Werfel ” ^[7] , while Mandelstam also translated the poem of Liechtenstein “Walk”.

Publications by Alfred Liechtenstein

In German

Translations into Russian

About Alfred Lichsteinstein

• Alfred Lichtenstein in the Journal Hall