Theoria

I’ve posted an updated version of the “Carl Schmitt in English” bibiliography here. In addition to being better organized and completing a number of incomplete entries, it also has a number of ‘previously unknown’ translations listed.

Below, a poem by Schmitt and an extract of a letter on the poem of Schuldt (who?) to G.L. Ulmen.

Ex Captivitate Salus
Carl Schmitt
(Translation of “Gesang des Sechzigjahrigen,” by G.L Ulmen)

I have experienced the tribulations of fate.
Victories and defeats, revolutions and restorations.
Inflations and deflations, bombings,
Defamations, broken regimes and broken pipes,
Hunger and cold, internment and solitary confinement.
Through it all I have passed,
And through me it all has passed.

I am acquainted with the abundant varieties of terror,
The terror from above and the terror from below,
Terror on the land and terror from the air,
Terror legal and extra-legal,
Brown, red and checkered terror,
And worst of all, the terror none dares name me.
I am acquainted with them all and know their grip.

I know the chanting choirs of power and law,
The shrieking voices and mean falsifiers of the regime,
The black lists with many names.
And the cardfiles of the persecutors.

What now should I sing? The hymn of placebo?,br> Should I abandon problems and envy plants and animals?,rb> Tremble in panic in the circle of the paniscs?
Fortunate as the gnat, who dances to his own tune?,

Thrice I sat in the belly of the whale.
I confronted suicide at the hand of the executioner.
Yet the sheltering word of the sibylline poets embraced me,
And a holy man from the East opened to me the gates of deliverance.

Child of this consecration, tremble not -
Harken and endure!

Schuldt to Ulmen on Schmitt’s Poem
Hamburg, 9/13/87

You ask me to cast “the poet’s eye” over your translation of Schmitt’s poem. Since I can’t see how to make it more poetic, I have employed myself at making it less so, which is my inclination anyhow. The “regimes” always have to be rendered in the plural, for that is precisely Schmitt’s point: they come and go and happen to be left, right or whatever and it doesn’t really matter much, and that is about one half the defense he puts up for having aided and abetted and praised the NS-regime, whereas if the discussion were narrowed down to just this one regime and the change that brought it upon us, he’d have something to answer for.

“Bombed-out apartments” (rather than “bombings”) because that entire recital is the sufferings of civilians, passive victims: a striking change of perspective in the man who had set himself up for decades as the prophet of the strong man. My “black lists” lines had bad rhythm. Maybe it’s better to say “the black lists with so many names” or “with all those names” or best: “the black listss rife with names.” All of it, incidentally, is kind of funny semantically in German too, for what is a black list if not names?

Escavessades best retained as such, because it clearly and fairly documents the author’s high-falutin mannerisms and eagerness to be taken for a Guard’s officer. It means (in “horsemanship”) sharp jolts imparted by the bridle to bit. The word is (and was in Schmitt’s time) quite as unintelligible in German as it is in English, and faded from French dictionaries with the Great War. I’d be loath to sacrifice it to tribulations, vicissitudes and their ilk.

Sohn dieser Weihe (Child of this consecration): with Schmitt’s rank Catholocism, I have little doubt that he flavor to him was one of ordainment or taking orders, though the plain priesterly rank was probably all he had in mind and it does not require consecration, reserved, if I’m not mistaken, for bishopry, but of course the idea or semantic structure here is not one of making a priest but graduating in life or graduating ecavessades … in short, an initiation, and I think the poem will be little damaged by skipping the Roman Catholic connotation here and otherwise much improved by not contorting it with vague and out-of-place sounding things like initiation ceremony or the plain consecration or whatever. The paniscs are little or inferior Pans, invented later. And then there is the gnat, which could be leaping off “toward its within,” if you like that better.