Poetry
Hebrew Ballads
Hebräische Balladen
Else Lasker-Schüler · 1913
Opening lines
Es wird ein großer Stern in meinen Schoß fallen ...
Wir wollen wachen die Nacht,
In den Sprachen beten,
Die wie Harfen eingeschnitten sind.
A great star will fall into my lap...
Let us keep watch through the night,
Pray in the languages
That are carved like harps.
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from projekt-gutenberg.org
Synopsis
Short poems on the figures of the Hebrew Bible, fifteen in the first edition, seventeen in the second. The first, “Mon peuple”, makes the Jewish people a crumbling rock from which the woman who speaks springs forth. Then come Abraham and Isaac, Jacob, Esther, Joseph before Pharaoh, Ruth and Boaz, David and Jonathan, Eve, Abel, the Shulamite, Moses and Joshua. Between them are interspersed a prayer to God and a poem of reconciliation in the night.
Context
The collection appeared from Alfred Richard Meyer, in Berlin-Wilmersdorf, in his series of lyric sheets: the title page bears 1913, but it was on sale from the end of October or the beginning of November 1912. It is dedicated to Karl Kraus. A second edition, augmented by two poems, followed at the beginning of 1914, and Paul Cassirer published an enlarged version of it in 1920, presented as the first part of her poems. A manuscript in the author's hand appeared in facsimile in 1986 at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach.
Who it is for
A slim notebook of short poems, which is read today in a bilingual edition or in the author's complete poems.
Prizes and reception
On its publication, the historian Ludwig Geiger saw in it, in the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums, only a vain clatter of words.