The desert land
The Waste Land ( English original title: The Waste Land ) is a 433 line long poem by the Anglo - American Nobel Prize winner Thomas Stearns Eliot from 1922 .
T. S. Eliot dedicated it to Ezra Pound, whom he admired . The revision of the text for publication, in which Eliot cut the manuscript almost in half, was based in large part on Pound's suggestions. In his long poem, Eliot processed numerous texts from various poetic and religious sources (including the Bible , William Shakespeare , Richard Wagner and various forms of the Arthurian epic ). Aspects of ancient myths were also included in this poem, whereby Eliot himself provided his work with a large number of explanatory footnotes , which make it easier for the reader to recognize the intertextual allusions.
Emergence
T. S. Eliot lived in London since the end of the First World War and was going through a difficult phase in his life. The native American had assimilated seamlessly in England , yet he found himself in a serious life crisis and was completely dissatisfied with his existence. In 1922 he took a spa stay in Lausanne ( Switzerland ) and started writing there. Back in London, he gave Ezra Pound 54 manuscript pages. At that point in time, what The Waste Land was going to be was long and confused. As a representative of literary modernity, Eliot used an encrypted narrative form; The place and narrator often changed rapidly and scenes were only described fragmentarily . Eliot also used the stream of consciousness technology .
Eliot later named Pound, who deleted two-thirds of the manuscript, an obstetrician. Eliot originally envisaged a portrayal of a long pub crawl to begin with. It is thanks to the influence of Ezra Pound that The Waste Land finally begins with the now famous lines: April is the cruellest month . Pound himself is said to have stood in awe of Eliot's work and wrote to him: “Complimenti, you son of a bitch. I am plagued by all seven jealousies. " Eliot himself was aware of the leading role of Pound and finally began the poem with a dedication: " il miglior fabbro Ezra Pound " ( Dante quote; cf. Purgatorio 26.117); so he calls Pound the better smith .
Other people also influenced the publication of The Waste Land . In addition to Pound, Eliot's wife Vivienne also spoke intensively to him about his manuscript. The Irish fellow writer James Joyce , Eliot for Ulysses estimated handed him his admiration. Decades later, Eliot's long poem should be called the lyrical counterpart to Ulysses . In fact, both works were groundbreaking and without comparison in their respective genres.
publication
Eliot found a publisher very early on that wanted to print his work. Horace Liveright of Boni & Liveright Paris made offers to publish to Pound, Joyce and Eliot in January 1922. At that time, The Waste Land had not yet been edited . The publication of the edited poem made Eliot a celebrated writer of modernity overnight. Years later he was to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for his groundbreaking poetry .
In terms of its impact, Das wüsten Land is one of the most important and influential works of the 20th century . Numerous commentary works deal with the interpretation of the complex work.
content
The main topic is the isolation and emptiness of man in modern times , as well as the development of Europe after the First World War. The poem is divided into five parts:
- The Burial of the Dead
- A Game of Chess
- The Fire Sermon
- Death by Water (The Wet Death)
- What the Thunder said
(The translations of the headings by Eva Hesse ).
Translations
- TS Eliot: The desert land. English and German (= Insel-Bücherei . Vol. 660). Transferred from Ernst Robert Curtius . Insel Verlag , Wiesbaden 1957, reprinted.
- Eva Hesse: TS Eliot and The Desert Land. An analysis. Suhrkamp , Frankfurt am Main 1973, ISBN 3-518-07376-1 (contains the original text with a German translation and Eliot's comments on the poem).
- TS Eliot: The barren land. English and German. Transferred and with an afterword by Norbert Hummelt . Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 2008, ISBN 978-3-518-42022-5 .
- TS Eliot: The desert land. Retransmission of TS Eliot's The Waste Land with expanded annotations. From BS Orthau. (eXperimenta.de), Part I: 11/2016, Part II: 12/2016, Part III: 1/2017, Part IV: 2/2017
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Dirk Weidmann: And I Tiresias have foresuffered all… - More than allusions to Ovid into TS Eliot's The Waste Land? ( Page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: Literatūra. Vol. 51, No. 3, 2009, ISSN 0258-0802 , pp. 98-108, (PDF; 1.3 MB).
- ^ Alan Bennett : Margate's shrine to Eliot's muse. In: The Guardian , July 12, 2009.
