Yvan Goll (1891-1950) was a poet, playwright, novelist, and translator born in Alsace-Lorraine who wrote in German, French, and English. He later lived in Paris and the U.S. and was an active part of the literary circles in Paris and Greenwich Village, along with his wife, Claire Goll. In the final years of his life, suffering from leukemia, he devoted himself to writing the poems of Das Traumkraut, translated as Dreamweed by Nan Watkins and recently released in a bilingual edition by Black Lawrence Press. (See an interview with Watkins at The Brooklyn Rail.)
These poems, written in pain and in the knowledge of impending death, possess a hallucinatory urgency that ought rightly to earn them a place among the great lyric works of the 20th century in any language. So that his pain not be wasted, Goll transformed it into the kind of art that perhaps only the dying genius can create. For the true artist, nothing is wasted–not even suffering, not even death. Read Dreamweed and you will see that Goll was a true artist, to the end.
Here is a poem from Dreamweed:
Rosedom*
Moon-rose
That burns in the heads of beasts
Brain-rose
Skinned from skulls
O hot-tempered rosedom
As long as the wheel of the rose
Turns and turns
The noonday rosary
Raves in fevered fields
And the rose-eye bores
Into my waking sleep
Yet woe if the Unrose
Ascends from the metals
And my rose-hand rises
Against the sun-rose
And the sand-rose withers
O rose rose of roses
That alone blazes for the roseless
*"Rosedom" is reprinted from Dreamweed, trans. Nan Watkins (Black Lawrence Press, 2012), by permission of Black Lawrence Press.