READING HEINRICH HEINE

228 Reading Heinrich Heine
Le soleil rayonnait sur cette pourriture,
Comme afin de la cuire à point,
Et de rendre au centuple àlagrande Nature
Tout ce qu’ensemble elle avait joint.
The sun on this rottenness focussed its rays
To cook the cadaver till done,
And render to Nature a hundredfold gift
Of all she’d united in one. 30
The comparison with Heine’s procedure is instructive. He too presents
the dead body of the dancer-prostitute as a merely physical object; but
instead of allowing the cadaver to return to nature, Pomare is the necessary
commodity of the medical school anatomy-class: which is not to say that
the medical school is ultimately any different from the knackers.
Und der Carabin mit schmierig
Plumper Hand und lernbegierig
Deinen schönen Leib zerfetzt,
Anatomisch ihn zersetzt –
Deine Rosse trifft nicht minder
einst zu Montfaucon der Schinder.
(B 6/1, 30)
And some clumsy dirty-handed
Student slashes, as commanded,
At your body fair and still
For his anatomic drill –
And your steeds will end ill-starred
One day in a knacker’s yard.
(D 579)
In the whole movement of ‘Pomare’ Heine constantly provides a social
context for his critique of the commodity as it is given institutional status in
theatre or vaudeville, prostitution and anatomical dissection. But the form
of this third poem should not escape our attention either. The contexts of
the commodity appear, here, in trochaic couplets. Pomare’s fate emerges
in a vernacular form reminiscent, once again, of Knittelvers, and hence
appears as the most everyday event. Perhaps these lines should recall popular
Bänkelsang, inadevalued and disenchanted moral judgement of the way
of all flesh. The knackers of Montfaucon (as the pseudo-comic rhyme on
‘nicht minder’ and ‘Schinder’ indicates) put a stop to the proliferating
couplets of the third poem, but they cannot provide a closure that is not
ironic.