Trot, little horse,
you carry me into the desert,
all cities are sinking,
the villages and lovely rivers.
Honorable the schools,
frivolous the pubs,
girls’ faces are sinking,
abducted by the storm of the East.
(Translated by Sarah Pe’er)
Behind the nicely decorated grid, which leaves open the question of whether Franz Kafka intended it to be crossed out or emphasized, one of his poems shimmers through. Written in 1917, “Trabe, kleines Pferdchen” (“Trot, Little Horse”) appears as a flip-flop image: It remains unclear weather the lyrical I’s departure from the European cultural landscape into the desert is – as at least the rhyhm of the poem promises at first – indeed joyful, or, weather it is thwarted by indirect compulsion. Although the lyrical I on the horseback imperatively urges his little horse to trot, the past participle “verschleppt” (“abducted”) in the last stanza, that has the “storm of the East” as its subject, unsettles the idea that this is a voluntary departure. Moreover, while the lyrical I is carried away by its trotting horse, “towns”, “villages” and “rivers”, “schools”, “pubs” and “girl’s faces” – each in their own fashion (“venerable the schools”, “frivolous the taverns”) – sink into the ground. What is left behind, is deserted land. There seems to be no alternative to the desert left in the desolate place of departure.
In 1942, when Theodor W. Adorno had also begun writing his Notes on Kafka, which he continued to work on until 1953, the year they were published in the Neue Rundschau, he composed a bagatelle on the text of Kafka’s poem from 1917 while in American exile. Translated into the personified context of Adorno’s forced flight from the Nazis into exile – the desert region of Los Angeles – the image of the poem is stabilized. In Kafka’s own context, however – provided the poem is not thought of as prophetic – its image stays unstable: Does Kafka’s poem speak of a forced escape, or does it appear as a Zionist dream? A dream in which the abduction “by the storm of the East” maybe indicates euphoria through which the ride merely becomes accelerated?
Photo: Oxford Octavo Notebook 5; Source: Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach, Kafkas Mäuse (Marbach 2013), 20.
243x200mm (72 x 72 DPI)