Tag: poetry

Who Am I? by Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Prison Poem

Posted on | by Carmen Butcher

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was arrested in April 1943 by the Gestapo and imprisoned by the Nazis in Berlin-Tegel prison for one and a half years. In 1944 he wrote the poem, “Wer bin ich?” [“Who am I?”], and on July 8, 1944, he sent it to his friend Eberhard Bethge. In October 1944, he was transferred to the Gestapo cellar in Prinz-Albert-Strasse, then in February 1945 to Buchenwald, and in April 1945 to Flossenbürg Concentration Camp. He was sentenced to death on April 8, 1945, and hanged.

A kind friend included my translation in his Christmas Eve sermon in Virginia. He sent it to me when I couldn’t find my version, and I revised it. It has always been special to me, and its relevance is perennial. I began reading Bonhoeffer in the German starting in 1983-1984 when I studied at Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg [Heidelberg University] on a Rotary Club Graduate Scholarship. In the original that is handwritten, the first three stanzas are indented some five spaces to the right. Please picture those there, which are in my manuscript, but which the formatting here would not hold.

It is interesting how Bonhoeffer ends his non-rhyming poem with a very meaningful rhyming couplet. During the heinous imprisonment that followed his stand against the Nazi Party, and with honest, authentic emotion and in dialogue with the divine, he laments not only his suffering but the suffering of so many others, and he must also be aware that he represents a loving and inclusive spiritual path not endorsed by political powers (remembering Hitler’s 1920-on racist “Positive Christianity”), as reflected in the then contemporary term “Gottgläubig” (“God-believing”), the Nazi Party’s non-denominational deism. Thus the poem also reminds that the small ego (our facades) can be involved in making a murderous mockery of a faith tradition.

So I was trying to capture some of that in my translation of the last lines. We can hear all the lonely doubt and worry “Einsames Fragen” and mockery / ridicule “Spott” dissolve into the word “Gott.” It’s lovely, and also haunting and ironic in the sense that clearly, in spite of the rhyme, nothing has been resolved in his and the world’s earthly situation. We sense and experience in some small way the tension within which he and so many others live and die. Here are the closing lines: “Wer bin ich? Einsames Fragen treibt mit mir Spott, / Wer ich auch bin, Du kennst mich, Dein bin ich, o Gott.”

Who am I? by Dietrich Bonhoeffer
©Translated by Carmen Acevedo Butcher

Who am I? They often tell me
I step from my cell
calm and cheerful and strong,
like a lord from his castle.

Who am I? They often tell me
I speak with my guards
freely and friendly and frank,
as if I were in command.

Who am I? They also tell me
I bear the days of misfortune
with serenity, smiling and sure,
like someone used to winning.

Am I really what others say of me?
Or am I only what I know myself to be?
Restless, longing, sick, like a bird in a cage,
gasping for breath, as if someone strangled my throat,
starving for colors, flowers, bird songs,
thirsting for kind words, human closeness,
shaking with rage at despotism and the pettiest offense,
haunted waiting for great events to happen,
weak from worrying for friends infinitely far away,
tired and empty at praying, at thinking, at coping,
lifeless, and ready to say goodbye to it all?

Who am I? This person or the other?
Am I one self today and tomorrow someone else?
Am I both at once? Before others a hypocrite,
and before myself a despised, whining weakling?
Or is what’s still in me like a battered army,
retreating in disorder from a victory already won?

Who am I? This lonely question mocks my facade.
Whoever I am, you know me, yours am I, O God!

Credits: I ask that you credit the work of the translator Carmen Acevedo Butcher if you share this translation of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s “Wer bin ich?” [“Who am I?”] as given in the title here: “Who am I? by Dietrich Bonhoeffer ©Translated by Carmen Acevedo Butcher.”

“Wer bin ich?” is from page 179 in Widerstand und Ergebung: Briefe und Aufzeichnungen aus der Haft, edited by Eberhard Bethge (Gütersloher Verlagshaus Mohn, 1983). It’s also in Band 8 of Dietrich Bonhoeffer Werke, edited by Christian Gremmels, Eberhard Bethge, und Renate Bethge, mit Ilse Tödt. (Chr. Kaiser/Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1998).

HAWNK

Posted on | by Carmen Butcher

You do not have to be good.   
You do not have to walk on your knees   
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.   
You only have to let the soft animal of your body  
love what it loves.   
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.   
Meanwhile the world goes on.   
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain   
are moving across the landscapes,    
over the prairies and the deep trees,   
the mountains and the rivers.   
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,   
are heading home again.    
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,   
the world offers itself to your imagination,   
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –    
over and over announcing your place   
in the family of things.
Wild Geese by Mary Oliver

Hear Carmen sing this Mary Oliver poem on her YouTube Channel @CarmenAcevedoButcherPresence.


Mary Oliver’s gentle, beautiful, persistent, persisting, comforting, inspiring, and no-nonsense, clear-eyed, wild voice has been with me, in poetry and prose, for decades. I’m grateful for her presence in the world, ongoing, beyond death.

Sometimes I think she is the United States Rumi. My friend tells me when she goes home to Iran, that’s when she truly reconnects with Rumi, on the streets, in cars and trucks, in homes, on TV, in gatherings, he and his music and love and wisdom are everywhere. Much the same can be said about Mary Oliver, thankfully.

“Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver from Dream Work is a favorite poem for how it invites us to celebrate our interconnectedness with everything, every creature, and every one. It’s renewing in that way. I have lived with it so long that gradually a song came with it. First I read it, then reread it, then recited it, then it became a part of my DNA, I sang a few lines, and then I was singing it, and it was singing me.

First released in 1986 in Mary Oliver’s Dream Work, also a favorite of mine. To understand why, I’ll share with you some alerts in my phone and some notes to my self that are scattered around on my desk on index cards, some folded.  

One daily alert that pops up on my SE2 every morning at 6:15 AM reminds me: “I am safe, I am loved, I am part of this human family.” The last part especially is a theme of “Wild Geese”—“announcing your place / in the family of things.”

Another message pops up at 6 AM. If I see it, it’s the first thing I need to see, because no resume has ever been enough for me to assuage my deep-seated childhood trauma. Not that I look to my resume for that anymore, but the reverberations of insecurity are unavoidably foundational for me and deserve my utmost self-compassion and receive it regularly, too. The result of trauma for me is that I often don’t feel I belong anywhere. There are complex reasons for that. Mostly it’s part of my human condition. This message in my phone encourages me with what kind friends often say to me, so I say it to myself since I forget pretty much 24/7: “They are lucky to have you! You’re the best!”

Then on one 3” x 5” unlined-side white notecard in thick permanent black ink, folded tall-ways, I read in large letters: “CALM & CONFIDENT.” Since my default for decades was to apologize for everything, and outgrowing that is an ongoing process, even as verbally and interiorly it happens significantly less and less. My other default setting, for the same reasons, is fear. That’s another reason I benefited from hanging out with the Guru of Calm, Brother Lawrence. I drank in his calmness in that very intimate way of translating him as he translated me. Thank you, Nic.

Then, on another card folded lengthwise, I tell myself: “You’re amazing, Carmen. A ✯! My inner deafness is a kind that hears kind words from family and friends and almost at once forgets to listen. “Love your neighbor as yourself” for me means I have to work daily on inobtrusively reclaiming my safe feeling of quiet baseline amazing, something a healthy childhood might allow a person to take for granted perhaps, and live their life out of that security.

Over the years, I’ve been fortunate to heal my father wound. I’ve been to therapy, lots of therapy, and yes it was hard, and I’ll likely go back again one day. Doesn’t everyone need and benefit from therapy? My massage therapist gets massages. Therapists get therapy. Reminders of our interconnectedness.

I’ve also been fortunate to have years of rolfing. Getting help was painful at first. It did not come easy to me. I only went to rolfing because I could no longer use my arms and hands. In my 30s and 40s they gave me such constant pain that at night I fantasized about taking off my arms, and propping them against the wall beside my bed so I could sleep. My lifelong inner experience of being crippled that I had often coped with (on the surface) successfully, as my therapist once said, “You are a high-functioning depressive,” which made me mad before it made me aware—the truth of it came out. The fear, the pent-up anger, but mostly the sheer fright, came out in my body.

Carpal tunnel made me desperate. Desperation has so often turned out to be a loyal friend. Thank you, Desperation. Today I stretch my body regularly, rolfing healed me from the inside out, from the inner pain to the outer pain, and I was able to work, teach, write books, and more. Thank you, Karen.

I also met and married my best friend, Sean. Over 31 years ago now, and his kindness and deep love have been exciting, fun, sustaining, and healing, orienting me back to my true self. He is the sine qua non.

And I’m fortunate to have long-time friends, a mother who loves me and is always supportive and kind, and my own self-compassion and friendship with my self-Self. I also have a job I love (most of the time!) and colleagues and students who inspire me (all of the time!). Often they also become my friends. How enriching is that. Thankful.

The truth remains that like most people I remain wounded as I’m healed and healing. So those phone alerts and hand-written messages (in permanent ink!) reveal my humanness. I accept them and try to remember to look at the ones in my phone, which pop up every morning. Sometimes I don’t, but I know they’re there. The two messages on index cards I see regularly throughout my day at the computer. They are good reminders. They make me smile. Self-compassion.

That’s why “You do not have to be good” and Mary Oliver so speak to me and nourish me. It’s a song of self-compassion. A song of belonging in nature. Of me being so grateful the snowy egret who soars over me doesn’t put up a sign at the marsh entrance saying, “You are not allowed here. You may not have noticed, and it’s not exactly comfortable for me to have to point it out to you, but in so many ways I’m superior to you, this is my home, and you and yours have trashed it often. Stay out, please.” Thank you, snowy egret. Thank you, wild geese, that you don’t do the same. Hawnking after me to go away. Thank you, all.

This piece is for all of us “in the family of things.”

Sophie

Posted on | by Carmen Butcher

When I studied for a year in Heidelberg at Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg, it wasn’t my teachers who taught me to speak German, it was the children in my life and also a septuagenarian. The teachers scared me. Combine dyslexia with I-can-write-and-read-German-but-I-can’t-speak-it-or-understand-it, and I was a mess in class. Walking down Plöckgasse to the main library to review, I studied the cobblestones and feared the next class session when I’d be called on to speak haltingly.

Meanwhile, the Buschbeck family took me in. Sophie Buschbeck was 79 to my 22. She was a widow. She lived on Mozartstrasse and loved music. She took me with her to the blind Gemüsefrau to buy vegetables, she took me on walks up and along scenic and historic Philosophenweg, she took me to church, she took me to visit shut-ins, including one famous former concert pianist who’d only play for Sophie, she took me to art museums, she invited me to a Christmas with a real tree and beeswax candles burning on it, and she had me clean her rugs and her toilet and wash her steps. And she cooked a roast chicken for me every Friday since “Americans like roast chicken.”

She went from Frau Buschbeck and the formal “Sie,” to asking me to call her Mutti and use the intimate “Du.” And her grandchildren said things to me like (except, in German): “You speak as if you have a hot potato in your mouth!” Which is apparently how my Southern accent elongated the crisp German syllables to their ears. And “We don’t say it like that!” Meanwhile, their parents kept telling me my German was “hervorragend!” “terrific!” When it wasn’t.

Her husband was a Lutheran minister in World War II and was five years in a Russian prison camp. She said that every day she asked God to send her “Mann”—her husband home, and one day she looked out from her balcony and saw an unrecognizable figure but with a gait she knew, a way of walking she went to embrace. Haggard, underweight, his face disheveled and marked with suffering.

“And,” she told me (also in German), “for every time I asked God to send him home to me, I now try to thank God as many times. Which is what you must do, Carmen. You must thank as often as you ask for something.”

So when I use German, after all those asks to “Please help me speak and hear/understand it,” I am thankful, every single time I use German in any way, I feel gratitude to Mutti Buschbeck and her family.

[I]ch möchte Sie, so gut ich es kann, bitten, lieber Herr, Geduld zu haben gegen alles Ungelöste in Ihrem Herzen und zu versuchen, die Fragen selbst liebzuhaben wie verschlossene Stuben und wie Bücher, die in einer sehr fremden Sprache geschrieben sind. . . .

Leben Sie jetzt die Fragen.

From Rainer Maria Rilke, Briefe an Einen Jungen Dichter

I wish to ask you, as gently as I can, dear friend, please have patience with everything unresolved in your heart. And try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms, and like books written in a very unknown language. . . .

Live the questions now.
From Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, Translated by Carmen Acevedo Butcher