One of my ongoing creative projects is making new versions of classic poems and myths. It's especially fun to adopt, adapt, update or reimagine another artist's version of a classic. (Like the "play w/in the play," Hamlet; or a film about/with/on film, like Nope). Or Goethe's and Schiller's Greek Myth-inspired poems. Goethe's Ganymed is one famous example. (Ganymede became "cupbearer" to the gods, after Zeus, in the form of an eagle, abducted the young shepherd, in a Panhellenic example of what we now call sex-trafficking. Goethe's poem eroticizes and idealizes the myth).
Here's a link to Schubert's prelapsarian idyllic song. Check out Hugo Wolf's perfumed setting of the same Goethe poem. The latter composer was renowned for not setting poetry he felt other composers had already successfully created. So it's revealing when Wolf does set poems already made famous by Schubert. Here is the beautiful (and still slept-on soprano), Barbara Hendricks in Wolf's version.
I'm not trying to be literal here, as will be obvious when compared to Goethe's ecstatic, violent, gay pastoral. But I am trying to capture some of the original spirit, like a deliciously pungent or tangy spice in a curry or stew. I'm trying to leap from Goethe, while clearly acknowledging the shadow in which I play. And I'm curious to know what you think...
Ganymed (a new version after Goethe)
Morning glow
rings me
treasured Spring
with thousand-
fold lovebliss
flooding my
heart, holy
feeling, your
forever-warmth
Endless pleasure
(Hey, can we mash limbs?)
O, on your chest
I lie, verklemmt.
Your buds
drug
my heart.
You quench
the flame-thirst,
lovely Morganwind
Nightingale who calls
love from the landscape
painting to me.
I’m coming…
I…
I’m… Damn.
Keep stretching
up until
twin clouds
encircle, and
like a lightning bolt,
pierce you
with love-longing
in your Schosse,
schnookie, squeezed
and squeezing
Up, up to the
tips of your
cut pects, my
sugar pops god
(7-8.2022 | Roa.)
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