Altenberg Peter - Telegrams of the soul: selected prose

Selected Prose of Peter Altenberg

Selected, translated and
with an afterword by Peter Wortsman

archipelago books

Copyright 2005 Archipelago Books

First Edition

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without the prior written permission of the publisher.

English Translation copyright 2005 Peter Wortsman

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Altenberg, Peter, 18591919.

[Prose works. Selections. English. 2005]

Telegrams of the soul : selected prose of Peter Altenberg / selected, translated, and with an afterword by Peter Wortsman.1st ed.

p. cm.

ISBN 0-9749680-8-0 (pbk.)

I. Altenberg, Peter, 1859-1919Translations into English.

I. Wortsman, Peter. II. Title.

PT2601.L78A6 2005

838'.91208dc22 2004027895

Archipelago Books

232 Third Street #A111

Brooklyn, NY 11201

www.archipelagobooks.org

Distributed by Consortium Book Sales and Distribution

www.cbsd.com

Telegrams of the Soul: Selected Prose of Peter Altenberg

Translations of Flower Alle, The Mouse and In the Stadtpark were first published in Fiction. An earlier version of P.S. (to P.A. from P.W.) previously appeared under a different title in A Modern Way to Die, small stories and microtales, by Peter Wortsman, Fromm International Publishing Corporation, New York, 1991.

Cover art: Oskar Kokoschka, Peter Altenberg, 1909.
2004 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ProLitteris, Zrich

All rights reserved

This publication is made possible with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency.

to my fathers wit and my mothers soul
P. W.

There are three idealists: God, mothers and poets!

They dont seek the ideal in completed things

they find it in the incomplete.

Peter Altenberg

I was born in 1862, in Vienna. My father is a businessman. He has one distinguishing quality: He only reads French books. For the past 40 years. Above his bed hangs a wonderful likeness of his God Victor Hugo. Evenings he sits in a dark red armchair, reading the Revue des deux Mondes, dressed in a blue robe with a wide velvet collar la Victor Hugo. Theres not another idealist like him in this world. He was once asked: Arent you proud of your son?

He replied: I was not overly vexed that he remained an idler for 30 years. So Im not overly honored that hes a poet now! I gave him his freedom. I knew that it was a long shot. I counted on his soul!

Yes, indeed, oh noblest, most remarkable of all fathers, for the longest time I squandered your godly gift of freedom, doted on noble and altogether ignoble women, loafed around in forests, was a lawyer without studying law, a doctor without studying medicine, a book dealer without selling books, a lover without ever marrying, and finally a poet without composing any poetry. Can these short things really be called poetry?! No way.Theyre extracts! Extracts from life. The life of the soul and what the day may bring, reduced to two to three pages, cleansed of superfluities like a beef cow in a reduction pot! Its up to the reader to re-dissolve these extracts with his own lust for life and stir them back into a palatable broth, to heat them up with his own zest, in short, to make them light, liquidy and digestible. But there are soulful stomachs that cant tolerate extracts. Everything ingested remains heavy and caustic. Such constitutions require 90 percent broths, watered-down blends. What are they supposed to dilute the extracts with?! With their own lust for life maybe?

Consequently, I have many adversaries, dyspeptics of the soul, quite simply. Bad digesters! Finishing is the artists all. Even finishing with himself! And yet, I maintain: that which you wisely withhold is more artistic than that which you blurt out. Isnt that so?! Indeed, I love the abbreviated deal, the telegram style of the soul!

Id like to capture an individual in a single sentence, a soul- stirring experience on a single page, a landscape in one word! Present arms, artist, aim, bulls-eye! Basta. And above all: Listen to yourself. Lend an ear to the voices within. Dont be shy with yourself. Dont let yourself be scared off by unfamiliar sounds. As long as theyre your own! Have the courage of your own nakedness!

I was nothing, I am nothing, I will be nothing. But I will live out my life in freedom and let noble and considerate souls share in the experiences of this free inner life, by putting them out in the most concentrated form on paper.

I am poor, but I am myself! Absolutely and completely myself! The man without compromises!

How far do you get with that? One hundred Guldens a month and a few ardent admirers.

Well, thats what Ive got.

My life has been devoted to the boundless admiration of Gods artwork, womans body! The walls of my humble room are practically papered over with perfect studies of the nude. All are hung in oaken frames with captions. A fifteen-year-old bears the motto: Beaut est vertue. Beneath another it says: There is but one indecency in the nakedto deem the naked indecent!

Under yet another it says: This is how God and the poets dreamed you up. But feeble little man invented modesty and covered you, en-coffined you!

When P.A. wakes, his glance falls on the holy splendor and he takes the trouble and stress of existence in stride, since he was endowed with two eyes to drink in the holiest loveliness on earth!

Eye, oh eye, Rothchild-chattel of man!

But the others stare, they ogle life like the toad ogles the water-lily.

Id like these words inscribed on my tombstone: He loved and saw.

Yes, indeed, to live in inner ecstasies, to get yourself all hot and bothered, piping hot, to let yourself be set on fire by the beauties of this world, that was all we ever wanted, father and son, that was all.

But whereas the old man was still somewhat attached to everyday life, at times colliding with it, the younger one fled immediately and without a second thought from this dungeon of duty.

True, I am poor, poor, but my noble father gave me the treasure which few fathers in their gentle wisdom grant their sons: Time for development and freedom. That allowed my uncorrupted soul to lovingly abandon itself to the inconceivable treasures which every hour of every day spill like pearls onto the desolate shore of life, allowed it to abandon itself to the tragic or the tender events, and grow, grow.

My Mama was once a very delicate, strikingly lovely lady with fine hands and feet and slender joints. Like a gazelle. Once my father brought back from England a very pretty girl. He said to Mama: This, my dear, is Maud-Victoria. She is the prettiest girl in England. My Mama saw that she was indeed the prettiest girl in England and said in a downright sorrowful voice: Will she have to stay with us from now on? Whereupon, my father was so moved that he sent the prettiest girl in England back where she came from.