Goatfooted, Fatcheeked: Goethe’s Venetian Epigrams
Tight little alleyway – no room to squeeze between its walls – a young girl blocks my way, my rambles around Venice knocks me off my feet, the place, the come-on to a stranger’s eye, a wide canal my drifting takes me to. If you had girls like your canals, o Venice, cunts like little alleyways, you’d be the greatest city in the world. * what bothers me is this: the way Bettina gets to be so skillful every limb in her body grows looser & looser till she can stick her own little tongue up her own little cunt a charmer who tastes her own charms will soon lose all interest in men. * Is it so big a mystery what god and man and world are? No! but nobody knows how to solve it so the mystery hangs on. * Lots of things I can stomach. Most of what irks me I take in my stride, as a god might command me. But four things I hate more than poisons & vipers: tobacco smoke, garlic, bedbugs, and Christ. * Doesn’t surprise me that Christ our Lord preferred to live with whores & sinners, seeing I go in for that myself. * I could have made it just as well with boys although my thing has always been with girls. And once I get my satisfaction with a girl I can turn her around & have her as a boy. * Not schwanz meaning “tail” but some fancier word o Priapus me being a poet in German that word grinds me down. In Greek I can call you a phallos a marvelous sound to my ears and in Latin mentula from mens meaning “mind” another good word. But schwanz is something that sticks out from behind & back there isn’t where I find the most pleasure. * Stranger-man, come, let’s drink coffee! She says, and she means ‘let me wank you.’ So much for coffee, my friends, I’ve always hated the stuff. * In my long search for a wife, I kept picking up whores; in the end I Caught you, my dear little whore: now I have found me a wife! * Turn your toes up to heaven, my dear, and don’t worry! We reach up Heavenwards too with our hands, but not so innocently. * Urns and sarcophagi pagans paint into life, dancing fauns, dancing bands of bacchantes, bright lines of them, goatfooted, fatcheeked, squeeze sounds hot & wild through brass horns, percussions & cymbals blare out,: we see & hear on the marble birds beating wings, sweet taste of the fruit on your beaks, no noise to frighten you.off still less to drive Eros away who joins the bright crowds rejoicing, hoisting his torch. So bounty overcomes death & the ashes within in the house made of silence still find pleasure in life. Some day may the tomb of the poet be graced with this scroll he has richly bejewelled with life. *** adminhumanitiesunderground.org