“Krater” (krater or crater in English) is the name given to the large vessel in Ancient Greece used for the diluting of wine with water. Drinking undiluted wine was a social faux pas that suggested a lack of restraint. Highly decorated with the characteristic black and red glaze figures, these mixing vessels often depicted scenes from mythology. However, the German “Krater” also means crater in the more familiar sense: pointing to the mouth of the volcano and the pockmarked moon later in the poem. The pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles is best known for having developed the cosmogonic theory of the four elements which would be mixed and separated by Love and Strife. Most important here though, is the fabled manner of his death: he is meant to have leapt into the crater of Mount Etna, his sandals famously left behind leading to speculation and myth-making. The poem also peers into another crater: the hole in the skull that allows one to view the grey matter within. Here we have a hint of Durs Grünbein’s Schädelbasislektion (Skull Primer) of 1991 but also of his first collection, Grauzone morgens (Grey zone in the morning) of 1998 which riffs on the greyness of life in East Germany, but also the grey matter of the brain. All these images are overlayed, one might say mixed, in the poem itself: a vessel with its delicate formal constraint. But the stories they suggest are elemental: stories of love and death (Persephone), memory and introspection, stories that are activated in the brain by the initial trigger of the word. In the other figure, Hephaestus, we see the blacksmith to the gods and emblem of the craft that can hold time and space together in the work of art.
Read the poem this note is about, “Active.”
Karen Leeder’s translation of Durs Grünbein’s Porcelain: Poem on the Downfall of My City (Seagull Books, 2020) won the Schlegel-Tieck Prize.