It was January 2023 and I was preoccupied with the question of the destructive power and violence that words can exert. A pandemic, which was mainly a pandemic of words and narratives, had just ended when a war began on European soil. Once again, words were not spared, mercilessly dividing people and spreading falsehoods, darkness and fear.
Where is this primordial creative Word—which once upon a time was the life and light of humankind—still to be found?
As I immersed myself in the prologue to the Gospel of John especially the opening sentences—In the beginning was the Word—I felt a tremendous source of strength.
At about the same time, I vaguely remembered a poem byNelly Sachs; People of the Earth. I searched and found the poem and once again this call penetrated my inner being with unforgettable depth and urgency— the content seemed more relevant to me than ever before:
Both the opening words from the Gospel of John and Nelly Sach’s poem were to form the basis of an installation.
In the beginning was the Logos
In ancient Greek lettering.
Εν αρχή ην ο Λόγος
People of the Earth
A poem by Nelly Sachs
Translated by Christine Howard
______________
People of the earth
you who entwine yourselves
like spools of thread,
in the power of unknown stars,
you who sew and then unravel the stitching,
you who enter the confusion of speaking
as in hives of bees
to sting in the sweetness
and get stung.
People of the earth,
do not destroy the words of the cosmos,
do not slice with knives of hatred,
the sound, that was born
when breath was born.
People of the earth,
O … that no one means death,
when they say life –
and mean not blood,
when they say cradle –
People of the earth,
leave the words at their source,
for it is through them
that the horizons can move
into the true heavens
and with their night facing sides
like a mask behind which
the night yawns
they help the stars give birth –
The result was a triptych in the centre of which the word Logos can be seen in ancient Greek gold letters on black sand. The bottom of the two wedge-shaped wings is covered with scorched book pages, an expression of a book burning. A transparent film is stretched over the wing on which the poem Peoples of the Earth is written.
The finished tryptich was set up and the wish arose to recite the poem while the camera was rolling. A Russian Orthodox choir can be heard in the background, which had accompanied me during my working hours.
Looking back, the following day was decisive: I made the decision to have this wonderful poem translated into many languages and to spread it throughout the world as a counterbalance to untruth and war. The person who ultimately made this possible was Christine Howard (South Africa / Berlin), who translated the poem into English, spoke and recorded the English version, and meticulously did the technical editing and made the first two versions of the video in German and English. She then ensured that the first video ‘Logos’ was produced in five language versions, once the poem had been translated and recorded in Spanish, Russian and Ukrainian. She then uploaded them all to the social media platform Rumble and distributed them to contacts all over, including South Africa. My special thanks go to her.
In the following days, Mrs Ingrid Vereia Casals (La Palma) translated and then spoke the poem in Spanish. Days of work and mutual consultation resulted in an excellent Spanish version. Thanks to her wonderful effort, the completed video could immediately be made available on Spanish and South American web platforms and on Rumble.
Thanks to special circumstances, it was possible to establish contact with Anna Cussinskaia-Diekamp (Moscow, Russia): She organised for the Nelly Sachs poem to be translated by Mr Vladimir Mukaschevitsch into Russian and she then spoke and recorded the poem. Thus a Russian version came into being.
A balance was a matter of course: Thanks to Christine who asked an ex-student from Ukraine, Mrs Svitlana König (Berlin/Ukraine) to translate the poem into Ukrainian. Once the translation was completed through a collaboration with her Ukrainian contacts, a Ukrainian version could be completed and published as well.
It is thanks to all of these people that this synthesis of the arts has been clicked on more than 3309 times on Rumble in all 5 languages, from all over the world – at the time of writing this.
The reactions and comments have been overwhelming and show how necessary it is to fight for truth, peace and life through the peaceful medium of art!
Andreas Hahn
2024
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