Nathan Katz

Biography

Nathan Katz was born the December 24th 1892 with Waldighoffen in the house from angle which shelters the Restaurant " nowadays; With the Lion of Or". At that time his/her father had not built yet the butchery on other side of the street. It was in this new house that the young person Nathan Katz passed all his youth. He attended the elementary school and as soon as he could read, he devoured with passion the booklets on the adventures of the Indians and the exploits of Buffalo-Bill which enjoyed at that time an immense success near youth. Worrying about the harmful influence that these accounts of acts of violence could exert on the boy, its mom entrusted her fears to the sister of the priest who submitted the problem to the old man in charge of hearts of the parish. Next Sunday, the top of the pulpit, the priest poured the lightnings of the sky on this kind of literature. Nathan, taken shame, directed its readings towards great classics. The theatrical work of Schiller and more particularly Geschichte der Weltliteratur filled with wonder the Nathan young person than the thirst for knowing pushed to acquire, each time its economies allowed him, a new masterpiece of this universal literature. It entered to the factory " Wire of Emanuel Lang" like young employee at the fifteen years age. During its leisures it tried to compose its first towards, and carried them to the drafting of the " Mülhauser Tagblatt".

Came the First World War. As of August 1914 Nathan Katz was wounded with the right-hand man. It was allowed at the hospital of the university of Tübingen where the effective intervention of the famous Albrecht surgeon avoided the paralysis of this member to him. After its convalescence, it was affected with a detachment of the Red Cross establishes in a building of the University of Freiburg-in-Brisgau. It benefitted from its moments of freedom to follow the courses of professor Witkopp, specialist in the Germanic literature.

Recalled on the face of the East, it was made prisoner by the Russians with Nijni-Novgorod. It met in the prison camp of war of other Alsatian and in particular Antoine Koch de Waldighoffen. It is there, in a hut out of wooden, in June 1915, which it composed the poems of its first collection Das Galgenstüblein (the small bedroom of the bracket) published in 1920. Nathan Katz wanted to prove that it was possible, in the old man Alsatian dialect, such as it is still spoken by the inhabitants about the Sundgau, to find terms of a touching poetry, to express the feelings of the noble hearts. It created " Ring Balthasar" , dramatic part in four acts. For a long time, it wanted to write a rather long poem epic: the song of the love and died of beautiful and innocent the Rings Balthasar and of sound promised in marriage Doni . It succeeded perfectly and like no one other before him, it sang beautiful Sundgau, by proclaiming its profession of faith in kindness and charity, more extremely than death.

In 1930, it publishes the collection of poetries " Sundgaü" then the same year still a collection of poetries and tales entitled " Die Stunde of Wunders". Literary criticisms in the review " Elsassland" judged the collection " Sundgau" in eulogistic terms: " All that makes the size, the force and the characteristic of this area radiates work of the poet Nathan Katz. Its creative power inspired to him an imposing interpretation of all that Sundgau comprises of charm and maturity, intimacy and contemplative: Nathan Katz raises the specific characteristics of this atmosphere in the form and the purest color condensed, purest, most transparent; it models the face and the heart of its native land as only can do it a sincere poet and a fundamentally good man, with a subsidiary love and deep a respect".

" Sundgau" is classified incontestably among what one finds of better in the field of dialectal lyricism in Alsace; it would deserve to appear among the rare artistically valid poems of all the Germanic territory of expression.

Working for the account of a large firm of food, he traversed all the countries of Western Europe and everywhere he had friends. Thanks to its relations, it often helped the young artists in difficulty.

After the declaration of the war in 1939, it had to leave its native soil to flee the invader. It is established in the the Limousin until the release then returned to settle with Mulhouse. It occupied there the post of librarian of the public library.

With the festival of the Release of Waldighoffen, it is him which paid the homage to deaths. The general De Lattre de Tassigny, very touched by the words of the poet, made it invite to congratulate it and in front of the generals he says to him: " With the weapons I made my duty for France, maintaining the Fatherland needs men like you, help me ". In spite of hatred still quite alive towards the oppressors, the poet found the words of kindness, peace and harmony.

In 1957, after its retirement, it classified its many poems, used others of them already appeared in its collection " Sundgaü" (exhausted since long years) and the republication under the title " prepared some; Sundgaü! O loos da hard Rüaf of Garte" (Oh Sundgau! Listen to this call through the gardens) published in December 1958.

Literary work found its crowning by its nomination like regular member of the Academy of Alsace. In 1966, the " Oberrheinische Kulturpreis" he was decreed by the " Johann-Wolfgang von Goethe-Stiftung".

Nathan Katz was always the poet of Sundgau, his poetries breathe the odor of the soil. Always stimulated by an irresistible attraction for the beauties of nature sundgauvienne, he sings his habits, his legends, his love of life. For Nathan Katz, the Alsatian dialect, of which the roots are drawn from the Germanic one, is older than the German language. All its poems, he writes them not in the dialect, but in the Germanic language. The poet always endeavoured to give to this language his noble letters. It is convinced however that one can also express oneself entirely in the Alsatian dialect and, to prove it, it translates in this dialect the poems of Péguy, Mistral, Poe, Burns, Guillevic, Shakespeare and others. By seeking the adequate words, it provides the irrefutable proof of the richness and the variety of the vocabulary sundgauvien.

Nathan Katz died out in peace and serenity in Mulhouse the January 12th 1981.

Works

Analyzes works of Nathan Katz

Nathan Katz: poetry and spirituality

By Yolande Siebert and Gerard Pfister Conference given to the FEC on March 7th, 2002 Summarized by Christine MULLER

Alsatian poet of Germanic language, Nathan Katz was one of rare to have crossed Haut-Rhin. Reference, myth, it left integrates the spiritual heritage of Alsace. The originality and the force of the poet lie in his metaphysics and its spirituality, in its philosophical depth. Yolande Siebert, university lecturer at the university Marc Bloch, published in 2001 the poetic work of the famous bard sundgauvien in a new bilingual edition. It exalte rare quality, depth of the text which exceeds dialectal regional poetry by far. Can one speak today about awakening in the richness and the dialectal culture or is one on the way of the regression? question yourself it. Gerard Pfister, second speaker of this taken care, poet and editor of works of Nathan Katz, founded Artfueren his own publisher in 1975, which publishes important poets of Alsace and besides. Originality of its production is due to a subtle marriage of poetry and spirituality.

Yolande Siebert: not to make the dead end on spirituality

The republication in 2001 of a first volume of works of Nathan Katz made available one important author for the dialectal inheritance. These texts emanate from a poet who created its own language, which made of a small soil, Sundgau, its literary fatherland, and propelled it to the school of the traditional writers of the whole world. This apparent paradox introduces in the middle of discusses of this evening. Today, Nathan Katz, it is initially to redécouvrir landscapes of antan and a country universe which attempts to recreate disappeared or threatened things. One would not know to underestimate in the economy of work the importance which in themselves these evocations have gardens, seasons, houses, festivals, work of the men. They crystallize for the poet the truth and the beauty of a country to no one another similar. Where that it is, indeed, this poet initially sales representative for textile industry in France, in Europe and beyond, is haunted everywhere by Sundgau, which it is on the Volga, in the Tyrol, in Provence or in North Africa. But beyond this first level, the nourished reader of Katz adopts the author in companion of life, less intellectual guide enacting precepts and giving lessons, that spiritual big brother whose poetry fixes the reference marks, reverses mountains, makes shine headlights. The work of Nathan Katz makes always more than to sing this Sundgau that the distance he makes transcend, conferring this serene distance to him which differentiates it so much from a poetry from soil. It maintains with its corner Alsace a relation quasi-mystic of which realities charge with religious and spiritual resonances. The poetry of Nathan Katz comprises one demanding vision of the human existence and reflects the universal life. Familiar landscapes themselves form beyond the quasi-permanent framework of an interrogation on the problems evil, death, nature, life, of God, love. Sundgau de Katz is one happy country where a crack, open or invisible is profiled, but omnipresent.

Evil

In der Musik of the zahrten Blühens, dieser traurige Akkord , noted it since 1930, in Die Stunde of Wunders (p.32). This crack, it is the existence of the evil auxmanifestations sometimes brutal, sometimes underhand, crack which spring dissimulates under its tides of flowers but who could not cure because it is in the heart of the men. In this respect, one of the texts most significant is Friejohr im Sundgäu. April makes its entry at the village which it submerges, so much so that any death seems abolished. On three pages, all reverdit, all lives. However, it last paragraph deploys a violent antithesis, less one wrong note that a counterpoint. By recalling that not far, hatred and the war continue to prevail: Who would believe that behind these hills tapit a world of jealousy and war, misfortune and greed! That there is men who live in the desire and spite… There are too much light and splendor on this country, the sky is too blue on this sumptuous garden. Who could believe that it still can there to have place in the hearts for hatred and smallness? (translation of J-Paul of Dadelsen). This same opposition is found in the poems. For example, at the beginning of the second part of the collection in R Tod a' S Labe (death and life), Known, p.128. There high, in million grass bits, in the branches which ploient, everywhere, life and dead. Without insisting on culpability of the human ones, if it is not subtly, by qualifying the death of these late of “bees” (bad). “Bees” taking a mystical value here and meaning something like “malefic”. It is rare that the expression takes a didactic form. That the action is at the time of the lawsuits of sorcery or in a village of our time, heroin is victim of lawsuit to the disastrous consequences. All the characters of Katz are the preys of the evil. Even if they are not always driven back with death. Espiègleries of kid brought back to the teacher by comrades with the wars between nations, the poet deploys a complete scale of failures of the human nature where world forgets its vocation of love. For Katz, the evil is not circumstantial, but inherent in the existence. By implicitly explaining the human condition through a kind of sin original, by underlining the incapacity of the man with éradiquer the evil in him, it raises the question coherence of its thought. Neither death, nor nature, two major topics of its inspiration, are felt with the manner other pessimistic writers such Pascal or Vigny, one and the other familiar ones in Katz. Null distresses in front of the death, under consideration like a rest in the maternal ground. Null anguish in front of the abyss of infinite where the man is lost. Nature, life and dead are indissociablement dependant at his place in a pantheist design of the universe. The pantheism of is poet reconcilable with the existence of the evil, if the evil is of nature ontological? The assertion of a god who merges with nature and appears in the cycle uninterrupted life-death-rebirth, is a leitmotiv of work.

Pantheism and revealed religions

There is in this coexistence of God and the evil minus a contradiction that a tear leading to most secret of the spirituality of Nathan Katz. God is everywhere, except in the heart men. A pessimism without exit could result from this report, since splendor gardens is only one appearance, since the eternal return of the seasons eradic at all fundamental evil. Nihilist Nathan Katz opposes sometimes the Carpus diem, until in the same poem. Also accents quasi-epicureans rise: brevity of the life, eternity of death. The spiritual attitude of pantheism constitutes consequently a key infallible for the whole of work. Remain also the answer of the poet, or his absence, with solutions of the revealed religions. Nowhere in literary work, it does not take a position clear; if is not to reject any dogmatism, of some church which it comes. Choices them firmer meet however in the pages not published of the years 1920. There, according to Katz, the religion is essentially unifying, sublime. But, when it is made dogmatism, it generates the evil. This topic is the subject of a long development in a new manuscript of 1928/29, Die gross Sehnsucht DER Pink Levy. God is foreign with the rites and the habits pertaining to worship, Nathan Katz affirms. It there thus of “not preferred” in the kingdom of God, Pdf Creator - PDF4Free v2.0 http://www.pdf4free.com insist the poet. God is not satisfied various worships with his name and does not let itself reduce with rites which are only human institutions.

Christ, brother of combat

To four or five recoveries in work published, Nathan Katz evokes also Christ, vision white which preaches on the mountain the Gospel of the blisses rejected by the men. Murder, hatreds, darkness, here is history of supposedly civilized humanity. The despair of poet bursts in his dialogs with Christ. In a poem of Sundgau, it is a Christ afflicted by the report with the evil which wanders, solitary and abandoned, in the streets of our cities:

the bells sound Christmas… I listen to you in silence, Seigneur, To go through the night. Poor, pale, You go by the streets, the heart full with pity, In snow and the storm. Of the thousands of men suffers, You know it. Of the thousands of men dies, By cupidity and the war, You know it. In the whole world, hatred, misery, you know it. You steps, Lord, Abandoned of all, Through the night.

“Verlosse N irrsch herr Jesis, nozzle hard of Nacht”. This Christ too human must much with that of Renan, whose life of Jesus was a book of bedside of the poet. It is at Renan that Katz found the idea of a religion of the heart, scorning the devotions, released from any formalism, as the poem above provides some the illustration. Jesus condemns the vain practices, the codes, the precepts. Katz could not that to be allured by a religion without practice, temple, without priest, by the idea that the kingdom of God was the Good; each and everyone can add its contribution to the building, according to its capacities to like. This revolutionary Jesus who wanted to renovate the world morally, this sublime man had poor biographers deforming his image, estimated Renan.

Eastern spirituality

Nathan Katz is made the echo of this vision of the things in its opuscule Das Galgenstüblein, writing in a prison camp, with the bracket drawn up under the window of its cell. However, the recurring image of the Christ suffering who haunts Nathan Katz of the years later in its poems sundgauviens calms down in that of Buddha, Master of serenity, other wisdom whose Katz was penetrated. Like the wise Eastern one, he seeks to discover reality who hides behind appearances. Its philosophy is outlined in the subtitle given to Das Galgenstüblein: “Ein Kampf um die Lebensfreude. ” Here is that the bracket is sublimated by will of that which looks it with the eyes of the heart. Nathan Katz wants to preserve the spirit free until in prison because nobody can prevent it from looking at the light which dances on walls. The poet deploys in these texts his Buddhist design of the existence: to benefit from the moment, to taste with the savor of each day which passes, nothing to let lose each moment that the life offers to us. The will to triumph over oneself over Katz is of inspiration goethéenne. Faust appears among the books which forged the spirituality of the poet, beyond any orthodoxy. Even if the Germanic poems of the following years move away from lived autobiographical, the refusal of a eschatologic theology and dogmatic residence.

The poet and love

Twenty years later, Nathan Katz is shown more affirmative: according to him, death does not exist, life is eternal. The answer to survival is given in another form that of the dogma: it is the love, absolute enraciné at Katz, categorical imperative of its philosophy which it conduit with its pantheist design. It is impossible, at the same time to like then to die. The love is the engine of this uninterrupted vital cycle in which God is given in nature. The connotation in love characterizes much night poems. God founds and this holy night of love blesses. The religious dimension of the love which transcends them lovers: for the characters of Katz, the revelation of the love is comparable with a way from Damas. The religious connotations in love are recurring in the work of Katz. beloved is holy and the lover folds the knee in front of it. The poet sees it sitting auprès throne of God. To like, it is to make holy work, writes it in the poem of heilige Hochzitsnacht. But the mystic of the love does not limit herself to the relations between two beings and with their communion with God. The love is also charity, i.e. humanity which is expressed initially in fraternity between individuals as between nations. For this reason, it is the lever of the Golden age, alas always to come. The love between the men would make village a paradise, known as the poet in Rings Balthasar. The topic of the hello by the woman is universal. Katz is it remembered its reading of the Banquet of Plato where the search of the soul mates, separated with do birth find in the meeting their original unit? In the poem Ewigi Liebi, Platonic resonance is sensitive until in detail of the expression. For Katz, love of a couple is the participation common to the adventure of the universal life and God.

Engagement with back.

The second consequence of the postulate of the love leads Katz to the action. Against winds and tides, he will always affirm a pacifism without concessions. This war with the war by poetry is one of the powerful Utopias which radiate in work. Katz is however not one committed poet. By no means in favor, it avoids evoking what divides, a kind of engagement to back. To abstain from what divides, but also to celebrate what links. The poet was held with this program without being made donor of lessons, always side of the victims, as in these new lines, written after the First World War: I saw hours lasting of the German women in front of the barracks in waiting of one remain of soup. I saw Russian women throwing themselves by ground while sanglotant, when is arrived the advertisement of died of their husband. I saw French women with half insane of pain; everywhere misfortune, a misfortune without end. In that, Katz joined another large pacifist time, Kurt Tucholsky, ouKäthe Kollwitz or Jean Jaurès and their commun run “never again, deny wieder! ” Poems of Katz, a few years later are less didactic; they are not less impregnated of the ideal of fraternity of Schiller, non-violence of Gandhi, pacifism of the Chinese You-Fu or of tolerance of Rabindrânàth Tagore. An illustrated heritage a contrario by the history of Alsace, always ensanglantée ground. Poems of Nathan Katz devoted to the war and to its devastations, the topic of died with the war, at the same time victims and culprits, phantoms wandering without rest, do not raise only of one literary romanticism. They testify and act. The voice of the poet, if ready to collect and reproduce the mysterious accents of nature is done then harder. Begging and thundering, also, with pathetic accents borrowed from died of the mass grave: Why was it necessary us to die so young people? God, why? Brothers, why? All say only one and even thing: that cease finally violence. And if this voice preaches in the vacuum, like Katz in fact sometimes the pessimistic report, it its justification does not lose any. The attitude of the poet is comparable with that of a bet pascalien: If peace is impossible and the love an illusion, I am right nevertheless to bet on peace and on the love, because it is the only way of living with dignity. Katz will always refuse to despair. With the risk to schematize them, it was not illegitimate of to conceptualize the broad topics which belong to the repertory of the mystics. The unit work, poetry, theater, tales, memories, into Germanic as in German strikes by the permanence of certain subjects. Even of lyric invoice, works remain mystical. Audelà the visible one, the sensitive one, Nathan Katz suggests the secret and unutterable life people and things.

Gerard Pfister: why publish Nathan Katz and poetry?

Each poem of Nathan Katz makes pass something of impalpable, of extremely invaluable which is beyond what one can formalize. Pantheist poems, certainly, mystics also, but the preciosity of Katz lies in the inappreciable price of poetry, space in which the things are known as. In the content, these things are seen in another space, that of God. From which extraordinary simplicity rises from Katz, which is not a poet of literary sophistication, nor that of the ideological or esthetic proclamations. He prefers more of intimacy, simplicity, a vibrating emotion. The call towards the bottom marks its writing. I have immediately be very sensitive to that.

To include/understand the relationship between poetry and spirituality, it should be wondered why them spiritual poems write and why poetry maintains a bond with spirituality, of quiet nature. For our contemporaries, poetry is the most futile thing and more useless which is, whereas material comfort, the communications tools are privileged. It would be on the contrary important to prove that poetry deals with the fundamental things of our human existence; spirituality is nothing without the privileged expression poetry. Largest spiritual, such François d' Assise and Jean of the Cross were among more large poets, with equal of Dante. Our larger contemporary poets are, them also, inspired by a spiritual, unnamed experiment. Yves Bonnefoy, for example has one indissociable writing of a spiritual experiment. It is about an intense and paradoxical report/ratio: the formal ones of the verb would reduce readily the poetic side of our language. But poetry remains verb, word, reality secret and hidden which emerges, with the image of Katz or Master Eckart. The poem is an asceticism of the language. We exist through the words. The work of poet consists to elutriate, rarefy and specify the words and to think beyond the words. Poetry is an asceticism of the language and sensitivity. The great poem starts when is done one birth, a passage in another space time. But we keep confusions: poet feels very near to the spiritual one; he nourishes himself some but without immersing himself there completely. Without what it could not write any more. There remains the man of the threshold which contemplates spirituality in spectator and is inspired some, contrary to spiritual who him, enters the union where silence fact. The spiritual poets undertook a work by knowing the limits of this exercise. Their mystical experiments, they, do without from words, articulated, words.

My work of editor takes as a starting point the Rhenish mystic, sharp source of the poetry and of spirituality. Let us quote with this titreMaître Eckart: People often say to me “request for me”. I then never to prevent me from thinking: why do you leave? Why you do not remain in yourselves, and don't you draw in your own good? However, you carry primarily in you all the truth. Can we thus really remain with-inside ourselves.

It is an ambitious program there but thus I conceive the publication of the texts spiritual. And thus our contemporaries await them. It is not a question to impose one catechism, nor to provide curious and odd ideologies. It is initially a question of inviting them to to enter in themselves, that of which they are prevented in the world of today. One little book can question and cause the appetite of knowing of the lazy readers, rejected by works too much bulky. Thus let us try to make books which benefit the reader, difficult thing, I admit.

In my collection of publications, I publish spiritual works of the whole world but I please also make discover the richness of the French spiritual literature. Why don't we know the admirable texts of the 17th French century and beyond? Why do we ignore Bérulle, Sainte Jeanne de Chantal, Marie of the Incarnation? The laic mode of the provinces, out of Alsace of the Legal settlement, made much, I believe, for to exclude the religious literature from the schools. That seems to me as aberrant as to remove religious painting in Louvre. I thus test, on my side, to reinstate the superb literature nun in the culture of today. I like it to publish spiritual texts but also agnostic books where spirituality is not absent. I do not choose the works according to labels, nuns or others. In this respect, I made appear the last collection of poems of François Cheng, connected to great tradition taoist. He felt very near to Rhenish spirituality. In my company, I have happiness to in addition escape absurd cleavages, so current. I privilege the voices of poets singular, pure, removed from the parasites of conformism ambient. I like it as much to make appear the texts of a Canadian poet that those of one ram which wrote hundred different conversations on… the peonies. This eclecticism enchants me. To finish, I would like to speak to you about a publication to come: the bulky work of one Dominican, Marie of the Trinity, missionary of the campaigns, deceased in 1980, having written ten thousand pages in the only secrecy of its confessor. I am charmed to publish a spiritual text of this quality, expressed in such a beautiful language. Y.S/G.P

The Price of Literature Nathan Katz

the Price of Literature Nathan Katz was created in 2004 on the initiative of the Ministry for the Culture on a project defined in collaboration with the Arfuyen Editions. The Price is animated and managed in a way independent and voluntary by European Capital Association of Literatures (ACEL).

The name of the poet, writer and translator Nathan Katz (1892-1981) was selected to symbolize all at the same time the preoccupation with a rooting in the regional tradition combined with a spirit of very broad opening on the other cultures. It pays homage to a work of high-quality, mainly written into Germanic but also in French and German, and with a personality of high requirement which is essential like one of most important of the Alsatian literature of the 20th century.

I would like to leave, to leave by the fields,

I would like to run by all the ways,

To pass all the mounts, to pass all wood,

See all the foreign countries.

And it are only by you, it is only for you

That my heart is so young, yes so young person, suddenly,

Only to have seen you.

Nathan Katz, Sundgau (1930). Transl. Jean-Paul de Dadelsen.

Three prices are allotted each year by the Jury of the Price of Literature Nathan Katz:

The European Price of Literature

It distinguishes, for the whole of its work, a poet or European prosator of international stature, in order to testify, in a place highly symbolic system, desire of unit like cultural rooting of Europe of today; in order to also express the urgency of a better mutual knowledge of the alive cultures of our countries through the great figures which are the alive symbols. This Price also distinguishes a translator who contributes to the meeting between large contemporary literary works. The Price European of Literature is placed under the sponsorship of the City and the Urban community of Strasbourg. Price 2006: Antonio Gamoneda (Spain), translated from Spanish by Jacques Ancet.

The Price of Literature Nathan Katz

It distinguishes for the unit from its work, a poet or French-speaking prosator of foreground whose course is particularly remarkable by the originality and the quality of its writing and by the strength and the amplitude of its vision. The Price of Literature Natha, Katz is placed under the sponsorship of the DRAC Alsace and the Mutual credit. Price 2005, Jean Mambrino, Price 2006, Henri Meschonnic.

The Price of the Inheritance Nathan Katz

It distinguishes a work from the Alsatian inheritance literary, the Middle Ages at our days, written in dialect or German and or not translated still little into French, in order to testify to the exceptional richness of a culture deeply marked by the dialog of the languages and the cultures and the urgency to overcome cleavages related to the history of the 20th century. This Price also distinguishes a translator thanks to which can leave the lapse of memory of works major and today still carrying future. The Price of the Inheritance Nathan Katz is placed under the sponsorship of the Office for the Language and the Culture of Alsace (OLCA). Price 2005: Jean Hans Arp, translated from German by Aimee Bleikasten. Price 2006: Albert and Adolphe Matthis, translated the of Strasbourg one by Gaston Jung.

The jury of the price of literature Nathan Katz is placed under the presidency of honor of Claude Vigée. He is composed cultural writers, translators, academics and persons in charge: Jean-Louis Droz, Adrien Finck, Vladimir Fišera, Jacques Goorma, Isabelle Baladine Howald, Gaston Jung, Pascal Maillard, Armand Peter, Gerard Pfister, Chantal Robillard, Paul Schwartz, Jean-Paul Sorg, Anne-Marie Soulier, Albert Strickler, Marc Syren and Jean-Claude Walter.

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