Till Lindemann's 'Messer' - "Sautod"

Come on, come on, just a little closer…

Boy, are you in for a treat with this one. This poem is the origin of Waidmanns Heil. The demo version is linked because that has two extra lines from ‘Sautod’ sung in it, thus giving it extra relevance.

I’d also appreciate corrections from those who are familiar with Waidmannssprache.

(Poem no. 21 out of 54, located pg. 56 of ‘Messer’, 2010 print.)

Disclaimer: Poem copyrighted to Till Lindemann. This post does not include photos/illustrations of said poem from ‘Messer’. The original German text is also not included. This is only a interpretive translation and accuracy is not guaranteed.


Death of a Sow

I have been in heat for days
So I shall hunt a female deer
Until morning I will sit here
So I may get myself a shoulder shot

Soon a promising roe deer
Will contribute to this setting
I must refrain from courtship
It cannot run towards the woods

A young doe comes to her feet
Having sunbathed in the high reeds
Making good tracks deep within the forest
Its white belly gleams; and I grab it

Its tail twitches like a finger-eel
The gun jumps from its holster
Sweeping the skin off the antlers
I aim the gun with precision

She feels the energy of the muzzle
Red blood dripping from her knee
I drag her to the baiting room
Then blow my horn for the hounds

Goo drips out from her genitals
I roar out a good mating
Then I drag her into the corner
And skin her free of all her pelt

Original Meter: Most of it is in iambic tetrameter, except for the second stanza which switches to trochaic tetrameter.

Original Rhyme Scheme: AABB.

Comments: First of all, my thanks to Jagdweb.at for being an invauable resource to translating this. Hunter jargon is nigh impossible to translate just by looking or searching in normal dictionaries. Here are the few that I feel that noting is important, though the poem is saturated with others - I don’t wish to risk giving away the entire text, though, so I will leave it here.

• ‘Promising roe deer’ was ‘Ricke hochbeschlagen’; the latter according to jagdweb.at means ‘a promising, huntable game (with hooves) for eating or refining’. I only saved ‘promising’ for that one. It should connotate a female deer too, but ‘roe doe’ sounds a little too whimsical.
  
• ‘Courtship’ in the second stanza was ‘Beschlag’; the last two lines of this stanza probably means ‘not striking too early/making a sound so that the prey doesn’t get away’.
  
• ‘Baiting room’ was ‘Luderplatz’, ‘Luder’ connotating ‘bait’. ‘Processing room’ could also have worked, but I don’t know if that would have been a superficial connection.
  
• ‘Schnalle’ is defined as ‘external sexual organs of female, nursing game animals’; the ‘nursing’ is also explicit. The definition for ‘Schnalle’ utilized another bit of jargon, ‘Harraubwild’, meaning ‘wild female game that is nursing’. I’ve just used ‘genitals’ in-text.

As for what it means, I am tempted to say that it’s about sex and predatory behaviour - but Suze has commented (from being in a hunting family themselves) that it actually is just about hunting, told through vaguely sexual metaphors. I can’t say I have a definitive stance.

Italicized lines in-text are the lyrics of Waidmanns Heil.
The last two lines, bolded, feature in the demo. Goddamn, I think I like that version more than the one in the album…