Category Archive

Love VI

We will meet again
in the lake
you as water
I as lotus blossom

You will carry me
I will drink you

We will belong to each other
in everyone’s sight

Even the stars
will be surprised
here are two beings
transformed back
into their dream
that chose them

Rose Ausländer translated by Vincent Homolka

Liebe VI

Wir werden uns wiederfinden
im See
du als Wasser
ich als Lotosblume

Du wirst mich tragen
ich werde dich trinken

Wir werden uns angehören
vor allen Augen

Sogar die Sterne
werden sich wundern:
hier haben sich zwei
zurückverwandelt
in ihren Traum
der sie erwählte

Rose Ausländer

Czernowitz before the Second World War

Peaceful hill town
encircled by beech woods

Willows along the Pruth
rafts and swimmers

Maytime profusion of lilac

About the lanterns
May bugs dance
their death

Four languages
Speak to each other
enrich the air

The town
breathed happily
till bombs fell

Rose Ausländer transted by Vincent Homolka

 

Czernowitz vor dem Zweiten Weltkrieg

Friedliche Hügelstadt
von Buchenwäldern umschlossen

Weiden entlang dem Pruth
Flösse und Schwimmer

Maifliederfülle

um die Lanterner
tanzen Maikäfer
ihren Tod

Vier Sprachen
verständigen sich
verwöhnen die Luft

Bis Bomben fielen
atmete glücklich
die Stadt

Rose Ausländer

Note:  We must be grateful to Vincent Homolka for bringing us these beautiful poems from a writer I had previously never even heard of. Rose Ausländer’s poetry has the chief characteristics that I believe poetry should have (and which few poets today even strive for, let alone achieve) : it is sincere, it deals with recognizable human situations and emotions in a language which ordinary people can understand and yet is both musical and memorable. She puts the appropriate expression and celebration of human feelings first and ‘showing what can be done with words’ last  : exactly the reverse of a poet who lived in the same town, Paul Celan, and whose only merit in my eyes is to have apparently encouraged Rose Ausländer to carry on writing.  S.H.

Loneliness I

My pores suck it up
until it’s evenly distributed
throughout my body

Days ceaselessly tattoo
lines upon my cheeks
signs none but the sibyl
can interpret

My friends are sewn up
their breath inaccessible
upon their lips there hangs a colourless flag:
a frosty smile

When I turn around
I see footprints
trailing away in the sand

The windmill on the horizon
moves its sails in time
to a lullaby
It’s time
to put an end to solitude
with bed and sleep

            Rose Ausländer    (translation by Vincent Homolka)

Einsamkeit I

Die Poren saugen sie auf
bis sie im ganzen Körper
gleichmäßig verteilt ist

Tage tätowieren
unablässig Linien
in die Wange
Zeichen die nur die Sibylle
deuten kann

Die Freunde sind zugenäht
man kommt nicht heran an ihren Atem
auf ihren Lippen hängt eine farblose Fahne:
frostiges Lächeln

Wenn man sich umwendet
sieht man Fußspuren die
sich verlaufen im Sand

Die Mühle am Horizont
bewegt die Arme nach dem Pulsschlag eines
Wiegenlieds
Es ist Zeit
dem Alleinsein ein Ende zu bereiten
und schlafen zu gehn

              Rose Ausländer

Visionary Movement

Oh the black angel who stepped softly from the
heart of the tree

Through their long hair rolls
A fiery wheel, the round day
Earth agony without end.

Moon, as though a dead one
Stepped from a blue cavern

The sun has sunk in black linen; forever
This bygone evening returns

And angels step softly from the blue
Eyes of lovers who more calmly bear their torment

When in sleep he descended the darkening spiral stair
When stonily he launched himself before black horses galloping

Softly sinks on stark walls the olive trees blue stillness
From which at times a gentle animal steps and slowly lowers heavy lids

Heavenly to lurch drunkenly through the dusking wood
Figures stride wax-stiffened through embers and smoke

A red wolf which an angel is strangling
A heart stiffens in snowy silence

Oh my brother, our blind hour hands climb towards midnight

Georg Trakl  translated by Will Stone

THE ANATOMY OF MOVEMENT IN GEORG TRAKL’S POETRY

My aim here is to attempt to illuminate a little of what for want of a better phrase one might call ‘the anatomy of movement’ in Trakl’s vision, to try to identify perhaps the most crucial strand leading to the infection of images that lends his work an unrivalled visionary intensity and singularity in modern European poetry. If we wish to take a conventional approach we might say something like ‘There is in the work of Trakl a muscular, highly elastic imagery, encompassing complex fusions of dream-like visions and the memory of real events and experiences propelled by an ever deepening morbid anxiety. This language of the imagination is the consummation of a visionary impulse born of chronic despair and longed for transcendence from an almost impossibly deranged and precarious existence.’ But what does such a pronouncement really tell us? One could say the same of a good number of poète maudit cases, or those possessing a visionary faculty.

Let us first identify what exactly constitutes the visionary image. I shall take an excerpt from Coleridge’s famous poem ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ by way of example. By examining a section of the Coleridge poem it gives an idea of what one in fact means by the visionary image and how through the combination of a series of movements both real and dream-like it acts powerfully on the reader’s own imagination to produce the feeling of having shared in the poet’s image design and furthermore maintains the image for the reader as something fluid and without boundaries, a living vision which can be extended by the individual imagination, a baton passed on.

From the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Part III

The western wave was all a flame,
The day was well nigh done!
Almost upon the western wave
Rested the broad bright Sun;

When that strange shape drove suddenly
Betwixt us and the Sun.
And straight the Sun was fleck’d with bars
(heaven’s mother send us grace)

As if thro’ a dungeon grate he peer’d
With broad and burning face.
Alas (thought I, and my heart beat loud)
How fast she nere’s and nere’!

Are those her Sails that glance in the Sun
Like restless goassameres?
Are those her naked ribs, which fleck’d
The Sun that did behind them peer?

And are these two all, all the crew,
That woman and her fleshless Pheere?

Coleridge’s memorable image of the sun above the surface of the sea being transformed into a ‘broad and burning face’ peering as if through a ‘dungeon’s grate’ when the ‘naked ribs’ of the ghost ship pass between it and the viewer has all the hallmarks of the visionary about it. There is not only the poet’s transfiguration of the sun into a  being with a face, but the fact that this being is incarcerated, trapped behind the bars of a prison cell and is peering through towards the onlooker, perhaps in the hope of escape or sympathy, in rage either impotent or menacing, or none of these. Although the idea of the sun having a face and being an entity like the moon is hardly original, even by Coleridge’s time, it doesn’t seem to matter here. The face image retains impact because of the artful melding of ship and sun, a poetic double act, the way these two entities interact through movement. The ability of the poet to endow objects with a supernatural meaning, indeed with any meaning at all is what elevates the scene to visionary status. Coleridge confirms towards the end of the sequence that indeed this is the timber carcass of the ghost ship, ‘the naked ribs’, passing spectre-like before a sun just resting over the ocean’s surface. This motion of ship against sun enables a temporary juxtaposition of objects to form which gives rise to the original image. The poet ensures the reader knows how that image came into being but waits for six or seven lines before an explanation. This gives the image space to ripen in the individual imagination, to plant a root but not be entirely without mystery or enquiry. However, by the time the reader reaches the explanatory line about the ‘naked ribs’ the image has already anchored in the reader’s imagination and the mind raced through the options of how to perceive it. Once it has the comfort of the ribs so to speak, the reader’s imagination is secure and is ready to embellish the image, reinforce it, frame it.

Coleridge’s genius like Trakl’s, lies in the creation of images which are the product of a mind unable or unwilling to accept reality and therefore in order to exist must find alternative realities which for them are more valid. Such a path leads to a kind of momentary truth nourished by its brief exposure and ephemeral nature, captured subconsciously at the heart of the image making process. The poet is saying ‘I had the means to feel this. I sensed the sun become an incarcerated being at that moment the ship passed before it. I give you a truth which came from feeling whether it be coaxed out by opium, dream or madness. I invite you to join me and perhaps even go further than I, to extend the image.’

In the case of this example by Coleridge and in Trakl as we shall soon see, movement is the key, both of the ship itself and the surface of the sun. The gradual grafting of the ghost ship’s timber skeleton onto the contrasting so very much alive inferno behind it causes a kind of quivering derangement, the strange notion of that broad flaming face of the sun peering through the bars. This is what attracts the sympathetic reader and infects them. They see the masts and ribs of the ship with the sun reaching round them. They sense the gliding movement of the ship, the silhouette of the timbers passing over the sun like a feeble eclipse, the metamorphosis of a burning sun’s face suddenly confronted by ‘bars’. This is an unforeseen apparition, temporary, product of a procession of movements, seized before fading completely and transmogrified into the permanence of poetry.

II

Like Coleridge, Trakl employs the visionary image as the principle means to express himself, but unlike Coleridge and other romantics with a visionary capacity who interspersed their visions with a framing language to support their occasional images, a narrative, political anxieties, awed wonder/fear at natural surroundings or despair of mankind’s folly etc, there is no space in Trakl’s work for such conscious construction in the traditional way a poem evolves. For Trakl the imagery has become the entire poem, or the world of Trakl is one long uninterrupted visionary image, cut and pasted into individual poems. All Trakl’s existential concerns become an essential part of this new language and cannot be separated from it. Nowhere does Trakl break out from the image world and show himself, nowhere does he weaken the bond which he has with this powerful unconscious. This is but one important factor which contributes to the feeling of total sacrifice, almost a martyrdom to the visionary element and a sense of greatness resulting from the uncompromising nature of Trakl’s vision. Although we hear Trakl loud and clear in his torment and despair at the fallen state of mankind, the message is filtered through the imagery he has initiated to deal with its pressure on his psyche and so comes at us in pictorially created fashion, that is to say those concerns are sieved through a series of images onto our minds via the dream-like, hallucinatory scenes and settings of his poems rather than through mere telling. Although all great visionary poetry has something of this faculty, in Trakl’s case the process is I believe strengthened by the continual provision of a dream-like setting, the uncanny, eerily beautiful and often obscure story which unfolds in the Trakl poem and seduces or unsettles the reader very quickly and often from the first line. ‘Shepherds buried the sun in the bare forest’ ‘Oh, the dark angel which stepped from the tree…’ ‘With dead hero forms, moon you are filling’ ‘I sing you wild fissure in the night storm’. These do not appear to be the standard fare of opening lines. There is no lead in, no preparation. One is immediately plunged into the image landscape like a parachutist falling from the sky into the unknown. The rate of images like that of Coleridge’s ghost ship, is in the work of Trakl increased ten fold.

Certain images often appear to have no connection to those that follow or precede them, so to some people reading Trakl for the first time it may appear to be a random display, seemingly incoherent, colours thrown in at will, delirious gestures and schizoid ravings with no real meaning beyond their shock impact. But on closer reading one soon realises that there is a distinct pattern. This is usually primed in the setting of the poem which although in a dream state, will have recognisable features as well. For example the chant like opening lines of De Profundis. ‘There is a stubble field where a black rain falls, there is a tree which brown stands lonely here.’ immediately evokes a scene which anyone can tell is going to be a melancholy one. We recognise the dreary field and the empty huts wreathed by a hissing wind. Trakl has the reader primed. He has introduced a landscape which mirrors his own despair. After the landscape is set the poem plunges suddenly into the scene that culminates with shepherds finding the orphan child’s ‘sweet remains rotting in the thorn bush’. No sooner have we absorbed this powerful image than we are faced with an abrupt change of pace and a solemn pronouncement on alienation with ‘a shadow I am far from darkened villages’ followed by the morbid terror of ‘onto my brow cold metal steps, spiders seek my heart’ and ending with the arresting yet perplexing ‘In the hazel copse crystal angels have chimed again’. Although these different parts of the poem seem adrift from each other they produce a seductive almost mantra-like effect as they drop down into each other, bearing little relation and yet somehow sitting comfortably alongside each other. This peculiar but effective combining of hermetic image clusters to produce a poem’s definitive picture is repeated throughout Trakl’s work.

The repetition of colour and its ambiguities has been much discussed elsewhere resulting in something of a quagmire, but little thought appears to have been given to the question of movement in all its variations. In Trakl’s poetry there is a glut of walking, falling, stepping and sinking. Climbing, bending, leaping, stirring, gliding, floating and leaning follow close behind. This tapestry of movement is carefully positioned in the poems to create an effect which emphasises the dominant theme wishing to be expressed, habitually that of melancholy or decline, but it is done in such a way that the tonal qualities of the poem are profoundly enhanced. As indicated before, the visionary power of the image is increased by the state of flux suggested by actions such as walking, sinking or stepping as well as the drawn out nature of such an act as sinking for example. The image is stretched by the movement, lengthened, giving the individual’s imagination almost a slow dance of gestures and actions within an enclosure of silence as in a dream. This idea of a detached landscape of imagery existing within a reality which is unable to grasp it is embodied in a statement by the poet Rilke, a contemporary of Trakl who was also a sensitive admirer of his poetry. ‘I imagine that even one who stands close by must experience such spectacles and perceptions as though pressed, an exile, against a pane of glass: for Trakl’s life passes as if through the images of a mirror and fills its entire space, which cannot be entered, like the space of the mirror itself.’

The variations in movement suggest a change of pace. The image of sinking, falling and inclining slows events down, suggesting reflection, melancholy, extinction, whilst conversely the image of leaping, striding or dancing creates an atmosphere of freedom, spontaneity, or madness. In the poem ‘To The boy Elis’ there are several incidences of this movement mosaic. ‘Your body is a hyacinth into which a monk dips his waxen fingers’, ‘you walk with soft steps into the night which is heavy with purple grapes and move your arms more beautifully in the blue’. Then later, ‘our silence is a black cavern from which at times a gentle animal steps and slowly lowers heavy lids’. One notes that a substantial part of this poem is based on dream movements. In another instance Trakl uses a real movement in a poem such as the line ‘heavenly it is to lurch drunkenly through the dusking wood’ from ‘My Heart towards Evening’ but on the whole the images have the elusive ethereal dream quality I have described. As if that were not enough the poem has myriad subsidiary actions going on as well. ‘the blackbird calls’, ‘your lips drink’, ‘your brow bleeds’, ‘a thorn bush sounds’, ‘black dew drips’. The poem is seething with action and motion, with beginning and completion, with unresolved gesture. The narrator talking to Elis, describes his visionary universe. Everything flows on a current of individual movement and yet as in De Profundis, the subject of each stanza has little relation to the one before or after it, like those in ‘Birth’ which contains the unfathomable lines ‘A pale thing wakes in a musty room. Two moons. The eyes of the old stone woman are shining’. In Trakl’s poetry one action seems to lead languidly into another as if there could be no other way. In ‘To the Boy Elis’ for example, the monk has only just dipped his waxen fingers when the gentle animal steps from a black cavern. Separate and unaware of each other’s existence, they yet combine to create a story which only has meaning within the poem’s solitary and detached landscape. These otherworldly beings and beasts carrying the colour assigned to them who step gently from one place to another have holiness and purity about them, a sure purpose and inner certainty alien to mankind. Theirs is a world which as Rilke says we cannot enter but only gaze at as if trapped behind glass. It is pure, unsullied and easily extinguished.

Trakl is leading us somewhere he does not know himself. The image is a lure only, asking to be followed, nothing is definitive. The Trakl line gives us so much to interpret and absorb because in its visionary state it throws up a bewildering range of ambiguities and possibilities. We see the image not as a dead thing, a finite picture but perhaps more as a cinematic image lacking a definable boundary, forever replayed in our minds. The desperate search for a bearable reality through poetic remoulding of existence creates, in Trakl’s eyes, a need for purification of some kind from what he sees as the pestilence of mankind. The awareness that this transcendence may only be achieved through the extinguishing of the body becomes more insistent as time passes, resulting in the forceful visions of annihilation characteristic of the later poems.

‘Beautiful is man and emerging in darkness, when marvelling he moves his limbs and silently his eyes roll in crimson hollows’ By way of conclusion this excerpt from the poem Helian shows the highly effective mix of movement in the Trakl poem and the possibilities of interpretation for the reader. The image successfully marries normal anatomical movement with delirious fantasy, a scene given credence through movement, the core of the image sequence, which binds the elements together and justifies its survival. Just a handful of such images would have meant that Trakl did not suffer his arduous existence in vain but to have such a prodigious supply of them is nothing short of a miracle. Trakl is the supreme modern exponent of the visionary impulse. Through him we have arrived at a place in poetry where it seems impossible to go any further, at least in the one direction he steered in. He got further down that road than anyone else, before or since, but when he finally broke down no-one could reach him.

Note : Will Stone is the author of  To The Silenced : Selected poems of Georg Trakl Arc Publications (2005)  (S.H.)

Many poets live in  exile, severed from the cultural roots of their writing and needing to find new sources for their writing. In the case of poets from the former German Democratic Republic of communist East Germany these roots became peculiarly distorted and invalidated by the catastrophes of the 20^th century: WW1 followed by the great Depression; the subversion of all cultural life by the Nazi regime; WW11 and the firebombing that reduced many cities to stone-age conditions and which could not be mourned due to the felt complicity of the population at large; the Russian occupation followed by the totalitarian communist regime; finally the propulsion into late 20^th century consumer capitalism. In West Germany over a long period of the mid 20^th century there was a reckoning and continuing struggle to come to terms with the Nazi past and degrees of complicity in it which shaped radically West German society and its culture. But not in East Germany where Nazism was interpreted simply as a violent consequence of capitalism.

The collapse of the GDR regime and communism generally led to a widespread view that those forty-five years or so of history had been a history of failure and invalidity. The result was, for many people and poets especially, an immense hole in the fabric of their culture and cultural memory. Furthermore the devastation of the immediate post-war was met by a great silence in German literature, as the writer W.G. Sebald has explored in his essay: ‘ Between History and Natural History: on the literary description of total destruction’. This silence was partly due to the impossibility of comprehending what had happened and partly to the sense that they, the people, were complicit in their own downfall. Thus it was to take a long time before people could speak of such horrors as the firebombing of, for example, Dresden. What kind of terrain was this for the poet?

The poems of Günter Eich, Heinz Czechowski and Durs Grünbein, poets all born in East Germany and overlapping chronologically,  illustrate the very different ways poets may survive the assaults on the histories and purposes of their homelands and consequent sense of alienation and homelessness, barely alleviated by the subsequent freedoms of the West. Each developed a particular strategy to create a home for and in poetry. Günter Eich experienced the Third Reich, the army and being a prisoner of war; but he died before the liberation of the GDR. Heinz Czechowski was born in Dresden and aged ten experienced its destruction; he travelled in the West before and after the liberation ands died there. Durs Grünbein was also born in Dresden in 1962 and has subsequently travelled and lived in the West.

Durs Grünbein  1962 was born in Dresden and studied natural sciences thinking to become a vet; although he changed his mind, his studies sparked an enduring fascination with creatures generally. He’s the most recent and most celebrated of the three poets– highly lauded,  a real star in the German poetry scene for his youth, brilliance, knowledge and scope; but above all perhaps for his participation in the modern zeitgeist: streetwise, ironic, and witty style and take on the world; part of that zeitgeist is the sense of ‘ get-over-it, move-on’ and his poetic style exemplifies that attitude. Already celebrated, his liberation from DDR led to continual travel and poetic material. His ironic tone appears  at first to reveal little of the emotional  homelessness of the other two. The rubble and ruin of the Germany the other two experienced nevertheless became a theme, a  starting point for seeing rubble and ruin across the world in the distant past and everywhere in the present. His response to the triumphal shine of the West was largely sceptical as the first two poems show. Nevertheless he spent 10 years composing a collection  of 49 traditionally formed 10-line poems dedicated to the once incredibly beautiful city of Dresden and of that city’s destruction. However the first two poems here – though ironic, witty cool etc. nevertheless reveal a similar disorientation, distance and a sense of death and the ephemeral as those of Czechowski:

Arcadia for Everyone

It’s not just the city centre, deserted Sunday morning,
the letters marked unknown at this address.
In the sea-shell sound on the phone the quiet Who’s there?
not the thousands of cars abandoned at the roadside
nor the stolen poetry on hoardings no one reads,
scrawlings on busts of schoolbook worthies in the parks —
it’s all of this and more you gladly shut your eyes to
feeding just one suspicion: swollen up to a metropolis
so this is how place looks where they buried the god like a dog.
Arcadia, graveyard of the heavenly, like any city
where death enters and leaves, life’s on privatised grounds.
So much for the idyllic, the happy lands, the rustic
Hideaways. Whatever shepherds sang to, travellers ever dreamed of.
This is the showcase: City and gorod, metropolis or ville.
It’s here you pass, your own spirit, beneath stoical trees
sleepless glass person, reflected in too-much-of-everything.
Glances set the beat, reflections urbane, no eclogues
In which Daphne flirts, Milon and Lakon watch out for each other.
Your vertebrae vibrate with the arches of the bridge,
you sense your skeleton, your face gets lost,
dazzled by the metallic glare of puddles; and yet
there’s nowhere else so homely. It was first here that,
in an accustomed exile, where nights you’d crawl
into your mouse-hole, were crumbs of happiness.
Where else, but in heavy traffic aimless,
Was one ever so alive, was one ever so removed
From lazy posthumous peace.

ARKADIEN :

Nicht nur das Zentrum, menschenleer am Sonntagvormittag,
Die briefe, gestempelt mit dem Vermerk Empfänger unbekannt.
Das Meeresrauschen am Telephon, in die Stille das‚ Bitte?’
Die tausenden Autos, von den Besitzern verlassen am Strassenrand,
Auch die Reklametafeln mit den Dichterplagiaten, die keiner liest,
In den Parks, grell beschmiert, die Monumente der Schulbuchidole,
Diesa alles und mances, wovor man die Augen gern schliesst,
Nährt den einen Verdacht. So also sieht, aufgeschwollen zur metropole,
Der ort aus, an dem man den Gott einst begrub wie einen Hund.
Arkadien, Friedhof der Himmlischen,ihm gleicht jede Stadt,
Wo der Tod ein-und ausgeht, das Leben auf privatisiertem Grund.
Von wegen Idylle, Landschaft  der Seligen, bukolisches Reservat.
Was immer Hirten besangen, wovon die Reisenden träumten –
Dies ist der Schauplatz.  City und gorod, metropolis oder ville.
Hier geht man, sein eigener Geist, unter stoischen Bäumen,
Ein gläserner Mensch, schlaflos, sich spiegelnd im Vielzuviel.
Den Takt geben Blicke, urbane Reflexe, nicht die Eklogen,
In denen Daphnis flirtete, Milon un Lakon einander beschützten.
Man spürt sein Skelett, Vertebrat im Vibrato der Brückenbogen,
Verliert das Gesicht, geblender vom metallischen Glanz der Pfützen,
Und ist doch nirgends so heimisch. Erst hier, im gewohnten Exil,
Wo man nachts in sein Mauseloch kroch, gab es Krümel bom Glück.
Wann sonst, wenn nicht im dichten Verkehr, untewegs ohne Ziel,
War man je so vital, so dem faulen, posthumen Frieden entrückt?

Durs Grünbein

Many poets live in  exile, severed from the cultural roots of their writing and needing to find new sources for their writing. In the case of poets from the former German Democratic Republic of communist East Germany these roots became peculiarly distorted and invalidated by the catastrophes of the 20^th century: WW1 followed by the great Depression; the subversion of all cultural life by the Nazi regime; WW11 and the firebombing that reduced many cities to stone-age conditions and which could not be mourned due to the felt complicity of the population at large; the Russian occupation followed by the totalitarian communist regime; finally the propulsion into late 20^th century consumer capitalism. In West Germany over a long period of the mid 20^th century there was a reckoning and continuing struggle to come to terms with the Nazi past and degrees of complicity in it which shaped radically West German society and its culture. But not in East Germany where Nazism was interpreted simply as a violent consequence of capitalism.

The collapse of the GDR regime and communism generally led to a widespread view that those forty-five years or so of history had been a history of failure and invalidity. The result was, for many people and poets especially, an immense hole in the fabric of their culture and cultural memory. Furthermore the devastation of the immediate post-war was met by a great silence in German literature, as the writer W.G. Sebald has explored in his essay: ‘ Between History and Natural History: on the literary description of total destruction’. This silence was partly due to the impossibility of comprehending what had happened and partly to the sense that they, the people, were complicit in their own downfall. Thus it was to take a long time before people could speak of such horrors as the firebombing of, for example, Dresden. What kind of terrain was this for the poet?

The poems of Günter Eich, Heinz Czechowski and Durs Grünbein, poets all born in East Germany and overlapping chronologically,  illustrate the very different ways poets may survive the assaults on the histories and purposes of their homelands and consequent sense of alienation and homelessness, barely alleviated by the subsequent freedoms of the West. Each developed a particular strategy to create a home for and in poetry. Günter Eich experienced the Third Reich, the army and being a prisoner of war; but he died before the liberation of the GDR. Heinz Czechowski was born in Dresden and aged ten experienced its destruction; he travelled in the West before and after the liberation ands died there. Durs Grünbein was also born in Dresden in 1962 and has subsequently travelled and lived in the West.

The following poems are chosen to illustrate these different strategies.

Heinz Czechowski  1935 -2009

Born in Dresden he survived, aged 10, the firebombing and destruction of the city. He published poetry in the GDR was recognised and prized in both East and West Germany and was able to travel on literary visits before the regime collapsed. However of all three poets he expresses most directly the spiritual and psychological homelessness that emerged from the apocalyptic changes of his lifetime, although he could not experience directly the ‘complicity’ that Gunter Eich will have experienced. His poetry has been described as a ‘journey home to strangeness.’ His poetic strategy was rooted in nostalgia, a mourning for another world – the recall of early childhood and childhood places infused with that melancholy which itself is often envisaged as a wasteland. His personality was depressive anyway and last year he died in an institution sick and cut off. He more than the other two expresses a profound sense of disorientation and pessimism and there’s little of the harsh irony informing the triumphal passage to freedom which featured so much post-war writing–his elegiac tone feels a more honest response to history.

I AM WHERE I AM

I am where I am,
and there’s nothing
to indicate that I
could ever be anywhere else
at any rate, in foreseeable time.
Even yesterday I saw
The little villages between Kamenz and Dresden.
Marked by the East, not spared
I went back, there
Where nowadays I am at home.
I saw the beloved in front of her house,
The distant past
Was close again
In the lowlands around Leipzig
I am, at any rate, where I am
Unredeemed and without prospect.

In me
There lives, again lives what died
Yet still ever, and ever again
Reaches me.

ICH BIN, WO ICH BIN, UND NICHTS

Deutet darauf hin, dass ich
Je woanders sein könnte, in
Absehbarer Zeit jedenfalls. Gestern noch
Sah ich die kleinen
Dörfer  zwischen Kamenz und Dresden.
Östlich geprägt und nicht verschont
Fuhr ich zurück, dort hin,
Wo ich jetzt zu Haus bin. Die Liebste
Sah ich vor ihrem Haus,
Die ferne Vergangenheit
War wieder nah
Im Flachland bei Leipzig: Ich jedenfalls
Bin, wo ich bin, unerlöst
Und ohne Aussicht. In mir
Lebt und lebt,was gestorben ist,und mich doch
Immer and immer wieder

In the poem published in 1988 he refers to the great post-war silence ‘what should have been said, was not said’ ; and beyond history he looks around and sees that power and force only change their names as he returns again and again to remembered familiar scenes:

FORTY YEARS AGO

Films underexposed: the pictures move on at a gentle pace,
Always the same landscape: the city
Surrounded by hills where barracks
Emerge and re-emerge.
What’s left is what I see today:
Tinder, in it the treads of tyres
On which we road towards the Elbe
Fish-tackle in our pockets.

The new age couldn’t arise
With all that concrete by the woods.
Behind the blacked-out window
Of the unfamiliar house
I played, forty years ago, with tin soldiers
Marching in step with the generations,
That moved back into the  barracks,
I’ve lost my innocence, what’s remained is force,
Only its names have changed.

I see the faces, overexposed in the floodlights
Of the conference. What, forty years ago
Should have been said
Has not been said, so
I’m returning to my childhood
Unenlightened by history
That draws back into itself
The monstrous
Whose beginning took place
Well before I was a child.

Vor Vierzig Jahren

Unterbelichtete Filme: im Zuckeltrab
Bewegen sich Bilder, immer
Die gleiche Landschaft: die Stadt,
Umgeben von Hügeln, auf denen
Kaserned stehn und
Neue entstehen. Was
Davon übrigblieb, sehe ich heute:
Zunder, darin
Die Profile der Reifen,
Auf denen wir elbwärts fuhren,
AngelschnureIn unseren Taschen

Die neue ZeitKonnte nicht aufkommen
Gegen all den Beton neben den Wäldern.
Hinter den erblindeten Fenstern
Des ausgewohnten Hauses
Spielt ich vor vierzig Jahren
Mit Zinnsoldaten. Im Marschtritt
Der Generationen,
Die einrückten in die Kasernen,
Habe ich meine Unschuld verloren, geblieben
Ist die Gewalt
Nur ihre Namen haben gewechselt.

Ich sehe die Gesichter,
Überbelichtet vom Scheinwerferlicht
Der Kongresse: Was vor Vierzig Jahren
Hatte gesagt werden müssen,
Ist nicht gesagt worden, so
Kehre ich wieder
In meine Kindheit zurück, unbelehrt
Von der Geschichte
Die in sich zurücknimmt
Das Ungeheure, das
Seinen Anfang nahm,
Schon lange bevor ich ein Kind war.

Many poets live in  exile, severed from the cultural roots of their writing and needing to find new sources for their writing. In the case of poets from the former German Democratic Republic of communist East Germany these roots became peculiarly distorted and invalidated by the catastrophes of the 20^th century: WW1 followed by the great Depression; the subversion of all cultural life by the Nazi regime; WW11 and the firebombing that reduced many cities to stone-age conditions and which could not be mourned due to the felt complicity of the population at large; the Russian occupation followed by the totalitarian communist regime; finally the propulsion into late 20^th century consumer capitalism. In West Germany over a long period of the mid 20^th century there was a reckoning and continuing struggle to come to terms with the Nazi past and degrees of complicity in it which shaped radically West German society and its culture. But not in East Germany where Nazism was interpreted simply as a violent consequence of capitalism.

The collapse of the GDR regime and communism generally led to a widespread view that those forty-five years or so of history had been a history of failure and invalidity. The result was, for many people and poets especially, an immense hole in the fabric of their culture and cultural memory. Furthermore the devastation of the immediate post-war was met by a great silence in German literature, as the writer W.G. Sebald has explored in his essay: ‘ Between History and Natural History: on the literary description of total destruction’. This silence was partly due to the impossibility of comprehending what had happened and partly to the sense that they, the people, were complicit in their own downfall. Thus it was to take a long time before people could speak of such horrors as the firebombing of, for example, Dresden. What kind of terrain was this for the poet?

The poems of Günter Eich, Heinz Czechowski and Durs Grünbein, poets all born in East Germany and overlapping chronologically,  illustrate the very different ways poets may survive the assaults on the histories and purposes of their homelands and consequent sense of alienation and homelessness, barely alleviated by the subsequent freedoms of the West. Each developed a particular strategy to create a home for and in poetry. Günter Eich experienced the Third Reich, the army and being a prisoner of war; but he died before the liberation of the GDR. Heinz Czechowski was born in Dresden and aged ten experienced its destruction; he travelled in the West before and after the liberation ands died there. Durs Grünbein was also born in Dresden in 1962 and has subsequently travelled and lived in the West.

The following poems are chosen to illustrate these different strategies.

Günter Eich 1907 – 1972

Was born in Lebus on the Oder on the far eastern frontiers of Germany. He studied economics and Chinese but became a full-time writer. He wrote many radio plays, which in Germany have a more important literary status than in England; but during the Nazi and wartime period he wrote virtually no poetry. He started writing poetry again as a prisoner of war. His writing was fully acknowledged and prized. He belonged to a pre-war literary movement that coined the phrase ‘inner emigration’ –inward being the only place one could go in a terror regime – but actually as a region to escape from any inhospitable milieu. One component of this was the essential timelessness of poetry and its a-political nature. Günter Eich immersed himself in the natural world which he found full of message and meaning. This was hardly popular at a time when, in the immediate post-war period with the revelations of the holocaust, the general sentiment was ‘how can one write about trees after Auschwitz’. More than half a century later perhaps, our recognition of a nature devastated and the consequences of that devastation in view, we now appreciate that trees might be the most healing things a poet could write about.

A poem written while he was still prisoner-of-war, all around rubble and desolation, calls up long-gone epochs of naive nature poetry; it’s called ‘Sun In October Mist’

SUN IN OCTOBER MIST

Sun in October mist
And the hedgerows flaring red
I look on with a desire
Whose source lies far off

When, beauty at the point of tears
Autumn was my happiness,
Those feelings, those colours
Reach me now as new.

The moment and permanence vanish
Under the startled eyelid
There where the reflection of the forest
Encloses me in its light.

SONNE IM OKTOBERNEBEL

Sonne im Oktobernebel
Und die Hecke rot entflammt
Seh ich an mit dem Begehren,
das aus alten Jahren stammt,

als die schönheit tränennahe
und der Herbst mir Wollust war,
solches Fühlen, solche Farben
reicht er mir erneuert dar.

Augenblick und Dauer schwinden
Unter dem erschrocknen Lid,
da der Widerschein der Wälderin sein Licht mich einbezieht.

By 1955 Eich had already published a collection ‚ Messages of the Rain’ in which his absorption in the natural world is established; in spite of the general anti-nature, anti-lyrical intellectual climate of that time he could write the following:

END OF SUMMER

Who would wish to live without the comfort of the trees?

How right they should take part in dying.
The peaches have been picked, the plums are darkening
While beneath the arches of the bridge time roars.

It is to the bird migrations I entrust my despair
Calmly they measure out a share in eternity.
Their passage seen through foliage is a dark force
The movement of wings tinges the fruit.

What’s needed is patience.
Soon the bird’s script will be deciphered.
Under the tongue is a coin to be tasted.

ENDE EINES SOMMERS

Wer möchte leben ohne den Trost der Bäume!

Wie gut, dass sie am Sterben teilhaben!
Die pfirsiche sind geerntet, di Pflaumen färben sich,
während unter dem Bruckenbogen die Zeit rauscht.

Dem Vogelzug vertraue ich meine Verzweiflung an.
Er misst seinen Teil von Ewigkeit gelassen ab.
Seine Strecken
Werden sichtbar im Blattwek als dunkler Zwang,
die Bewegung der Flügel färbt die Früchte.

Es heisst Geduld haben.
Bals wird die Vogelschrift entsiegelt,
unter der Zunge ist der Pfennig zu schmecken.

From the same collection is his poem ‘Pigeons’  in which he already appears to foresee the Gaia hypothesis that the earth and its mysteries can survive without us and the entire realm of nature is not under our control, many years before these ideas were current:

PIGEONS

The flight of pigeons across the fields, —
a beat of the wing, swifter than the beauty
that cannot keep up,but remains
in my heart as disquiet.

As if the laughter of pigeons could be caught
in front of the dovecotes, green-painted dwarf dwellings,
and I begin to wonder
if flight matters to them,
what rank they give to the earthward glance,
what place to the pecking of grain,to the spotting of hawks.

I tell myself I should fear pigeons:
you are not the master when you scatter grain,
when you fasten a message to plumage,
when you breed new strains, new colours,
new crests, new tufts about the foot.
Put no trust in your power,
So you’ll not be amazedto learn how little you count,

that beyond your kind are hidden kingdoms,
soundless languages that will not be discovered,
dominions powerless and unassailable,
decisions made in the flight of pigeons.

TAUBEN

Taubenflug über die Äcker hin, —
Ein Flügelschlag, der schneller ist als die Schönheit.
Sie holt ihn nicht ein, sondern bleibt mir
Als Unbehagen zurück im Herzen.

Als wäre auch taubengelächter vernhembar
Vor den Schlägen, den grün gestrichenen Zwerghäusern,
ob der Flug ihnen wichtig ist,welchen Rang die Blicke zum Erdboden haben
und wie sie das Aufpicken des korns einordnenund das Erkennen des Habichts.

Ich rate mir selbst, mich vor den Tauben zu fürchten.
Du bist nicht ihr Herr, sage ich, wenn du Futter streust,
wenn du Nachrichten an ihre Federn heftest,
wenn du Zierformen züchtest, neue Farben,
neue Schöpfe, Gefieder am Fuss.
Vertrau deiner Macht nicht,
so wirst du auch nichtverwundert sein,
wenn du erfährst, dass du unwichtig bist,

dass neben deinesgleichen heimliche Königsreiche bestehen,
Sprachen ohne Laut, die nicht erforscht werden,
Herrschaften ohne Macht und unangreifbar,
dass die Entscheidungen geschehen im Taubenflug.

Thus for Günter Eich nature could be a refuge for the ‘inner emigration’.

[Note: This piece about the German poet Hans Enzensberger has been sent in by Anne Boileau who presented him at the Poetry Café on May 26th -- see  Events and Meetings. S.H.]

Hans Magnus Enzensberger was born in 1929 in Kaufbeuren, Bavaria and grew up in Nurnberg. This was an exciting time for a boy – destruction, bombings, death, bulletins, and after the war, shortages, very little government, near anarchy. He realized at a young age that his country had not only been defeated but was in deep disgrace, a pariah throughout the world. He vowed to learn languages and leave Germany behind. While still at school he made friends with American servicemen based at the Nurnberg airbase and earned pocket money interpreting and translating for them, and trading on the black market. He observed the collective amnesia about Germany’s recent past, the fact that cities were in ruins but no one commented on it: “There was no self reflection for a long time in the media in postwar Germany.”

He studied foreign languages, linguistics and Philosophy at various universities, including the Sorbonne and after gaining a doctorate worked as a radio producer. He travelled widely in Scandinavia, the US, Mexico and South America; from 1968-69 he lived in Cuba and for several years on a small island in Norway.

He is an accomplished linguist. He has edited an influential periodical called Kursbuch, and is eminent as a critic, translator and contributor to all the media. He has re-invented the art of essay writing; his writings cover in an often rather quirky style all sorts of topics, politics, the environment, philosophy. He also writes under a pseudonym. (Ref: Michael Hamburger, one of his translators.)

But it is his poetry which I chiefly want to talk to you about.

He says the poet is an omnivore, not a specialist. He thinks a poem should be accessible and easy to understand on one level, while at the same time have layers of other meaning which can be peeled away like onion skins. He does not claim to be prescient, but is an observer and critic. Rather than saying straight out that something is bad, he paints an image or a scene, often with humour, to say what he means in a more original and memorable way.

He hates tyranny and dictators. “If Hitler had survived I would not have been tolerated – I’d have been done away with. I’ve been lucky, I have said what I like, not been sent into exile or put in prison. Poetry is risky. If you take on the risk it’s wrong to complain.”

He loves Europe – there is nowhere better in the world – but is appalled at the growing level of bureaucracy- Brussels is a sort of Politburo, it meets behind closed doors.

George Steiner writes: “HME is a poet of formidable intelligence and range, like Brecht before him he combines an intense political imagination with lyric gusto. The reader discovers in him both a satirist and a friend.”

An example of his work :

blindlings

siegreich sein
wird die sache der sehenden
die einäugigen
haben sich in die hand genommen
die macht ergriffen
und den blinden zum könig gemacht

an der abgeriegelten grenze stehen
blindekuhspielende polizisten
zuweilen erhaschen sie einen augenarzt
nach dem gefahndet wird
wegen staatsgefährdender umtriebe

sämtliche leitende herren tragen
ein schwarzes pflästerchen
über dem rechten aug
auf den fundämtern schimmeln
abgeliefert von blindenhunden
herrenlose lupen und brillen

strebsame junge astronomen
lassen sich glasaugen einsetzen
weitblickende eltern
unterrichten ihre kinder beizeiten
in der fortschrittlichen kunst des schielens

der feind schwärzt borwasser ein
für die bindehaut seiner agenten
anständige bürger aber trauen
mit rücksicht auf die verhältnisse
ihren augen nicht
streuen sich pfeffer und salz ins gesicht
betasten weinend die sehenswürdigkeitenund erlernen die blindenschrift

der könig soll kürzlich erklärt haben
er blicke voll zuversicht in die zukunft

from   Landesprache   Suhrkamp 1962

blindly

victory will go
to the sighted ones
those with one eye
have joined hands
seized power
and made the blind man king

at the heavily armed  border policemen are playing blind-man’s-buff
while on the hunt for an eye doctor
who is wanted
for activities dangerous to the state

all the prominent gentlemen wear
a small black patch
over their right eye
in lost property offices
abandoned lenses and spectacles
brought in by guide dogs gather dust

assiduous young astronomers
are getting glass eyes fitted
while far-seeing parents
instruct their children
in the progressive art of squinting

the enemy is smuggling in eyewash
for the conjunctiva of his agents
but decent citizens
considering the circumstances
do not trust their eyes
throw pepper and salt into their own faces
weep while running their hands
over works of art
and are studying Braille

they say the king has just declared
that he looks to the future  with
confidence.

Translation: Anne Boileau

Timothy Adès read us translations of various poems by Bertolt Brecht last Wednesday (24 March) at the Poetry Cafe (see report in the Events and Meetings section). He has since written to tell me of his surprise when, visiting this site, he came across a translation of a  Brecht poem he is currently working on (but didn’t actually read at the meeting) . As it happens, I selected the very same Brecht poem from Roger Hunt Carroll’s Variations and you will find it on the previous post.
There is, I think, room for very different renderings of the same poem and readers might like to contrast Roger Hunt Carroll’s ‘freer’ version with Timothy Adès’ much closer translation. The original German will be given afterwards.

The Drowned Girl

When she was drowned she floated on and on
Down the streams and brooks and into the great big river
The opal light of heaven most splendidly shone
As if impelled to do the body a favour.

Grappled and held by the water-weeds and the slimes,
Slowly and out of proportion her weight increased.
Fishes swam coolly along beside her limbs.
Last haul! as a ferry for green-stuff and water-beast.

In the evenings the sky was as dark as smoke
With the stars by night it kept the light in play
But the brightness came on early when morning broke
So she still had the start and the finish of the day.

As her pallid corpse lay foul in the water there
By God himself she was little by little forgotten:
First her face, then her hands, then finally her hair.
She was just more meat in the water, decayed and rotten.

Vom Ertrunkenen Mädchen

Als sie ertrunken war und hinunterschwamm
Von den Bächen in die grösseren Flüsse
Schien der Opal des Himmels sehr wundersam
Als ob er die Leiche begütigen müsse.

Tang und Algen hielten sich an ihr ein
So dass sie langsam viel schwerer ward.
Kühl die Fische schwammen an ihrem Bein
Pflanzen und Tiere beschwerten noch ihre letzte Fahrt.

Und der Himmel ward abends dunkel wie Rauch
Und hielt nachts mit den Sternen das Licht in Schwebe.
Aber früh ward er hell, dass es auch
Noch für sie Morgen und Abend gebe.

Als ihr bleicher Leib im Wasser verfaulet war
Geschah es (sehr langsam), dass Gott sie allmählich vergass
Erst ihr Gesicht, dann die Hände und ganz zuletzt erst ihr Haar.
Dann ward sie Aas in Flüssen mit vielem Aas.

Bertolt Brecht

Again, one might like to contrast Brecht’s Thirties’ treatment with a poem on the same theme by Thomas Hood written a hundred or so years earlier, The Bridge of Sighs. It can be found in full in Quiller-Couch’s Oxford Book of English Verse.
As one might expect since we are at the dawn of the Victorian era, Hood assumes that the drowned girl was not only a suicide but, if not necessarily a prostitute, almost certainly a ‘fallen woman’. For all that, I am not sure that I don’t prefer Hood’s  sentimental  treatment to Brecht’s cynical ‘socialist’ one ![Timothy Adès comments : "If this poem is cynical, it is so deeply cynical that it is effectively sentimental. Nor do I find it socialist : Brecht is not the private property of the hard left -- he can speak to us all".]
The Bridge of Sighs

One more unfortunate
Weary of breath,
Rashly importunate,
Gone to her death!

Take her up tenderly,
Lift her with care;
Fashion’d so slenderly,
Young and so fair !

(…)

Touch her not scornfully;
Think of her mournfully,
Gently and humanly;
Not of the stain of her,
All that remains of her
Now is pure womanly.
Make no deep scrutiny
Into her mutiny
Rash and undutiful;
Past all dishonour,
Death has left on her
Only the beautiful.

Who was her father?
Who was her mother?
Had she a sister?
Had she a brother?
Or was there a dearer one
Still, and a nearer one
Yet, than all other?

Alas! for the rarity
Of Christian charity
Under the sun!
O! was it pitiful !
Near a whole city full,
Home she had none.

(…)

Perishing gloomily,
Spurr’d by contumely,
Cold inhumanity,
Burning insanity,
Into her rest. –
Cross her hands humbly,
As if praying dumbly,
Over her breast!

Thomas Hood