For the last month,  I’ve been teaching classes in contemporary American and Romanian poetry in the American Studies program of the University of Bucharest, and that time has been well spent indeed, providing me access to new voices and perspectives on poetry and its place in both modern American and Romanian cultures.  We’ve had a number of lively class discussions, and I was especially interested in my students’ reactions to the news that Herta Müller had won the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2009. representing the first time (and long overdue at that) a Romanian writer had won the award.  Not so fast, though.  Müller writes (mostly) in German, the students reminded me, and she’d left Romania for Germany in 1987.  But hadn’t she been forced to leave, I countered, emigrating only suffering censorship and worse under Romanian communism (Müller recounts some of that vividly here)? Besides, while she writes in German, doesn’t that speak mostly to her having grown up in a German speaking town in Romania, and at a time when the country’s German minority lived under considerable duress?  In fact, doesn’t writing about those ethnic tensions, and almost exclusively about life in communist Romania, mark her clearly as a Romanian writer and a vital one?

The discussion led beyond Müller to the idea of writers and their national identity and whether these kinds of designations–”German writer” or “Romanian writer–” carried any real weight.  Many of the students concluded that Müller’s value resided in the bleak realities of communist reality that she portrayed in her novels and stories not in her nationality, and on a certain level this seems reasonable.  Something about it gives me pause, though.  Are there nothing more than bragging rights at stake in labeling Walt Whitman or Emily Dickinson an American writer?  Are these terms only relevant when dealing with overtly political writers, like Victor Jara or Amiri Barka, and meaningless when dealing with the likes of Wordsworth or F. Scott Fitzgerald?  Is Herta Müller a German writer or a Romanian writer (or can she be both)?  Does it matter at all?  I have to think it does matter, though, as of now, I’m at a loss when it comes to explaining why.

by Martin Woodside

Martin Woodside

César Vallejo, one of the greatest South American poets of the 20^th century, wrote about politics as well as spirituality and sexuality, and though he wrote just three books in his lifetime, he was a radical thinker, ahead of his time. He wrote about subjects such as love and death with intelligence and wit.  He made his own death seem somehow sensuous. “The Eternal Nuptial Bed” is a poem full of eroticism and surrealism, which becomes both absurd and calamitous.

The Eternal Nuptial Bed

Only when it ceases to be, is Love strong!
And the tomb will be a huge eyeball,
in whose depths the anguish of love
survives and weeps, as in a chalice
sweet eternity and black dawn.

And lips curl up for the kiss,
as when something full overflow and dies;
and, in convulsed conjunction,
each mouth renounces for the other
a life of moribund life.

And when I think this way, sweet is the tomb
where everybody finally interpenetrates
in a single roar;
sweet is the shadow, where everybody unites
in a universal assignation of love.

This poem mocks marriage to the point of saying that the only time love exists is in death. That’s morbid.  The poem is scathing too. A tomb as an eyeball in whose depths love survives is quite a commentary on matrimony.  The last stanza is cruel but funny.  Everybody interpenetrates in a single roar.  I can hear it now. Everybody unites in a universal assignation of love.  What kind of love would this be?  I think of lions, of masturbation, of not being in love with your partner, of narcissism—this poem gives the reader much to think about.  It’s a clever take on love, lust, and joining as one.   This next poem highlights Vallejo’s ability to write  about grim subjects in an alluring way.

Black Stone On A White Stone

I will die in Paris in a downpour
a day which I can already remember.
I will die in Paris—and I don’t budge—
Maybe a Thursday, like today, in autumn.

Thursday it will be, because today, Thursday,
as I prose these lines, I have forced on
my humeri and, never like today, have I turned,
with all my journey, to see myself alone.

César Vallejo has died, they beat him,
all of them, without him doing anything to them;
they gave it to him hard with a stick and hard

Likewise with a rope; witnesses are
the Thursdays and the humerus bones,
the loneliness, the rain, the roads…

This poem reminds me in ways of “A Song At The End Of The World” by Czeslaw Milosz because while it too, is a death song, it’s clearly hopeful and alive.  Vallejo is chronicling his own  death in this poem, yet, I want to dance in the rain.  It’s a poem about desperation and loneliness.  Elegies should be beautiful, celebratory even.  This piece goes beyond that though.  Vallejo succeeds in writing an elegy about himself that while obviously serious, is also seductive, almost like a lover, and quite appealing and musical.  This is what I want when I die, and I didn’t know it until Vallejo told me so. As I peruse these lines I have forced on my humeri and, never like today, have I turned, with all my journey, to see myself alone. He writes his elegy as he sits alone, forcing himself to put on his body, as we put on clothes.  A creepy yet erotic moment. Likewise with a rope; witnesses arethe Thursdays and the humerus bones,  the loneliness, the rain, the roads…The last stanza is powerful:

Witnesses are the Thursdays.
His humerus bones and the loneliness, the rain, the roads…

Such charged language, it hardly makes me think of death rather, of truly living.  As William Faulkner said,“Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.” The last line, “the loneliness, the rain, the roads…” makes me want to do a pirouette with my umbrella in the rain. It’s lovely, spinning round so musically and physically. Vallejo has made death become a friend rather than a black cloak of fear.

For more, see: Vallejo, César, Eshleman, Clayton. The Complete Poetry César Vallejo. University Of California Press: Berkley, 2007

Erika Lutzner

by Jill Frischhertz

Requiem (the first two sections)

Not under foreign skies
Nor under foreign wings protected -
I shared all this with my own people
There, where misfortune had abandoned us.
[1961]

Instead of a Preface

During the frightening years of the Yezhov terror, I
spent seventeen months waiting in prison queues in
Leningrad. One day, somehow, someone ‘picked me out’.
On that occasion there was a woman standing behind me,
her lips blue with cold, who, of course, had never in
her life heard my name. Jolted out of the torpor
characteristic of all of us, she said into my ear
(everyone whispered there) – ‘Could one ever describe
this?’ And I answered – ‘I can.’ It was then that
something like a smile slid across what had previously
been just a face.
[The 1st of April in the year 1957. Leningrad]

***

Anna Akhmatova’s Requiem speaks to the victims of Stalin’s Terror and her own agony as a mother waiting for the release of her son from prison.  She also speaks to me.  I cannot help but focus on the final words of the poem’s first stanza; “Where misfortune had abandoned us.”  In this line, there is a sense of darkness, a separation from grace; but Akhamotova, like any poet, does not find solace in silence; she finds it in words.  In “Instead of a Preface,” Akhamotova describes the push that led to this poem: the scene of her calling, a calling to capture the Russian misfortune, a calling that led to the creation of this poem; “‘Could one ever describe this?’ And I answered – ‘I can.’”  In my mind, Akhamtova’s response to tragedy represents the poet’s response to tragedy.

This understanding adds clarity to my desire to put on paper a lesser tragedy, but one that still sits heavy on the southeast, a place where water replaced hope.  I remember front porches with swings and rocking chairs filled with people in search of a breeze.  I remember the hottest days, when we would stand in shade, anticipating the chilled syrup of a snowball.  I remember New Orleans when her people celebrated a storm the way they do a baptism, a birthday, or a Friday afternoon— with music and beer.

***

I was not among them, the people of New Orleans, when lake water commandeered houses, floorboard by floorboard, or when families climbed from attics onto roofs, or when  hospitals ran out of hope, clean sheets, and working generators.  I did not witness the city fill with water; I was not among them.  I was in the Astrodome, waiting.  In preparation, I helped others place cots in measured rows, rope off a play area for children, stock concession stands with Doritos and water, check bathrooms for toilet paper, sanitizer.  We thought we were prepared for the recent residents of the Superdome.

The first buses arrive, but they are not occupied with any of the expected 25,000.  The three drivers are no older than sixteen, and their passengers are all children, some babies.  Still, they managed the 350 miles.  One boy explains, “The older ones carried the little ones above water to abandoned buses on an empty lot.”  They siphoned gas from forsaken cars and followed the radio’s evacuation route to Houston.  He tells me, “I stopped waiting for my ma after two days. We had to leave cuz the younger ones were scared of all the water.”

Outside a line of buses unloads the desperate: those who suffer from feeding tubes, oxygen tanks, dialysis, and the effects of days without treatment.  A few come with medical histories, prescriptions, and emergency numbers. We are ill prepared; there is a three hour wait to see the doctors.  Have you ever taken a crippled man’s wheelchair? We have to all day long because wasted frames cannot walk down a ramp or lower themselves into a cot.  Each time I return to the drop-off area, there are more, leaning against trees, walls, propped on benches. Now, I understand the meaning of war a little better. I do not distribute the carton of water because there is a woman half breathing who was sitting, now slouching.  I shake her and wake her with a sip of water.  She is 76, the age of my grandmother; and she is lost.  She asks me, “Have you seen my daughter?”  Do you tell her the truth or comfort her? “I am sure she is close. Let’s move you inside where it is cooler.”

Trip after trip after trip, and finally I stop because an elderly man has my elbow, begging me to take him to the bathroom.  He doesn’t have the muscle to manage the stairs to the first level. I have no wheelchair.  I search and I plead, but, despite my success, I am late, too late: maybe by seconds, maybe 3 minutes. I do not notice the puddle or the smell of soiled clothes only the face, no longer urgent.  A young mother stops me.  All she wants is her newborn baby who was evacuated without her. Remember, no one was prepared even though we all knew Katrina was coming.

by Susan Wheatley

This summer, I met with Ellen Hinsey in Paris to discuss her new book, Update on the Descent, just published with The University of Notre Dame Press and Bloodaxe Books (2009). Ellen Hinsey has taught writing and literature at Skidmore College’s Paris program and the French graduate school, the Ecole Polytechnique. Her other books include The White Fire of Time (Wesleyan University Press, 2002/Bloodaxe Books, 2003) and Cities of Memory, which was awarded the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, as well as several books in translation. In 2001 she was a Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin; she has also been the recipient of a number of awards and honors, including a Lannan Foundation Award.

Q. Over the last twenty years you have witnessed a number of significant European events firsthand. What impact have these events had on your work?

A. Since 1987, I have lived and traveled extensively in Europe, based mostly in Paris. My first book of poetry came out of my experiences following the events of 1989 in Eastern Europe. I was in Berlin on the weekend of November 9, 1989 when the wall came down and in Prague during the Velvet Revolution a few weeks before Havel’s election. In the years following this, it was with great sorrow that we witnessed the Yugoslav wars, some of the most painful conflicts in recent European history. This too had a significant impact on my work. The breakup of the former Yugoslavia was a reminder that we had not in fact escaped the temptations of nationalism, war and genocide. We would not benefit from the “peace dividend” that the end of the Cold War had supposedly brought. Whether in ex-Yugoslavia or elsewhere—and as we have seen in America over the last ten years—it has been war-business as usual.

Q.  History in your work is often described in its relationship to ethics.  What are the origins of your examining the two together as you do?

A. History and ethics are themes that run throughout my work.  That perhaps comes out of my own personal experiences. I am concerned with how we can respect “the other,” and how we can renew our belief in that most archaic idea, “thou shalt not kill.” This is an important issue for me, as a number of years ago there was a murder in my family. This personal event led me write two interconnected volumes. The first of these two books, The White Fire of Time, came out of a struggle for renewal. However, when I finished that book, I was still deeply unsettled about questions of violence, in particular how individuals can carry out acts of ultimate violence against each other, whether this is against people they have known intimately, those they consider to be neighbors, or people they don’t know, but whom they come to understand as “the enemy.” These questions were very much in my mind when I was working on this new book.

Q.  You attended The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague. Tell me about that.

A. I have often found that poetry has an odd way of drawing us into strange synchronicities. A year after I had begun work on Update on the Descent, the Milosevic trial opened in February 2002 at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. After attending the opening of the trial, over the next three years I traveled back and forth to the Netherlands to listen to witness sessions and hear how violence had been carried out across a whole society. These sessions in the Hague were some of the most difficult, but moving experiences I have ever had. It is almost impossible, or “obscene” as one witness put it, to describe such human acts. However, while I was there, it was clear that the stories being told were not limited in any way to the Balkan experience. They had happened—as in Rwanda—or would soon be happening in other parts of the world.

Q. In fact, you don’t mention any specific places or people in the new book. In what way is this omission a reflection of your concept for the work?

A. Update on the Descent is not limited to any specific conflict, but rather it is about the structure of violence and our common human nature—a nature capable of extreme acts, but one that also has the potential for compassion and forbearance in the presence of “the other.” During the seven years I was working on the book, the revelations of what occurred at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq were made public as were, more recently, details about the CIA “black sites” and the torture carried out at those sites. The fact of torture is important to Update on the Descent, not because it is sensational, but because it touches on a question that I think we are extremely afraid to confront. The last few years have brought us perilously close to an unspoken fear that we are losing the battle against violence, and that the climate of relative decency we have known is no longer holding firm. Or even that, if we do not do our best to battle against it, we may be facing the start of an unlawful age.

Q.  The structure of Update on the Descent is striking. How did you arrive at it? What sources influenced you?

A.  The book is composed in three sections—I won’t say too much about the overall structure, because I think it is more interesting for a reader to discover certain things for himself or herself. But as regards the individual poems, there are “lyrical” as well as “non-lyrical” forms in the volume. The book’s sequence includes introductory lyrical poems followed by prose poems, aphorisms and philosophical notebooks. It was written this way because I wanted to avoid aestheticizing the violence I had heard about or experienced. The music of the book resides at the opposite end of the spectrum from what we often associate with the affirming rhythms of poetry. But the book is also inhabited by the possibility of forgiveness and renewal. In general, the influences on the book are more philosophical than poetic, though poetry also plays a role. But I am a bit wary of poetry—or rather excessive aestheticizing—if poetry exempts itself from fundamental dialogues, where it is also needed.

Q.  It seems that the question of evil – whether it exists, what it is – is central to your work, particularly Update on the Descent.

A.  Of late, I have spent quite a bit of time thinking about the question of evil. I have come to feel that it is an entirely human affair, and is more of an ethical than a theological question. If we, as human beings, choose to carry out atrocities, then these acts are a reflection of our own nature. I find it hard to understand how we can expect a divine power to come and clean up our mess. Further, I’m not convinced that the terrifying events of the last century—or this new one—prove the death of the Spirit. Rather, to my mind, they only underscore the fact that the human animal has a murderous potential, beyond our previous imaginings. In fact, this issue may be one of the most urgent legacies that poets of my generation face. The challenge of how we can, despite everything, contemplate the possibility of affirmation—while at the same time knowing that genocide has happened and can happen at any time. That poetry is not only possible after Auschwitz, but imperative, an integral part of our survival.

Q. There are a number of references to Hannah Arendt in your last two books, which explore, respectively, the contemplative life, the vita contemplativa, and the vita activa, the life of society. What impact has her work had on your approach to poetry?

A.  I think that the last eight years have shown us how fragile our democracy is, and how we must remain alert to the very real dangers of illegality, rhetoric and demagoguery. This is not about adhering to any particular political standpoint, but rather, in a meticulous way, about sorting through the immense amount of data that is always coming towards us. Some years ago I mentioned that I was interested in the possibility of a “poetics of radical reflection.” For me this means, as Hannah Arendt wrote in the Life of the Mind, the idea that perhaps thought itself can help us to maneuver and survive the dangers around us—the dangers of our own making. With the end of the 20th century we found out that, incredibly enough, we did not arrive at the end of History. History and terror—as well as the possibility of meaning—are still with us. We didn’t escape their noose: they are, and will always be, things with which we must wrestle.

Q.  In the last poem in your book, “Update on the Last Judgment,” there is no “Judgment,” but only an “abyss.” What, then, is “judgment” and who is passing that judgment?

A.  This was a complex poem for me. When you begin to write a poem, you don’t always know exactly what you think about your subject. Regarding the topic in general, I tend to agree with what the Lithuanian poet Tomas Venclova wrote in his poem “Verses for a Child’s Birth”: “it’s best to keep silent/ because we don’t know yet if God hovers/ above the empty featureless waters.” However, it seems fair to say that until we arrive at that unknowable moment, we are entirely responsible for our actions here on earth and it is to our peril that we look for recourse or justification for those actions in any kind of afterlife. For the foreseeable future, we only have judgment with a small “j”, which is to say the mortal, imperfect and fallible judgment that we possess as human beings and with which we have to attempt to make sense of our world. Despite how terribly fragile it is, it is all that we possess. But it is still immense.

Susan Wheatley is a probate lawyer, poet and a founder of the Walnut Street Poetry Society at the Mercantile Library in Cincinnati.

My doctor put me on a cleanse recently. He stipulated I remove sugar, dairy, alcohol, breads and vinegar for two weeks from my diet. It has been two years since my last cleanse which happened during the Christmas holiday. Was it hard to pass up all the holiday potlucks complete with homemade cakes slathered in buttercream frosting or the cheesy casseroles in favor of a handful of celery- yes. A million times yes, but it was do-able. This go round I mentioned my cleanse on facebook and received 11 comments, some dubious and some intrigued. This time I decided to chart my daily consumption believing that in spite of the removal of these key food categories, I could still eat deliciously and perhaps pave a road for others that want to give it a go.

Some of us live to eat and others eat to live. This cleanse reminds me of the food as fuel approach and anyone that knows me, knows this is not enough. The texture and complexity of flavors, the aromas and commingling of ingredients, the act of masticating and swallowing- food is a sensual act, not mere science.
Poetry does not seem to have a natural correlation to food, but it intrigues me how both entreat the senses to take part. Fingers typing on a keyboard or pushing pen to paper, active and subconscious visualization of how the words might fit best, background sounds to create the white noise in favor of the white page- these are some images that come to mind of the space in which a poem comes into being. For some, their ritual of creating that sacred space includes sipping a glass of wine, a cup of tea, a large cup of coffee late into the night. All of the senses participate in breathing a poem into life. And we can appreciate how much brighter life becomes because of the poetry. Is poetry just a fuel that keeps our creative wick burning? Do we write the poems to stay nourished and balance the world around us? Does the need for poetry seem immediate like a growling stomach beckoning for a morsel?

I cracked open Ginsberg’s Kaddish to imagine how it might respond to a cleanse of the senses. His imagery of Naomi, of his surroundings employs all of his senses, captivating the reader. When he speaks of “Ray Charles blues shout blind on the / phonograph”, I can hear it. Or his description of “hand- / churned ice cream in backroom on musty brownfloor”, I can taste this. His depictions of Naomi particularly bring out an ultra-sensory frame. He envisions her young, recently arrived from Russia, “frightened on the dock – / then struggling in the crowds of Orchard Street” and the reader finds him/herself enveloped by the crush of touch in a foreign place. This foreignness takes on new meaning and heights for Naomi as her descent into madness reveals itself to 13 year old Ginsberg. In part II, they are walking in Paterson and he writes of her, “you covered your nose with motheaten fur collar, / gas mask against poison sneaked into downtown atmosphere,” and the reader can smell the fur collar, smell her fear. It’s hard to imagine Ginsberg without his senses telling part of his story for him. They are part of what we love about his poetry.

To strip poetry of the senses is to find a poetry beautiful on the page but missing something necessary. The senses provide different points of entry into a poem that elevate its meaning.

I’m going to explore the poetics of food in my postings and look forward to this tasting menu, one blog bite at a time. The food of poetry calls us to a higher nutrition that feeds the mind and the soul. If we let it, we not only consume poetry, but it consumes us, one sense at a time.

–Annelies Zijderveld

September 16 @ 7:30 – 9:00 p.m. the Barnes and Noble Poetry Series is hosting a reading with Kathleen Tyler.  There will be an Open Mic before the feature poet, and more afterwards. The reading is taking place at the Barnes and Noble Store in the Grossmont Shopping Center, 5500 Grossmont Ctr Dr Suite 331, La Mesa, CA 91942.

Kathleen Tyler lives in Los Angeles where she teaches English at a local high school. Her publications include The Secret Box from Mayapple Press, and My Florida from The Backwaters Press. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals including VisionsInternational, Runes, Solo, Poetry Motel, Margie, Seems, Cider Press Review, and others. She has been the featured reader at many Southern California venues such as Beyond Baroque, Skylight Books, Coffee Cartel, World Stage, Venice Grind, and the Church in Ocean Park. A poem from My Florida was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Most recently, a poem of hers was a finalist in the 2009 dA Center for the Arts Poetry Prize.

How can one translate something that is untranslatable?  Paul Celan has often been accused of being hermetic in his poetry.  He himself said that was not the case.  His writing is pregnant with incomprehensible grief and longing.  One who reads Celan is left feeling the pain of Celan’s experience living through the Holocaust, his survivor’s guilt, and his anger toward Germany for her silence over the atrocities that occurred during the war.

Many people have translated Celan’s poetry successfully; some more so than others.  He is one of the most influential poets of the second half of the twentieth century. How can that be when his work is nearly impenetrable? His writing is cryptic, full of idioms and manipulations of the German language.  Celan’s poetry reflects his ambivalence toward Germany because of her impotence in dealing with the aftermath of the Holocaust.

Almost impenetrable yes, but not quite.  His writing is filled with his desire to find a way out of his pain, which one gets on a visceral level immediately. The next step, however, is more difficult.  Celan alludes to his experiences in every poem he writes, but one must carefully read his work to understand it.

In Celan’s speech when he won the Breman literature prize, he said, “A poem, being an instance of language, hence essentially dialogue, may be a letter in a bottle thrown out to sea with the––surely not always strong––hope that it may somehow wash up somewhere, perhaps on a shoreline of the heart.” This statement reflects Celan’s belief that his poetry was universal and that everyone reading his work could, in fact, break through that seal and find that message in the bottle.

Michael Hamburger’s translations are by far my favorite because he gets to the meaning while keeping the language beautiful; he also keeps the structure whole.  I especially like the beginnings and endings of his translations. However, John Felstiner is remarkable as well. I don’t however; find his translations quite as good, though Poet Survivor Jew is a remarkable book.

Such a small thing as;
“Count the almonds,
“…count what was bitter and kept you awake,
count me in:”

Felstiner’s translation;
“Count up the almonds,
count what was bitter and kept you waking,
count me in too:”

The ending of each––

Hamburger’s version;
“Make me bitter.
Count me among the almonds.” (77)

Felstiner’s:
“Render me bitter.
Number me among the almonds.” (49)

Hamburger’s translation brings pain to the surface in the first three lines.  Also the use of the universal “I” comes across clearly.

Felstiner’s translation doesn’t have the same impact in the beginning because waking and awake have such different meanings. Awake gives the connotation of being alive.  Since this poem is filled with death, this is an important word.

The endings are similar but the Hamburger’s repetition of the word count gives an entirely different meaning than Felstiner’s usage of render. By repeating count, Hamburger hammers in the force of death and responsibility.  Yet, render is a word that hones in the atrocity of war. It’s nauseating, to think about.

“Alchemical” is another good example of understanding different translations.

Hamburger’s beginning is powerful:
“Silence, cooked like gold, in
charred
hands.” (183)

One cannot miss the meaning here of those in the Holocaust being shoved into ovens, yet the beauty of the words is overwhelming.

Pierre Joris’ version:
“Silence, cooked like gold, in
carbonized
hands” (81)

Carbonized and charred are synonyms but their meanings are subtly different. Carbonized has a direct relation is charcoal which refers to ash; nothing left while charred connotes being set on fire. Charred is not as harsh a word in this case because Celan is referring to those stuffed into ovens during the Holocaust.

“Corona” is a poem worth examining because Celan borrows from Rilke’s poem “Autumn Day” by making extreme and quiet changes.

Rilke’s “Autumn Day” translated by Edward Snow

Autumn Day
Lord: it is time. The summer was immense.
Lay your long shadows on the sundials,
and on the meadows let the winds go free.
Command the last fruits to be full;
give them just two more southern days,
urge them on to completion and chase
the last sweetness into the heavy wine.
Who has no house now, will never build one.
Who is alone now, will long remain so,
will stay awake, read, write long letters
and will wander restlessly up and down
the tree-lines streets, when the leaves are drifting.

Hamburger’s translation of the first lines of “Corona”;
“Autumn eats its leaf out of my hand: we are friends.
From the nuts we shell time and we teach it to walk:
then time returns to the shell.”

In the mirror it’s Sunday,
in dream there is room for sleeping,
our mouths speak the truth.” (61)

And Felstiner’s version:

“Autumn nibbles its leaf from my hand: we are friends.
We shell time from the nuts and teach it to walk:
time returns into its shell.

In the mirror is Sunday,
in dream comes sleeping,
the mouth speaks the truth.” (29)

The first stanza is similar while the second is not.  Hamburger’s translation says “our,” while Felstiner’s uses “the.”  I would argue that Celan meant the universal not the singular, thus, Hamburger’s translation works better.  Also in dream there is room for sleeping connotes our place to escape. While in dream comes sleeping presents the idea that sleeping approaches the singular. The idea of the time returning to it’s shell could be seen as summer turning into autumn; life into death.  Summer reflects growth whereas autumn refers to harvesting which means (death).

Hamburger’s translation of the ending of “Corona:”

“We stand by the window embracing, and people look up from
the street:
it is time they knew!
It is time the stone made an effort to flower,
time unrest had a beating heart.
It is time it were time.

It is time.”

And Felstiner’s version:

“We stand at the window embracing, they watch from the street:
it’s time people knew!
It’s time the stone consented to bloom,
a heart beat for the unrest.
It time it came time.

It is time.”

The words effort and consent again imply different meaning.  Effort gives forth the idea of application and accomplishment, while consent means give permission to.  Hamburger, therefore is saying that the collective our, is working toward, while Felstiner’s version gives forth the notion that we are acquiescing.
I would argue with those that say his work is hermetic because his poetry though difficult and seemingly written for himself, I see it as written for humankind.  That is what makes him a unique, powerful and influential writer.  He writes for the dead who have no voice, he writes of the horror of the death camps, he writes about a universal experience.  His, is poetry of witness.

The mistake some translators make, is that because they see his work about the I and not the You, they don’t take into account Celan’s reaching out toward others.  Celan was a lonely man.  Poetry was his way of communicating with others. Even those who have been successful at translating Celan have said that some of the poems were too difficult to attempt.  John Felstiner says in preface of Selected Poems And Prose Of Paul Celan,“Several poems that I’d bypassed as too enigmatic or elusive for discussion, such as “Streak”, “Dew”, “Black”, and “King’s rage,” I’ve now translated anyway.” (xxxi)  He goes on to say that he is willing to translate what he felt he could not before because he trusts the reader to decipher Celan.

The silence in Celan’s poetry is important to note.  Perhaps he uses silence as a device to make one stop and think, perhaps it’s because the work is so intense, one needs a moment of pause.  Or perhaps, Celan, entangled with his own words, needed the silence.  It can be seen throughout his poetry; the hyphens, the awkward structure of wording, the music of the words themselves.  This is another reason his work is difficult to translate.

As I fell in love with Celan, I wished that I knew German––that I had listened to my grandparents as a child.  I become entranced in his words more each time I read them. I’ve read several translations of his work, and of course, I have my favorites, though I have begun a journal in which I combine translations together.

Yes, some translations are better than others, but for one to take on the task, the hope is that one does so because of a devotion to the work.  Then it is up to the reader to decode the meaning.

–Erika Lutzner

For more:

Rainier, Rilke, Marie, Translated by Snow, Edward (1994).  The Book of Images: Poems/Revised Bilingual Edition. North Point Press 1994

Celan, Paul, Translated by Felstiner, John. (2001). Selected Poems And Prose Of Paul Celan. W.W. Norton New York 2001

Felstiner, John (1995). Paul Celan Poet Survivor Jew. Yale University Press, New Haven 1995

Celan, Paul Translated by Hamburger, Michael (1988). Paul Celan Selected Poems. Penguin Book Group, London (1988)

Celan, Paul Translated by Joris, Pierre (2005). Paul Celan Selections.University of California Press, Berkley 2005

In addition:

Please note David Young’s recent translations of Paul Celan can be found in Poetry International 13/14.

Putting in his time as poetry ombudsman for America and the world, Pulitzer Prize-winner and Princeton University professor Paul Muldoon recently appeared on the Colbert Report and spoke briefly about the importance of poetry for making sense of life and advocated broadening the definition of poetry to include greeting cards. OK, to be honest, I cringe a little at the thought of Hallmark being the most widely read poet of the past ninety-nine years, but maybe I need to get off my high horse. Perhaps if we recognized greeting cards as poetry, more people would realize that poetry is not some distant, high-brow enigma, but rather it is part of their everyday lives, so much so that they don’t even recognize in in their own words anymore. In illustration of that point, Muldoon reminded viewers of the inescapability of the metaphor, a literary device, indeed a poetic device, that really has crept quietly inside the vernacular and made a cozy home for itself there (I think I’ve used a couple already in this post). Many metaphors have become so common we don’t even realize we’re employing them, e.g. “After just one drink, he was buzzed.” A great number of these oft-used expressions have become cliché, e.g. “She broke my heart.” But cliché or completely original, for all its enrichment of tongues the world over, I’d like to raise my glass, tip my hat, and bow down to the metaphor! Huzzah! 

Here is a link to the interview:

http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/231220/june-18-2009/paul-muldoon

by Lisa Grove

Here’s a second helping from the prodigious new double issue of Poetry International 13/14.  This sampling includes work from Carolyn Forché, Fady Joudah, Bob Hicok and more, while previewing PI 13/14’s  Daniel Simko and Paul Celan chapbooks.  You can find out more on our beautifully refurbished website.

IN MEMORY OF PAUL ELUARD

Put the words in the dead man’s grave,
the words he spoke in order to live.
Cradle his head among them
let him feel
the tongues of longing,
the tongs.

Put the word on the dead man’s eyelid,
the word he refused to speak
to the one who said “thou” to him,
the word
his heart’s blood rushed past
when a hand bare as his own
knotted the one who said “thou” to him
into the trees of the future.

Put that word on his eyelid:
maybe
his eye, still blue,
takes on a second, stranger blue,
a second blue,
and the one who said “thou” to him
dreams with him: we.

YOU TOO SPEAK

You too speak:
you speak last,
say your word.

Speak–
but never split No off from Yes.
Give your word a meaning:
give it the shade.

Give it enough shade,
give it as much shade
as you know is parceled around you
between midnight and noon and midnight.

Look around:
how everything comes alive–
In the presence of death! Alive!
whoever speaks shade speaks truth.

Now, though, the shade where you stand is shrinking:
Where now, shade-stripped?
Upward. Grope your way up.
You grow thinner, less perceptible, finer.
Finer: a thread
a star would like to slide down on:
to be able to swim down there
where it observes itself glimmering: in the flow
of drifting words.

by Paul Celan.  Translated by David Young.

Left to My Own Devices

The floor’s level now. It was as easy as moving
a red handle, as buying a jack, as cutting a hole
in the floor, as being born, as translating Rilke badly
but with the exhilaration of one who loved
flipping the pages of two dictionaries simultaneously.
Not the panther poem but some other
Austrian lyricism I’ve forgotten, how many of my moments
are contrails, bold, white slashes
against a blue background that are gone the next time
you look up from your turkey sandwich? You
and your box lunches. I suspect jets are really a means
for the birth of contrails, that forgetting
is a form of life, just as knowing for certain
where the keys are should have a species name. No matter.
I’ll never be six foot tall so I hop a lot,
and at the top of the hop, I’m probably six two,
six three, so I write that down on forms
that want to know how tall I am, as if a blank space
is really curious. The form is not specific
about duration—how tall are you and how long
have you been that tall—so the question
is either demure or badly phrased. The difference
between the thought of the thing and the thing
goes away for Caroline when she gathers and staples
her skin. There’s just the pain. It’s not a word
or a ball of sunlight, it’s this very specific attempt
not to scream so her husband won’t know
what she’s doing to the thigh he doesn’t visit much
these days. Is there a point, you might be asking,
and I might be telling you no, not beyond the shape
of a god up ahead as we’re walking,
which when we get to it, is not a god but a naked
piece of stone. The days have stacked into who I am
but if I met one of them again, out on the street,
I doubt I’d recognize it. It could ask me the time
and I wouldn’t know it was my past, the irony of this
would be lost on me, it would float off wherever
forsaken irony goes, and someone in an official smock
would trip the “we’re running low on irony siren”
but it wouldn’t work, thus increasing our stock of irony,
praise the Lord. I’d be sad if trees stopped telling
the truth. I mean really, really sad, like rusted lug nut
sad, you out on the highway with your flat, beating
what won’t let go with the lug wrench, then sitting there
with bits of bottles thrown from cars, sorting shatter
by color and shape.

Psalm of Filling the Rental Car

For the director of music. To the tune
of static.

Man eating from a dumpster at a BP
off Middlebelt in Romulus.
From an apple core, then a burger first wiped
against the dumpster, to remove ants,
maybe, maybe
maggots. Early March, grime-snow
lines the roads. Jets
drop from the east, the air is paper,
torn. He never looks up, he is dilligent,
he is fed. I do not forget the mouth
of Your promise.
How servant my eyes, pitfalls of hope.
Who will bring us
to the fortified city? I fail
greatly. My soul faints like smoke.

By Bob Hicok

In Memoriam: Mahmoud Darwish

A Poet Among Us

On a winter night in Beirut twenty-two years ago, a physician working among Palestinians in southern Lebanon whispered to me that I had arrived too late, that the poets had left Beirut the year before, Mahmoud Darwish among them, and in the darkness of a black-out he spoke of how unsettling it was for the people to know that the poets were no longer there, most especially Darwish—  whose work was beloved by millions in the Arab world and beyond, whose lyrics were sung by heart, set to the music of their ancient oud, whose poetry readings filled stadiums. Having survived a life of imprisonment, house arrest and exile, he wrote of love, survival and our common humanity. Now Mahmoud Darwish is no longer among us, this poet who made of his language a homeland, who dwelled in exilic being—this solitary, private man who became the voice of a people, and who, in a language of fig trees, olives and flute music, exile and longing, re-built in poetry the four hundred and seventeen invisible villages of Palestine, such as Al-Birweh—which he was forced to flee as a boy—the village to which his empty, symbolic coffin was carried to be set among the stones of what may have once been his house, near a prickly pear bush, in a dry wind.  At that same moment in Ramallah, tens of thousands attended his state funeral and laid him to rest on a hillside with Jerusalem visible in the distance.  Those who carried the second coffin to Al-Birweh knew that their poet had to be buried twice, once for his presence and once for his absence.

Almost twenty years after Beirut, I came to know Mahmoud Darwish as one of his collaborative translators and then as his friend, and would come to understand why the people of that besieged city were so bereft at his loss.  No other poet of his time gave voice to an entire people, no other poet was so beloved, and yet he also cleaved to his art, and carried within himself the solitude it demanded. He seemed to know and accept his destiny, and desired only to finish the work under his pen. A year before his death, we were together at Struga in Macedonia, the oldest poetry festival in the world, and as he stood on a bridge over the River Drim, he read his poems to the thousands who crowded its banks and drew their flotilla of boats as close as they could to him beneath the bridge. During the festival, the sky flowered with fireworks in his honor, torches were lit, songs sung, and he was presented with the Golden Wreath Award, one of the highest honors given to a poet.  A few days later, we were taken by boat across a spring-fed pool near Lake Ohrid.  There was no sound but that of the oar rising and falling.  Mahmoud was pensive as he leaned over to touch the water, while telling me very quietly that his heart was giving way.  I didn’t understand at the time that he was saying goodbye, and now I must say goodbye to him, who realized his wish to be a candle in the darkness of the times in which he lived, and by whose poetry, memory and light we must now find our way.
—Carolyn  Forché

She Didn’t Come

She didn’t come. I said: And she won’t…so
let me rearrange the evening with what suits my failure
and her absence:
I put out the flame of her candles,
I turned on the electric lights,
drank her wine then broke the glass
and switched the music: from the swift violins
to Persian songs.
I said: She won’t come. So I loosened my elegant
necktie (to relax more) and put on
my blue pajama. I could walk barefoot
if I want. And sit cross-legged, sagging
on her sofa, to forget her
and forget all the things of absence.
Then I put back in the drawers what I had prepared
for our party. I opened the windows and pulled back the curtains.
I stood in front of the night, my body holding no secret
other than what I waited for and lost…
and I mocked my obsession with purifying the air for her
(I had sprayed rose and lemon water).
She won’t come…I will move the orchid
from the right to the left to punish her forgetfulness…
I will cover up the mirror with a coat, I don’t want to see
her radiant image…and add to my regret.
I said: Forget what you have chosen for her
of ancient love lines, she doesn’t even deserve
a plagiarized poem…
Then I forgot her, ate my quick meal standing,
and read a chapter in a school book
about our distant planets,
and wrote, to overlook her harm, a poem,
this poem.

By Mahmoud Darwish.  Translated by Fady Joudah

A Stone for Svetko: A remembrance of the poet Svetozar Daniel Simko, 1959-2004

Yesterday, in the bronze light of late afternoon, in a wild March wind I walked from West to East Berlin, retracing the steps I took eighteen years ago with the poet Daniel Simko, through a city at once delirious and hesitant with joy, where could be heard in the streets both the quiet of disbelief and the uplifting strains of Beethoven’s Ninth.  Somewhere here, just here or was it a few hundred meters away?—sections of The Wall still stood at that time amidst its rubble, and while it was still necessary to pass through Checkpoint Charlie, even that had become a formal relic of a shattered State.  But now it seemed impossible to tell East from West, except for a path of small stones marking where the wall and been here and there, and so I found myself in the windy expanse of Alexanderplatz—in front of its glass arcade and atomic clock—before I knew that I had gone from one world to another, from past to present.  Only Alexanderplatz looked familiar, but its surroundings were as crystalline as the new century.  You wouldn’t believe this, Svetko, I whispered to my now dead, ever-present friend, but you would be happy in your disbelief.
This is the short story of a friendship between poets, which began so serendipitously, and is now marked in memory by a path of moments.  We met in 1976 in Iowa City, and again in New York a few years later.  During our friendship of almost thirty years, we shared poems, books, an extended family, houses and apartments here and there, travels and a passion for literary art.  He was from former Czechslovakia, as was my father’s family.  That, in the beginning, drew us together, but what carried us further had to do with poetry, and then with all else.

In 1985, when my husband, the photographer Harry Mattison, was often in South Africa documenting what would become the last years of the apartheid regime, I welcomed the chance for camaraderie in what had become an oasis of Czechoslovakia on East 27th street—Daniel Simko’s studio apartment, whose shelves groaned with double-stacked books but for the wall where a painting hung, and the closet kitchen, and the alcove study where he wrote his poems and translated, in those days, Friedrich Hölderlin. I remember that we drove my little car down to Greenwich St., where Harry and I lived in a loft in an old spice warehouse that still smelled faintly of spices when it rained. I do remember Daniel and his friend James Reidel taking turns holding a wedding band by a strand of my hair over my pregnant belly. If a boy, the band would swing back and forth, it was said by the old wives, and if a girl, the band would move in a circle, but over and over, it swung back and forth, and about seven months later, I gave birth to my son in Paris, where we were to spend the year 1986 beginning with the summer of the Paris bombings. When our Sean was a few months’ old, Daniel arrived to stay with us while working on his translations of the twentieth-century Austrian poet, Georg Trakl.

In the months before I had joined Harry in Johannesburg, sometimes Daniel and I spoke by telephone—Johannesburg to New York—and he discerned, in my silences and hesitancies, the caution one feels when under surveillance—which as foreigners in South Africa—we were. Daniel would joke then that our halting conversations reminded him of “the old country,” the Czechoslovakia of his childhood, then still under Soviet domination. As it happened, we had to leave South Africa precipitously, having been accused by our landlady, formerly of “Rhodesia,” of breaking apartheid laws. That is how it happened that we arrived in Paris as I was entering my ninth month of pregnancy. We moved into an atelier overlooking Cimitière Montparnasse, at 11 rue Schoelcher, beside Simone de Beauvoir’s atelier at 11 bis. She would die that April, and be laid to rest in a grave that I could almost see from the window of our loggia. After she died, mourners came to rue Schoelcher and tossed flowers through our open windows, mistaking one atelier for another. At the end of those days, I would bring the bouquets to her grave and add them to the mounds of wilting flowers.

When Daniel wasn’t working on Trakl at the café around the corner, we would walk together with my newborn son, Sean in his carriage through the cemetery, reasoning that the bombs going off in metro stations and stores would never be planted among the graves. Daniel smoked his Turkish cigarettes as we walked, and between smokes, held Sean up to see the tomb sculptures and pigeon flocks. Once we did hear an explosion, and it turned out to be a bomb hidden in a baby carriage, detonated in a department store, but our cemetery was always left undisturbed, and in my memory, Daniel and I are often walking there, from one grave to another. In a few hours of peace and wind, we could visit Tristan Tzara and Charles Baudelaire, and then make our way over to composers Camille Saint-Saëns and César Franck, and before leaving pause at the graves of Julio Cortázar and Jean-Paul Sartre. As we walked, Daniel recited his versions of Trakl to me, asking if one word might be better than another and then, one afternoon, he came back to the atelier in a dark mood and announced “I am becoming Trakl.” I tried to reassure him that becoming Trakl might be necessary to the work of translating him. A translator of poetry must enter the language of another as closely as possible to the moment of its making. But entering Trakl carried a special risk, and Daniel knew this.  His poet had been attached to a field hospital as a lieutenant pharmacist on Austria-Hungary’s Galician Front facing the Russians. There he witnessed the Battle of Grodek and Rawa-Ruska during September, 1914. Responsible for many critically wounded soldiers housed in a barn, and without an attending physician or drugs to relieve their pain, Trakl announced he could no longer bear to live and fled to shoot himself only to be disarmed. Under the pretext of a transfer to a military hospital in Krakow, he was placed under psychiatric observation and shared a room with a fellow officer suffering from delirium tremens. The windows were barred like a jail and Trakl had to wear hospital pajamas resembling a prison uniform. His publisher, Ludwig von Ficker, saw the brutality of the hospital and its screaming patients and attempted unsuccessfully to have Trakl released.  Knowing of his prewar bohemian days as a drug addict, von Ficker asked Trakl if he had drugs in his possession. The poet is said to have replied,

“Would I be alive otherwise?”

One of Vienna’s most promising young expressionist poets, the painter Oskar Kokoschka, was his close friend, and the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was an avid reader of his work.  Trakl began to write again, but died on the third of November from a self-administered overdose of cocaine. These circumstances certainly interested Daniel, but it was the lucidity of Trakl’s lyric response to war experience that drew him to the work, along with his fluid imagery, mutable figures, and mysterious vision. He was drawn as well to the near-prophetic poems written before his war experience, and to Trakl’s referential density, lyric consciousness, and capacity to sustain almost infinite ambiguity without diminishing the poetry’s expressive force. Trakl was inarguably among the twentieth-century’s genuine poets, but there may have been other reasons for Daniel’s elective affinity, having to do with Trakl’s youth, when he was viewed as a bit strange, perhaps as Daniel himself may have sensed himself viewed as a young immigrant in Ohio. It was said, for example, that Trakl sniffed chloroform from a flask and dipped his cigarettes in opium. Later, as a poète maudit , emulating Charles Baudelaire, he took morphine, Veronal and cocaine, dressed as a flaneur, drank prodigiously and otherwise transported himself, but always seemed to his friends “more awake” than others. Daniel was certainly himself “more awake,” more observant and attentive, with a formidable knowledge of European history and literature, against which he read his “new Americans.” On the night I met him in July 1978, he was sitting alone on a couch in the living room of a poet’s house in Iowa City, as an after-reading party swirled around him. Although I was very young, I had been that night’s reader, and wishing to escape the confusing social mélange, sat down on the couch as well. After a time, he introduced himself, and I heard a familiar accent (perhaps barely perceptible to others), that I hadn’t heard since childhood.

He was from Bratislava, Slovakia, also the birthplace of my father’s family, and so we talked for several hours about his life, “the old country,” and European poets. I didn’t see him again for several years, until the night the Master of Fine Arts program at Columbia University chartered a Circle Line boat for a starlight cruise around Manhattan. After we disembarked, Daniel invited my husband and I back to his then nearly empty apartment on East 27th Street, and so our enduring friendship began. Although he studied with me at Columbia for a semester or two, I never thought of myself as his teacher, but perhaps the sister and friend he more deeply needed. Over the years, we spent time together in Paris, Provincetown, Vermont, and then in the spring of 1990, after the “Velvet Revolution” liberated former-Czechoslovakia, we traveled together to Bratislava, where I joined him in a family attic, searching for the jazz records and books he had left behind when he fled in early 1969. We drove then to Prague, still quiet that spring, still gothic and dark, and not yet crowded with tourists. Most nights, we walked back and forth across Charles Bridge by ourselves, occasionally encountering clusters of students talking, singing and playing guitars.
In Wenceslas Square, thronged only months before with tens of thousands of Czechs demanding the government’s capitulation, we could still find the jingle bells rung in celebration of newly won freedom, and rippling candle-wax memorials to the revolution’s martyrs.

We visited my great-aunt in Brno, then living in an apartment given to her by the Jewish Council for her work on behalfof Jews during the occupation and Shoah. There is much more to say about our time with her, but the conversation would not have been possible without Daniel’s fluency in Slovak and sensitivity to her special circumstances.

From Prague we drove to Dresden, where the ruins of the fire-bombing were still visible, and then on to Berlin, where the wall was being jubilantly dismantled. We stayed in the East, near Alexanderplatz, crossing through the still-active Checkpoint Charlie several times a day. We took walks in the neighborhood where Daniel lived years earlier with his love, Tania Taubes, daughter of philosopher Jacob Taubes, one of the founders of Berlin’s Freie Universität. During these walks, Daniel grew pensive and melancholy, but always retained his sharp wit, as well as a certain gravitas. He knew where we were and “what time it was,” as we picked scraps of the wall from the ground and chose which ones to bring home with us. Behind the soot-blackened Reichstag, vendors had spread blankets with Russian war medals, particularly artful examples of wall graffiti, dog-fur hats and Soviet mementos. My friend, the late Charles Newman, captured this flea market of history perfectly. Thinking of a museum, he wrote: “Grim History proceeds painstakingly and openly from room to room, until the last very small one (devoted to the near present) where it dribbles away into a meaningless collage of artifacts; a sword from the Russo-Japanese War, a bust of Stalin, a cosmonaut, a photo of an expedition to Antarctica, a Chinese vase inlaid with Brezhnev’s visage and some Gorby buttons—all in no particular order, and without explanation. It’s as if—‘here are the pieces’—you figure it out.”

Throughout our journey that spring, Daniel was painstakingly and contemplatively “figuring it out.” He showed me where he had lived and gone to school, the abandoned castle in Bratislava where he played as a boy, and in the musty attic of his aunt’s house, with its old wooden trunks, dove nests and broken chairs, he showed himself that it was impossible to be more than the ghost in a country that was no longer his. There wasn’t very much in that attic that he wanted to bring back.
During the next fourteen years, he lived in New York, earning a degree in Library Science and working for the New York Public Library. He continued to write, but grew less and less interested in publishing his poems, other than in the books he made himself, and in his “manuscriptions” of notes, aperçus and versets, all privately distributed among his friends. He sent out translations, yes, but not his own poems—and although he offered reasons having to do with a contempt for “literary politics,” it seemed to me his reticence had deeper roots. Perhaps parting with his lover, Tania, had inflicted a decisive wound, held open by his vigil over his mother’s long illness. Dr. Mary Simko had suffered from a rare blood disease and died in 2003, only ten months before her son. Perhaps his reluctance to publish could be attributed to some other cause, but the mode of his poetry in those years was decidedly European. In boyhood he had fled his country, but only in adulthood did he become an exile, and not only from Slovakia. He lived in a realm of exilic being. He wrote in English but he often seemed, in so doing, to be translating himself—not his language—himself. It seems to me now that in his youth, he was attempting that rarely accomplished feat, full assimilation.

He didn’t “lose” his Slovak accent. He learned to mimic American speech. His humor and youthful carryings-on were attempts to fit in, to be accepted by his peers. The humor, the indulgences, even his invented language “Tanto,” in which he sometimes wrote his letters and experimental poems, were partially in the service of this acceptance. In his later years, I believe he realized what he had lost—not only Tania and his mother—but his own past. He had to watch “The Velvet Revolution” from a distance, and he was desperate in its aftermath to return to Czechoslovakia. In the last months of his life he was attempting to have his Slovak citizenship restored, and I am told by his friend, Zuzana Andreánska, that in his last days, drifting in and out of consciousness, he spoke only his mother tongue. That is why, throughout his later years, it seemed that when one stepped into his apartment on East 27th Street, one was stepping into an oasis of Central Europe.

Whenever I came to visit him there, he met me at the top of the stairs in Penn Station, elegantly dressed in overcoat and silk scarf, an umbrella on his arm, a valise over his shoulder, and we went back to his apartment to sit and talk, share passages from our reading, poems in draft, and moments of quiet laced with his cigarette smoke. Always he had arranged a vase of roses on the table, and a plate of fruit and biscuits, and later we would go to dinner at Mocca, a Hungarian restaurant on Second Avenue, for wiener schnitzel and goulash, or else to the nearby bistro Les Halles, and then take long walks into the night, usually through Gramercy Park and Union Square, and sometimes as far south as Greenwich St., where my husband and I had first lived. On every trip, we visited the Strand bookstore where Daniel once worked and where he still seemed to know everyone. Usually we also went to the Museum of Modern Art, but during most of our time together we stayed in his apartment refuge, talking and writing, revising and reading to each other. It was there we argued our way through selections for Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness.

Throughout those years, Daniel lived quietly, worked diligently, smoked prodigiously, and if he drank heavily, never did he seem inebriated. I knew, in his last years, that he was ill, and should have realized how gravely ill he was, but his comportment obscured his suffering until it was too late. He once told me that he preferred to die rather than endure medical treatment. I thought the remark an odd instance of his dark wit, but as it turned out, he was serious. Throughout what must have been a long ordeal, he insisted that everything was “fine.” Vyborne , he said often in Slovak. Fine. When I offered to help him assemble a manuscript, he made his usual excuses: the poems weren’t “ready,” the work was “in-progress,” there was “more to come.” We used to joke with each other that whoever died first would have to cope with the other’s library and papers, and I added to this the threat that eventually he would publish a book, even if I had to assemble it when he was gone. So, I said, you had best now make your revisions and selections.

Despite my failure to persuade him to let his poetry into the world, it is to Daniel that I owe my own reemergence as a poet in the late 1980’s.  Had it not been for him, I may have remained in self-protective seclusion myself, saving my poems in boxes and manila folders for someone else to find one day.

Daniel had been given a fellowship to the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center in 1987, and as we had returned en famille from Paris to the United States with as-yet no definite home, I moved with Sean to a winter beach house in Provincetown’s West End, and Harry commuted from Georgetown University to join us on weekends until a suitable residence could be found for us all.  Daniel lived on the East End, and would visit us after writing for most of the day. In those days, we shared poems with each other, or rather I listened to Daniel’s drafts, and we shared a little supper most evenings. Daniel worried that I hadn’t allowed myself time to write in the aftermath of the publication of my controversial second book, The Country Between Us. I had become, he thought, wary and reclusive—a bit too much like himself—and that I had understandably retreated into motherhood so determinedly that I might never publish poetry again.  Not while I’m alive, I used to joke with him.

“This must not happen,” he had said, and he offered to take Sean in his carriage to the East End for two hours every day, as long as I wrote while he was away, and he demanded to see the pages upon his return, so that I wouldn’t use the time for domestic chores. I would wave goodbye to them and close the little gate, taking in a breath of sea: beyond us was the bay, and on the horizon, shore clouds; below my windows, drying kelp and bladder wrack, and above, herring gulls holding their black-tipped wings rigid on the wind. I would go back into the house and, trying not to pick up toys, move toward the desk—to typewriter, ink and paper—as if this were a piano that hadn’t been played in years. I set to work, filling five pages with notes in an unfamiliar form, and in what seemed only minutes, I would hear the creak of the gate. After placing the sleeping baby in his crib, I dutifully showed Daniel my pages, asking him please not to read them, but only confirm that something had been written. That is how my third book, The Angel of History, was made possible, and it would be some years before I would let it go into the world, after much back-and-forth with Daniel and at his urging. Otherwise I may not have brought myself to write for others again.

Daniel had always wanted to make a pilgrimage to Krakow but never had done so. I was in Krakow when I learned of his death in a dawn telephone call from my husband. My son and I were staying in Hotel Logos. For an hour before I knew that he was dead, I listened to the bells of a far off church and made notes of the kind I had made in Provincetown that winter, and imagined showing them to Daniel when I next visited New York.

When I hung up the phone, I opened the casements and let the morning wind into the room.  In my soul Daniel waved goodbye, and turned to walk away through the fog on Charles Bridge in Prague.  Our Svetko was gone, and I don’t remember the rest of that morning well.

A few days after his death, my son and I walked through the wards of the military psychiatric hospital, to the room where Trakl was kept at the end of his life. The room has been turned into a small museum. It is only by chance that I was offered to see it, by someone who knew nothing of my history with Daniel nor his with Trakl. The hospital patients were still wearing striped pajamas, and the windows were still barred. I remember speaking very deliberately in my heart to my friend at that moment: This, at last, is your visit to Krakow.  I have come here for both of us.

And now, from the new Berlin, I send a postcard made of light and hope to Svetko, telling him that his poetry will be published in an American edition by Four Way Books, to be read at last in his adopted country, as it has been, posthumously, in the new Slovak Republic, and in the coming months I will place a stone on his grave in Bratislava, that he, as well as his poems, will not be forgotten.

Carolyn Forché
Berlin, March 2008

An earlier version of this tribute was published in Slovak in Kritika & Kontext, edited by Samuel Abrahám, No. 36, Volume XIII.  Bratislava, Slovak Republic, 2008.

TESTIMONY

Go on and on.

It is a fact that now you understand the music.
The kind that is played quickly, and in terror.

The one whose skull you last saw sunning itself.

Yet it is important to carry on,
to continue speaking

in the arrested voice you once used in a different language.
To simply continue speaking.

The one whose skull you last saw sunning itself.

It is bothersome to exorcise history.
It is just a flat row of wheat, a cut poplar.

As for trees, they always remain singular.

What else is there to say, and how many ways to say it

You, being the I.

PRAYER

It is so. It touches the clothes
with the rustle of leaves under a naked back,

And to sleep a little less now
is a small compassion.

That darkness you see, a land
of darkness, is darkness itself.

To be mad is to be like this.
Prayer is like this: to live on nothing.

Even I, the judicious failed scholar
find no reason for this.

Tomorrow, if I remember,
I will continue to repeat the same.

The way a face is pure.
The way fear is pure.

How simple it all becomes.
Thy deed is done.

THE ARRIVAL

after a photograph almost taken in Berlin

Wet slate roofs.  Pigeons.  A light.
A leaf on the sidewalk.
The shadows slipping between cobblestones.

It is already dusk
when you arrive
from Paris,
smoke rising from the Diesel
as you step out
with your black hair untied.

I am almost always
turning into that smoke,
into the pigeons landing
on the glass roof.

Or I wake up
and you come
with a shawl
black with stars.

Paris, 1980

by Daniel Simko

What are the responsibilities we, as poets face? Documenting history and being non-judgmental are paramount in maintaining humanity. How can we write without editorializing? Whether one writes a poem about those who died in their quest for the summit of Mount Everest or about a five year old Cambodian prostitute, The Tree Man (Dede Koswara), who has growths covering his entire body due to an over abundance of HPV, or Christopher McCandless, the young man known as Alexander Supertramp from Into The Wild, it is up to the writer to accurately portray his/her subjects. Of course, one brings emotions into whatever he/she writes about; in fact this is a necessary part of writing. One must, however, honor and respect one’s subjects.

Many people remain voiceless while countless others died and are dying because of their opinions, which intimidated governments and those in charge. Often, they were killed for their writing; tortured, imprisoned, even murdered. By writing about atrocities, they took risks which many times signed their death warrants.

As a Western woman, I have little to worry about. Whether I write about indigenous people in the Northern Kalahari Desert, or about my views on the Iraq War, I need not worry about my safety. Perhaps people will not be interested in my subjects, and I may not sell my work, but I can go about my daily life without fear of repercussions.

Cesar Vallejo, for example, put his life in jeopardy for his beliefs. He spoke out, and he wrote about injustices he saw. He was murdered for this. May Swenson, a lesbian ahead of her time, was able to write about her love of women, her beliefs, because she wrote in what many see as code. She wrote about the natural world and love without seeing them as mutually exclusive. What if she had written openly about being a lesbian?

Photojournalists round the globe document the lives of others. Some would argue that it’s wrong to take pictures of people in war, famine, and other horrific situations. By documenting the stories of those who are not seen, I would argue that this is the opposite of exploitation. The photos of a five year old Cambodian prostitute, a Java sulfur mine worker at the top of a dormant volcano, or a man about to be shot in Darfur, are people the world needs to be aware of in order for change to be made.

As a writer, I assimilate the information I take in, and I have a choice as to what I want to do with it. I may write about my own life, or perhaps, a scenic moment on a little island off the coast of Maine. I, however, at anytime, can choose to write about the little girl in a brothel in Cambodia, a prisoner in Latin America about to be burned alive, or genocides taking place round the world. The little girl, the prisoner, they remain imprisoned while I can walk away.

I can only bring forth the information and thoughts I view and write about my beliefs and hope the world will open up and change.

Here is an example of a poem I wrote after seeing a photo of a Cambodian prostitutes taken by a photojournalist who worked for National Geographic. He wanted to free them, but a fifteen-year-old boy with a gun made that impossible. Instead, the photographer took pictures, which were used in a story called Sad Little Girls by Susan McClelland.

Cambodia:

Sold for five dollars; given drugs to make them jump like monkeys in a cage–the foreigners are turned on by this; go crazy for it. Girls as young as five run up to the men on the streets and say; Mister, want some yum yum? They have sleep in their eyes and don’t understand. Mister, want some yum yum? I will not think of my father, who married a Cambodian woman. Mister, want some yum yum? I will not think of him. Mister, want some yum yum? I jump like a monkey.

© Justin Guariglia

“Cambodia” was first published in failbetter: www.failbetter.com

Erika Lutzner