Paul Celan…I doubt I’m up to the task of ‘explaining’ anything by Paul Celan. He was brought up in a German speaking Jewish family in Bukovina. Both of his parents died in forced labour camps during World War 2. He was multilingual, fluent in German, Romanian, French, and able also to speak Hebrew and understand Yiddish. But he regarded German as his mother Tongue, and it is in German that he wrote the vast majority of his poems. But German was also the language of the Nazis, and his relationship with the language was anything but simple. I defy anyone to give a definitive interpretation of any poem by Celan, and I suspect that he did not compose with a single end in view. Instead, I believe he composed within something like a charged field of possibilities, a third space equidistant between word and world where both could meet and refract meaning in new ways, the way light and image are refracted by the planes of a crystal. Housed within that crystal are the redemptive efforts of the German language to re-engage the world, after…well, after all the horrors perpetrated in the name of National Socialism. Hence the neologisms, the fractured syntax. His precisions are different from the simple fidelities of description. He rarely makes big statements. He rarely writes long rythmic lines, unbroken by caesuras and subclauses. Big statements and rythmic, rising crescendos are the stuff of speeches, and hadn’t the Germans had enough of speeches? Then there is his deep interest in Jewish mysticism, apophatic approaches to a God who would not intervene on behalf of His Chosen People in their darkest hour. And this, I think, highlights one of the most interesting features of modern poetry in the second half of the 20th Century, it’s often demonstrated refusal to simply walk away. Instead, it attempts to set up relationships with the unanswering void, as if even emptiness can be cultivated to yield meaning. Celan’s poetry may always be on the verge of silence, because of the ever greater need to listen.

(DO NOT WORK AHEAD)


Vladimir Holan. Holan is a Czech poet. I first came across his work in a box of books in a house on the shores of Belfast Lough. The house was owned by one of my English Lecturers. She had moved out, and myself and a few other students rented rooms. The box, a treasure trove, contained works by most of the major East European poets of the 20th Century. Many of them signed by their authors. I toyed with the idea of diverting some of these into my posession, but couldn’t convince myself that it would be somehow ok to do so. Geekily, I remember each book vividly. In fact, I remember more of them than I do of the degree I was supposed to be studying for. Holan was in there. Selections from ‘A Night With Hamlet’, his most famous long poem, and many of his shorter poems, for which he is best known. I know little about his personal life: he was a Catholic, left the church. joined the Communist Party, left the Communist Party, and rejoined the Church. A classic pattern. In his later years he lived in the centre of Prague, as a recluse. I don’t know enough about Czech literature to contextualise him within his native tradition. But he certainly appears to be different from other European poets of his generation. His shorter pieces engage in a kind of sorting, a zoom-lense attempt to discriminate amongst phenomena in order to uncover and frame the undefinable. When his shorter pieces are successful, he reveals something that you know cannot be made visible in any other way.
(Between)


Czeslaw Milosz is the greatest of the 20th Century Polish poets. Some regard him as the greatest 20th century poet, full stop. His greatness may not be immediately obvious, especially to those of us reliant on translations, though he has been well served in his translators, most of whom are poets of some substance themselves. At first reading, Milosz’s merits were not to me obvious, as I was in thrall to the subjective pyrotechnics of Plath and the punchy, close-up maneouverings of Robert Lowell. But I persisted. Something in me felt challenged by Milosz. He did not compose within a subjective, amoral bubble. He didn’t excuse himself or claim exemption from ordinary human obligations, including moral obligations, on artistic grounds. There’s nothing in Milosz that would appeal to a teenager, for example. When I started to commit to reading his body of work with a view to grasping it, it was a commitment to grow up. Milosz is a total subscriber to what he calls ‘the human experiment’, he doesn’t live in geological time, or pinpoint his co-ordinates within biology, he works from within human history, cultural-time, and refuses to relinquish ground to those who feel superior to others by virtue of their nihilistic viewpoint, a stepping outwith the human. His poetry is a constant search for meaning, and it encompasses the entirety of human civilisation. His mind is first class. He would have made a great philosopher. Or a great economist. Or historian, statesman, or even scientist. But he chose poetry, or, as he says, poetry chose him. And as fate would have it, he was set down on earth at the perfect point in place and time to record the course of the entire 20th Century, to bear witness to its most gigantic insanities: Facism, and so-called Communism. He hoped for ‘a day of comprehension’, an ultimate unveiling when the entire spectacle would at last make sense. A hope that has an eschatological dimension, but also a practical one: because he tried to realise it within his own limited lifetime and and as far as his limited powers would allow. It’s difficult to know what to select from his works, his poems are mostly large and ‘tend towards the condition of prose’, because he did not want to be exclusive. Otherwise, how could he ever hope to comprehend? I’ve chosen a poem from his previously unpublished works, witheld out of kindness, I think. It is a rebuke. It may be addressed to Robinson Jeffares, but at the time I read it, I took it personally.
(To Robinson Jeffares)

Mandelstam. Osip Emilievich Mandelstam was one of the great Russian poets of the early 20th Century. He stands alongside Boris Pasternak, Anna Akhmatova, and Marina Tsetayava, as part of that group of poets whose work responded to the Stalinist terror. There’s a famous story told about Mandelstam that reflects just how highly regarded poetry was in Russia during this time. Mandelstam had written a poem, ‘The Kremlin Mountaineer’, in which he calls Stalin a ‘Peasant Slayer’. He read this aloud at a literary gathering, popular in those days amongst the intelligentsia. Someone reported back to Stalin, and Mandelstam predictably was arrested. He was held in the infamous Lubiyanka, headquarters of the secret police, where he was intensively interrogated. It is said that Mandelstam was actually brought before Stalin himself to answer questions. In addition, while he was still in prison, Stalin phoned Pasternak to ask: is he, Mandelstam, a good poet? Stalin’s respect for poetry was such that Mandelstam was not killed, but released into internal exile, an ‘inner emigre’. He settled in Voronezh, a village outside Moscow, and there composed what have come to be known as the poems from the Voronezh Notebook. From this point onwards he experienced symptoms of mental illness. He lived in a state of nervous anxiety punctuated by bouts of paranoia, with at least one well attested suicide attempt. He must have known that the respect Stalin held towards poetry and poets would only preserve him for so long, that, sooner or later, his henchmen would return to finish the job. The most sensible thing would be to shut up, but Mandelstam suffered from what he called in one poem ‘nightingale fever’: an inability to stop singing. Furthermore, his poems of this time show a strong faith in the everyday and domestic, an awareness of the beauty of being at home in the world that is not diminished by the threat of mortality. He believed that poetry had a truth-telling function, and he accepted the fate that such an obligation entailed in times like his. The poem below reflects this. Written after the revolution had already turned sour, and after the first flush of his own literary fame, and youth, has passed, he predicts the inevitable, but eschews lamentation and tears.
Poem 129 (as numbered in the Collected Works)

Fable

Janos Pilinsky was a Hungarian poet. Born in Budapest in 1921, he was conscripted into the army during World War 2, and spent the last year of the war in various prison camps in Germany and Austria. This experience was definitive. A Catholic, a committed Catholic, what he experienced during the war and in these camps was something he subsequently wrestled with for the rest of his life. He could have chosen the easy route, become an atheist and walk away from his former commitments. But he didn’t, he stayed, and worked the emptiness, year after year. I’m not convinced he believed in a God, His existence, in any simple fashion, but I think he did not believe in his absence. When he confronted the emptiness, it was as a religious poet who never flinched from the biological evidence. The Incarnation and Redemptive Suffering would have been default templates to use to help make sense of the horror, yet he avoids both. How is it then that his poems can appear so luminous? Over and over again he returns to the scene of the crime, examines the evidence, and then examines it, examines it, and examines it…until it begins to shine, like a chalice, like a monstrance. But as the ‘fable’ below demonstrates, not everything that shines let’s you in.

(Fable)

Tadeusz Rozewicz is of that generation of Polish poets who wrote their best work in the aftermath of World War 2, others of whom I’ll get round to mentioning. I like this poem because it echoes findings on the practicalities of evil that were published by Jay Lifton in his study of evil called The Nazi Doctors. The question Lifton addressed was, why and how did medical doctors take part in the Final Solution in the numbers they did? One of his conclusions was that they did so by constructing what he called an Auschwitz Self that treated morality as context dependant, relative, and that prioritised technical expertise above moral judgement. In this sense, a ‘good’ doctor was one who implemented the Final Solution with efficiency. Rosewicz predates Lifton’s work, but this poem zeroes in on that psychological state that allows a man to perform evil whilst still still laying claim to prestige. But just because a man is good at doing something doesn’t mean he is a good man, nor does a narrow focus on technicalities excuse one from wider moral responsibilities. The title is ironic, and not.

(To The Heart)