-

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En ocasiones, a veces, para acercarse a algunas personas conviene orbitarse alrededor de ellas: ir trazando recorridos

con la (relativa) libertad que nos proporciona la distancia, pero (relativamente) sometidos a la fuerza de la gravedad

que nos mantiene girando en torno a ellas. Se trata de un movimiento ordenado y repetitivo: son dos rasgos que Paul Celan

hubiera apreciado. La denominación de ciclo, que hemos elegido para acercarnos a Wislawa Szymborska y a Paul Celan

proviene, en buena medida, de tales rasgos.

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Jacques Derrida, que fue colega de Celan durante varios años en la École Normal Supérieure de París, y lo trató personalmente

desde 1968, dice: “Era un hombre muy discreto, muy borroso, inaparente. La presencia de Celan era, como todo su ser y como

todos sus gestos, de una extrema discreción, elíptica, borrosa.”

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El expresionismo, un movimiento espiritual que coloca la experiencia interna por encima de la vida exterior, tuvo su origen en Alemania,

en 1910. En poesía, Georg Trakl y Gottfried Benn se citan, entre otros, como sus iniciadores. Se considera como un esfuerzo para

transformar la poesía -y la misma existencia humana-; se dice que su mérito consiste en haber combatido por la causa del

espíritu.

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El expresionismo se enfrentó con el hondo problema de las relaciones entre el hombre y la vida, arrancando de un idealismo casi religioso.

Por ello ha representado una crisis en la conciencia contemporánea, a la vez que un sentimiento de insatisfacción. El expresionista traduce sus vivencias

más íntimas, sus pasiones interiores, con frecuencia desgajándolas, desarticulándolas de la realidad exterior -y, en este sentido, se le supone el primer paso hacia

el surrealismo-. No tiene en cuenta las propiedades reales de los objetos, la objetividad presente: lanza desde el  interior al espacio los pensares y

sentires subjetivos de la conciencia: como una linterna mágica, por decirlo así.

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Verdad subjetiva/pasión íntima/afirmación de la personalidad propia/realidad sustancial del alma.

Voluntad activa de penetrar la naturaleza con el espíritu/visualizar lo eterno apartando las apariencias.

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El lenguaje expresionista está cortado, es telegráfico, reiterativo, abundante en monólogos interiores, rompe la sintaxis lógica del razonamiento:

no se trata de narrar, sino de ahondar: las imágenes son libres y móviles; la acción llega a ser abrupta, caótica -en la línea del imaginismo-.

Más: es conciso, penetrante, desnudo, con un tono patético y desolado, busca lo esencial rompiendo las reglas sintácticas si es preciso, sustantivando

o creando neologismos. Utiliza también el simultaneísmo; utiliza el oxímoron (o contradicción en sus términos, que es un absurdo: un instante eterno,

por ejemplo. Es muy frecuente en poesía mística y amorosa: el oxímoron trasciende todas las antinomias).

–

¿Añadiremos todavía algunos elementos del expresionismo (poético alemán) o tenemos suficiente con los que hemos nombrado? Bien, tal vez nos interese

incluir aquellos que nos ayuden a entender: el expresionismo se inspira en el gótico y en el barroco para devolver a Alemania su genuina tradición artística,

rompiendo violentamente con la civilización burguesa. Por su parte, Celan aprendió del germanista altoalemán medieval Horowitz Mittelhochdeutsch, lo que

después le permitiría ocuparse del Nibelungenlied, libro del que tomaría elementos ficcionales por los que luego introdujo en su poesía referentes caballerescos

y mágicos.

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Estamos orbitando a Celan: la declaración de intenciones que hemos hecho al inicio no era retórica.

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Seguimos en ello. Paul Celan, como expresionista, despreciaba el realismo (la mímesis, la representación,  la imitación naturalista): incluso rechazaba

]]> http://bebrowed.wordpress.com/2009/12/20/paul-celan-jacques-derrida-and-deconstruction/ Sun, 20 Dec 2009 18:17:56 +0000 bebrowed http://bebrowed.wordpress.com/2009/12/20/paul-celan-jacques-derrida-and-deconstruction/

In the Anglo-Saxon world, Jacques Derrida often gets a bad press. He’s usually considered to be either a complete charlatan or to be unreadably obscure. I’ve never been brave enough to tackle either ‘Of Grammatology’ or ‘Glas’ but I was terribly impressed by the notorious ‘differance’ essay- so impressed that I copied out the last few paragraphs. I was also impressed by Derrida’s reading of Heidegger’s use of the term ’spirit’ although less impressed with his analysis of the rectorship address.

Derrida in 1994 said of deconstruction “ It is an analysis which tries to find out how their thinking works or does not work, to find the tensions, the contradictions, the heterogeneity” and “deconstruction is something which happens and which happens inside”. This was an attempt to refute the charge that deconstruction has no respect for the text and seeks to reduce everything to the same level.

One can argue whether deconstruction is appropriate for philosophy and this is a debate that I’m happy to leave to others. It is however clear to me that it is entirely fitting for the reading of ‘difficult’ poetry and indeed may be the only way to read challenging verse.

I have written on this blog before about the poetry of Paul Celan (who has also been accused of unreadable obscurity) and my belief that his work is the most important poetry of the last 50 years. Celan is a source of constant joy for academics, they tend to seize on one aspect of his work (usually his admiration for Heidegger) and extrapolate to the nth degree. In my view this doesn’t clarify any aspect of the work but does enable critics to construct their own pet theories ad absurdam. I acknowledge that Celan is a complex figure and one has to reconcile his relationship to philosophy, religion, German literature as well as the holocaust and his consequent mental health issues but that doesn’t mean that we should seize on one particular strand as proof of his intentions.

Further meat for academics is provided by two speeches that Celan made (The Bremen Address and the Meridian) in which he sets out a personal manifesto for poetry. These two have provided critics with endless hours of fun in picking over key phrases to the exclusion of the whole.

It is therefore with some trepidation that I approached ‘Shibboleth for Paul Celan’, a 1986 essay in which Derrida tackles several key themes in Celan’s work. The first thing that can be said is that it is neither unreadable nor obscure, there are no references to people that you’ve never heard of nor are there any foreign phrases that will bee unfamiliar to the lay reader. The essay stays within Celan’s work and looks especially at the concept of ‘date’ and the use of the Hebrew word ‘Shibboleth’ and the practice of circumcision.

What I like about this essay is that Derrida treats the texts with complete respect, he doesn’t indulge in flights of fancy and extrapolate things that aren’t actually there. The essay starts with a long discussion of the nature of cirmcision and what it may signify, the circular nature of the wound itself, the wound as a sign of admission to a community and ‘the experience of blessing and of purification’.

In the Meridian, Celan says ‘Yet the poem does speak! It remains mindful of its dates, yet – it speaks’. Derrida starts from this to consider the role of the date in Celan’s poetry, pointing out the importance of commemoration and mourning in the work and also the fact that the date on which the poem was written always returns the following year. The fact that poems carry two dates (the date on which it was written and the date of the event which it describes) and the notion that each date carries within it its own destruction leads to Derrida to point out the inherent madness of the date. Some would say that this is an example of over-reading or of finding things that aren’t actually there but I found myself following this line of argument and can see its merits.

In the Old Testament the story is told of a victory over the Ephraimites. In order to prevent the defeated soldiers from escaping, each was required to say the word ’shibboleth’, the Ephraimites were known for being unable to pronounce this word and thus gve themselves away. Derrida extends the use of this word to consider the access that it may give to a poem and also the role of passwords as rallying cries to political action.

I realise that the above doesn’t do justice to the nuances of the essay but I hope it conveys the sense that deconstruction can treat the text with appropriate respect and that challenging work almost insists on this working from within. This particular essay will also enrich the experience of anyone with an interest in Celan.

It is an analysis which tries to find out how their thinking works ordoes not work, to find th e tensions, the contradictions, the heterogeneitywithin their own corpus

In my journey up Mount Prynne I’ve been looking at some of the academic work that sets out to elucidate the poems and place Prynne in a wider context. The Jacket site has been particularly useful in this regard but unfortunately most of the stuff on there is couched in dense and (to the lay reader) impenetrable terms which doesn’t actually elucidate the work but does serve to further mystify and complicate the business of climbing Mount Prynne. I cite as evidence Kevin Nolan who writes- “rather than a merely mechanical materialism or, even worse, a Heideggerian apophatics which would collapse the autonomy of the poem in the rush towards a negative theology of the unennhalte?” How many people, other than post-graduates, are going to be entirely familiar with the meaning of this?

There’s also the issue of value in poetry and the fact that an impossibly elitist and obscure discourse on poets and their work effectively destroys that value by means of exclusion. This is not to say that I am against theory nor am I against the various European brands of criticism per se. I do recall however watching with some dismay as deconstruction, post-structuralism and all things Foucault started to seep into the Anglo-Saxon world in the early eighties. This seepage has produced what is, at best, a bastardisation of the original ideas and, at worst, a complete travesty of what was meant.

I need also to say that there are some insights in Mr Nolan’s piece but the hapless reader does need to wade through the bullshit to get at them. Unlike David Harvey, I don’t think that Eng Lit has entirely lost it’s theoretical way  but I do feel that attempting to be more ‘difficult’ than difficult poets themselves are does nobody any good. Criticism, if its any good, should provide readers and students with the wider context and provide the tools for us to appreciate the poems finer points. Alastair Fowler’s gloss on Paradise Lost, for example, tells me about the way Milton makes use of astronomy and of the significance of numbers in the poem’s  construction.  I can then choose whether or not to marvel at the astronmical invention and puzzle over the numbers but Fowler also lets me know that these are not barriers to understanding. George Steiner writes with great warmth and enthusiasm about Paul Celan but he does this with far more clarity than many members of the academy.

So, this is a plea for Eng Lit to sort itself out and to remember that obscurity and quality do not always go hand in hand and that ‘difficult’ poets do should not be written about in difficult terms.

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DOVE?

Nelle masse incoerenti della notte.

Nel ghiaiume e nei detriti del dolore sordo,

nel lentissimo tumulto,

nel pozzo di saggezza che si chiama Mai.

Aghi d’acqua,

a ricucire insieme

l’ombra schiattata – essa lotta

per sprofondare ancora, più giù,

libera.

(P. Celan)

*

Prynne and Hill have many things in common, both have taught at Cambridge, Hill is only four years older than Prynne, both admire Paul Celan and both write poetry that is said to be difficult. They are also the two most important poets in the English language.

If ‘difficult’ means that they write poems that require more than 30 seconds’ attention, then they are clearly difficult. I would argue that ‘difficult’ isn’t a particularly useful term and that we should use ‘complex’ and ‘absorbing’ instead. Both Prynne and Hill are important because they challenge the safe mediocrity that passes for English poetry these days and because they remind us of the possibilities of language.

I’m much more familiar with Hill than I am with Prynne but it has taken four years to achieve an understanding of what Hill may be about. This has been an immensely rewarding experience helped along by frequent reference to the  OED, DNB and Wikipedia. I like to know the politics of the poets that I like and Hill has described himself as a hierarchical Tory and a 19th Century Red Tory. I take him  to mean members of the Ultra Tory faction that aligned themselves with Cobbett at various points during the 1830s. In 2009 this is obviously a minority position to take but it does give a flavour of Hill’s eccentricity.

Both Prynne and Hill are critical of the money markets.  Such vilification has a long and noble history in English politics – we all like to castigate those who appear to do very little for their wealth but Prynne especially goes for knee jerk easy options rather than presenting a more nuanced analysis. In ‘News of the Warring Clans’ he has a go at option trading in this manner and in ‘The Oval Windows’ he has a more obscure go at the manipulation and control of economic data which he describes as ‘work makes free logic’. Work makes free was emblazoned on the gates of Auschwitz and is a phrase that shouldn’t really be used lightly. There is a huge gap between the workings of capitalism and the eliminationist impulse that motivated the Nazis. This aside, Prynne does redeem himself with ‘Refuse Collection’ which is his response to the atrocities committed at Abu Grhaib, a searing indictment of western imperialism and one of the best political poems that I’ve ever read.

Starting to read Prynne can be a daunting experience wherea Hill is intimidating. Prynne is daunting because of the use of words- ’shut inch’, ‘tree glide’ are examples of the kinds of phrases that I’ve been engaging with in recent weeks which I find oddly involving. Hill is intimidating because of the breadth of his references. ‘Triumph  of Love’ is the only poem that I know of to contain reference to both Gracie Fields and Michel Foucault.  These aren’t particularly obscure but the are others that are (the Lawes brothers, Hallgrimur Petursson, Immelmann to name but three)  which is why Wikipedia and the DNB are so helpful.

One difference between the two is in the use of foreign phrases, Hill tends to translate these as he goes along within the poem whereas Prynne doesn’t. My poor French can make sense of the phrases in that language but I can’t do this with the German. I’m also a bit concerned at the almost random way that Prynne uses French phrases when there are perfectly adequate English ones available.

In terms of the work, I would nominate ‘Mercian Hymns’,  ‘Triumph of Love’ and ‘ Scenes from Comus’ as the finest of Hill’s output, I would nominate ‘Brass’, ‘News of the Warring Clans’, ‘Word Order’ and ‘Refuse Collection’ for Prynne.

What I’m also grateful for is that both have broadened my horizons. Reading Prynne has led to Charles Olson (a revelation), Ed Dorn and Robert Creeley which has caused e to be more sympathetic to American poetry. Reading Hill has led to Hopkins, Southwell and Henry Vaughan. I still don’t like Hopkins but Hill has made me work out why.

Both poets have written poems dedicated to Celan and Celan looms large in their work. Prynnes technique of using words that have multiple meanings and of putting words together in odd ways is redolent of Celan at his best. Hill makes the most direct reference to Celan in ‘The Orchards of Sion” where he has several goes at translating ‘atemwende’  and then speculates about Celan’s taste in women. All of this feels a bit gratuitous.

Who is the best? This depends on what you want poetry to do, if we wish to be reminded of the complexity of reality then Prynne is your man. If we want poems to remind us of our moral obligations and the importance of the natural world then Hill is way out in front. There can be no denying that these two are writing poetry that puts the rest in the shade.

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Salmo

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Nadie nos forma otra vez de la tierra y el barro,

nadie sopla en nuestro polvo.

Nadie.

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Alabado seas tú. Nadie.

Por ti queremos

florecer

hasta ti.

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Nada

fuimos, somos, seremos,

floreciendo:

la nada,

la rosa de nadie.

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Con el lápiz transparente,

con las fibras de polvo baldías como este cielo,

con la corona roja

de la palabra púrpura

cantamos a las,

oh, a las espinas.

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Psalm

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Niemand knetet uns wieder aus Erde aund Lehm,

niemand bespricht unsern Staub.

Niemand.

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Gelobt seist du, Niemand.

Dir zulieb wollen

wir blühn.

Dir

entgegen.

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Ein Nichts

waren wir, sind wir, werden

wir bleiben, blühend:

die Nichts-, die

Niemandrose.

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Mit

dem Griffel seelenhell,

dem Staubfaden himmelswüst,

der Krone rot

vom Purpurwort, das wir sangen

über, o über

dem Dorn.

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Paul Celan

Salmo

Traducción de José María Pérez Gay

This article on Paul Celan in today’s Die Zeit begins, ‘It’s a bad joke that Germany at least won the philosophical war, with help from its secret weapon concealed in the Black Forest.” I couldn’t possibly comment on the author’s consideration of why the many “heideggernden Sprachmystikern” might have warmed to something in Celan’s poetry which was “dunkel, hermetisch oder monologisch“. Heidegger as we all know was a wholly dialogical thinker; it’s just his preferred dialogical partner was a local farmer sat smoking a pipe in the ski hut’s Herrgottswinkel.

UNE FOIS,
je l’ai entendu,
il lavait le monde,
non vu, à longueur de nuit,
vraiment.

Un et infini,
anéantis,
disaient Je.

Lumière fut. Salut.

***

Paul Celan (1920-1970) – Renverse du souffle (Atemwende, 1967) – Traduction Jean-Pierre Lefebvre

« Celui qui marche sur la tête, Mesdames et Messieurs – celui qui marche sur la tête, il a le ciel en abîme sous lui. » Paul Celan

Okay, I’m back. And I’m being asked to talk about what the difference is between prose and poetry. I’ve seen this debate on poetry message boards, where someone posts up a poem for critique and someone else says: “That is terrible. It’s not a poem.”

And you’re like, what? What kind of a thing is that to say?

Sometimes someone says, “That’s just lineated prose.”

Again: what?

So it seems that one way of talking about prose – especially among poets – is to start by talking about poetry. After all, the concept of “prose” only exists in our world as a counterfoil for “poetry,” or “verse.” (I differentiate partly because “verse” implies versification – i.e., prosody – whereas “poetry” doesn’t need, these days, overtly to have it. Note all the qualifiers.)

It seems to me that a good place to start looking at this binary is with Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s famous remark that:

The definition of good prose is – proper words in their proper places; of good verse – the most proper words in their proper places. The words in prose ought to express their intended meaning, and no more… But in verse, you must do more; there the words [are] the media…

Very prescient of him, I think. And then there’s Yeats, writing to Lady Wellesley – specifically about poetry as opposed to prose – that, “The correction of prose, because it has no laws, is endless; a poem comes right with a click like a closing box.”

We could ask the novelists what they think about that “no laws” remark; it’s tempting to say prose has more laws, and poetry ust has more of a guideline… And it is possible there is a single moment when novelists know they’re done; maybe it just isn’t like a click.

Housman said: “Poetry is not the thing said but the way of saying it.” He also said, “Meaning is of the intellect, poetry is not.” And he said “Poetry indeed seems to be more physical than intellectual.”

This is where you get into the idea that poetry is partly about, not only sound, but the movement of the sounds through both the ear and the mouth; rhythm and pattern, on either the large scale or at letter or sound level. It’s abut waves and reverberations.

One of the most particular prose stylists of the late 19th century was, surprisingly, RL Stevenson. He would write and rewrite to get the assonance right, to get the sounds to work in service of the thing. But he was definitely writing prose. He’d have said so.

One way of thinking about it is to think of prose as something that can be paraphrased. As Frost said: “poetry is what’s lost in translation.” So you can translate prose – a novel, say – and even with the odd infelicitous word or clunky phrase, you get the meaning and can understand the point.

Try that with Mallarmé* or Celan.

And what about prose poems? Are they poems because each word is particular and necessary to a meta-meaning, and no word can be replaced?(I’m asking; I’m really asking! I find prose poems harder to read than poetry-poems. I’ve written a couple, two or three, and they did come to me differently, and defied the line. But I can’t define it. And then someone said to me once that when I read one of them out it was in metre – which it had defied on the page – so who knows?)

On the whole, I think the kind of poetry that gives poetry a good name is the kind where you can’t “describe what it’s about” because the whole thing is so integral: lineation, word play, double meanings, sonic effects, the particular timbre of a set of allusions or changes in register (though you can do many of these things in prose). As Auden said, “A poem must be a closed system.” An ecosystem, if you like.

To say any of this, of course, is to invite the exceptions: the Sebalds, the Steins, the other people who don’t begin with S…

But just for the sake of argument, let’s say a poem is a closed system. And, except for the the subset “bad poetry”, prose is everything else…

* Here’s a good description from Wikipedia of the kind of thing I mean:

Some consider Mallarmé one of the French poets most difficult to translate into English. The difficulty is due in part to the vague nature of much of his work, but mostly to the important role that the sound of the words, rather than their meaning, plays in his poetry. When recited in French, his poems allow alternative meanings which are not evident on reading the work on the page. For example, Mallarmé’s Sonnet en ‘-yx’ opens with the phrase ses purs ongles (‘her pure nails’), whose first syllables when spoken aloud sound very similar to the words c’est pur son (‘it’s pure sound’). Indeed, the ‘pure sound’ aspect of his poetry has been the subject of musical analysis and has inspired musical compositions.