Paul Celan, _Threadsuns_, trans. Pierre Joris

THE ONLY CELAN I have read is the selected poems volume translated by Michael Hamburger, and that was years ago--mid-nineties, I think. Reading Yoko Tawada's novel (see yesterday's post) inspired me to seek out Threadsuns (in the original German, Fadensonnen), the volume that is the subject of the paper Patrik is planning to deliver at the Paris Celan conference. I was in luck--a handy library had Joris's Breathturn into Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry of Paul Celan.

Joris's commentary includes the observation that "Threadsuns may well be the least commented on and most critically neglected volume of Celan's oeuvre." That made a neat additional datum on Tawada's character; he does seem like a reader who would gravitate to the less-populated precincts of reading. Not only is he drawn to the famously difficult Celan, but also to Celan's least read book. According to Kai Fischer, whom Joris goes on to quote, Threadsuns "is not only the gateway into  the late work but also introduces and performs a new way of saying that will be characteristic for the following volumes." In other words, this is when things get really challenging.

I cannot shed much light on the poems, I'm afraid. I found them baffling, though baffling in a compelling and arresting way. Sorry about the self-contradiction--that is, saying the poems both compelled me, which suggests they pushed me along, and arrested me, which suggests they brought me to a stop--but there you go. I was, indeed, compelled and arrested.

The poems are full of abrupt turns, opaque allusions, and newly-coined words. For instance:

THE HEARTSCRIPTCRUMBLED vision-isle

at midnight, in feeble 

ignition key glimmer.

"Vision-isle" conjures up something without much readerly effort...but "heartscriptcrumbled"? The effect is a little like the coinages of Finnegans Wake, but only a little--somehow they land differently, less playfully than Joyce's compounds, seem more effortful, harder-won. I always felt like something was at stake that could be said no other way,, even without knowing what the something was.

The word "Trans-Tibetan," as used in Tawada's title, shows up in one of the poems: "Ashrei, // a word without meaning, / trans-Tibetan, / injected into the / Jewess / Pallas / Athene's / helmeted ovaries, // and when he, // he, // fetally, // harps Carpathian nono, // then the Allemande / bobbins her lace for / the vomiting im- / mortal / song." There's a Thomas Mann  novella in there somewhere.

I recently learned that Celan, a Holocaust survivor, on one occasion met Heidegger, a former member of the Nazi party. What was that like? There is at least one book about it, apparently. 

Yoko Tawada, _Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel_, trans. Susan Bernofsky

YOKO TAWADA WRITES fiction in both Japanese and German. From what I gather, her writing in both languages is not just a switch, as Milan Kundera switched from Czech to French or Jhumpa Lahiri switched from English to Italian, but an actual going back and forth. Remarkable, no?

She came to my attention via a review article in the LRB by Adam Thirlwell that discussed several of her novels--I picked this one because the title was irresistible. It was originally written in German.

The main character, Patrik, is also the narrator, although he usually refers to himself as "the patient" or "Patrik," only occasionally slipping into the first person. He lives in Berlin and may be German, although there is some uncertainty about his nationality. He is a Celan scholar but has no institutional affiliation, although he may have had one once. He is supposed to give a paper on Celan's volume Threadsuns at a conference in Paris, but perhaps he only thinks he is supposed to give one. In either case, he is flummoxed by the procedures he has to complete to get to the conference.

The outline of Patrik's identity, we could say, is insecurely fixed--mobile and porous. He is like a Thomas Bernhard character, a kind of laboratory animal trying to solve the maze of his own personhood and not making much progress. There is also a kind of Bernhardian eventlessness to the novel, which does not so much have a plot as a Debordian dérive as Patrik wanders about the city at the same time he is wandering through his psychological maze.

Within the maze, though, he finds a reward: Leo-Eric Fu, a deeply simpatico figure that Patrik encounters and then re-encounters. A budding friendship with Leo-Eric seems to hold out a tantalizing possibility of solving the riddle of Patrik. Leo-Eric has some kind of connection to the Asian continent, so he may be the the Trans-Tibetan Angel ("Trans-Tibetan," by the way, is a descriptor that appears in Celan's Threadsuns).

Is the last paragraph of the novel a kind of magical happy ending or the final dissolution of "the patient"? I don't know. I don't know what to conclude about the ending of "The Yellow Wallpaper," either. But we are airborne, and it feels right. Fly, Patrik, fly!

Anne Berest, _The Postcard_, trans. Tina Kover

A NOVEL, BUT based on Berest's own family history. Indeed, a lot of it could qualify as memoir, I think. Is the distinction between the two, always smudged, in the process of disappearing entirely?

The postcard of the title is received by Berest's mother, Lélia, in early 2003. On it are written the names Ephraïm, Emma, Noémie, and Jacques--nothing else. Berest's mother is shocked and scared, because these are the names of her own mother's father, mother, sister, and brother, all four of whom were Russian Jews who emigrated to France in the 1930s and were then sent to their deaths in the camps in 1941. Who sent the surprisingly knowing card, and why? 

The book is about Berest's and her mother's efforts to answer those questions. This involves a lot of detective work, which is the part that feels most like a memoir. As they learn more about how Myriam (Lélia's mother, Anne Berest's grandmother) lived in the 1930s and how she evaded capture during the years of the Nazi Occupation, Berest narrates an imagined version of what Myriam's life was like, which feels more like a novel.

All questions about the postcard get answered in the book's last few pages.

Worthy of note: Berest's family is Jewish, but not particularly observant. Early in the book, Berest attends a seder where she gets criticized for not being more familiar with Jewish traditions than she is. She can't come up with much of a reply in the moment, but near the end of the book (Chapter 38), she comes to some very striking conclusions about what her Jewishness means.

This was a book club pick--probably not something I would have chosen to read on my own. Good, though.

Mary Jo Salter (guest editor) and David Lehman (series editor), _Best American Poetry 2024_

 I WONDER WHETHER David Lehman is thinking of hanging it up. There's a valedictory tone to his foreword this year--reflections on Keats's "When I Have Fears," on the passing of Louise Glück, some parting advice he gave to one of his classes. Hmm.

And can we read anything into this being the first BAP to include some of Lehman's own poetry? We get thirteen stanzas from a longer poem called Ithaca that similarly feels like closing up shop, as though Lehman were about to light out for the territory where oars are taken for winnowing fans.

That's not all. Three of this year's contributors--Glück, Saskia Hamilton, and Mark Strand--are no longer alive, and two of the poems are about getting messages from dead poets: Jeffrey Harrison's "A Message from Tony Hoagland" and Mitch Sisskind's "Jack Benny," which begins, "John Ashbery called me after he died [...]."

Is Lehman thinking hard about taking his journey west?

I hope Lehman hangs around for a while, but he is getting up in years (born 1948) and he has been managing BAP since its beginnings in 1988, so he's certainly earned the right to hand it off. 

This year's guest editor is veteran anthologist Mary Jo Salter. Salter gives us a wide swath of the middle of the road here. The poems that are not from the New Yorker or one of the longer-established  reviews (Kenyon, Gettysburg, Hudson, Sewanee) sound like they could well have been from the New Yorker or one of the longer-established reviews. All solid and professional, but a bit watered down, with no surprises.

Nice to have a crown of sonnets from A. E. Stallings, though. Are these coming back? Sara Nicholson had one in her recent book. 

Anahid Nersessian, _Keats's Odes: A Lover's Discourse_

HAVING JUST READ Edmund Wilson's 1950s journals, I wondered whether he could  be considered the last great American literary critic who did not have a secure academic position (although he did have a few prestigious-visitor sorts of positions).  I couldn't think of another one from the last four or five decades. 

There have been some university-based literary critics who made significant efforts to write for broader, culturally literate but not scholarly audiences. Lionel Trilling, for instance. Harold Bloom was trying to do that in his books on the western canon and on Shakespeare, but both those books feel eccentric and polemical compared to Wilson's Patriotic Gore. There's Camille Paglia, while we are on the subject of the eccentric and polemical. Stephen Greenblatt made some headway with the larger public in the Shakespeare biography and The Swerve.

A whole crop of younger literary critics seem to going for the brass ring of the wider audience in recent years, writing for n+1 and NYRB and the New Yorker and the NYT Book Review, such as Merve Emre, Christine Smallwood, and the author of Keats's Odes, Anahid Nersessian. Nersessian has already published a couple of more straightforwardly academic books, but this one seems to be written for a broader (though still well-read) public.

I liked it a lot. I'm not sure I learned much that I did not already know about the six great odes (or the five great odes and Ode on Indolence), but the book had a wise and appealing voice, took some meaningful detours into Nersessian's personal history, and did Keats due honor. I especially liked how Nersessian drew on Roland Barthes in structuring her approach, and I loved how she put Keats into a conversation that included Alice Notley, Juliana Spahr, and Anne Boyer.

I wasn't always persuaded by the claims about the poems. Nersessian dislikes the complacency with which the speaker of Ode on a Grecian Urn regards the sexual violence depicted on the urn and the fatuousness of equating truth and beauty, and she has reason to dislike them--but why let Keats off the hook with the assertion, "Another thing that distinguishes this poem is that its speaker is not Keats, but a character or persona"? Not Keats? I cannot see why the speaker of Grecian Urn is any more a character or persona than any of the other speakers. I mean...come on. 

Nersessian (following Jerome McGann) is a bit more willing to call Keats out for leaving the Peterloo Massacre out of To Autumn. In general, she wishes Keats's poetry manifested more of his awareness of and attraction to radical politics than it does. I get that. But she (and McGann) ought to appreciate more how erratic poetic inspiration is. I can imagine a survivor of Hiroshima, say, a month after the dropping of the bomb, writing a poem about something completely unrelated--the  changing of the seasons, even. And why not? Is that a problem? Poets are not editorial writers.

On the other hand--Nersessian's chapter on Ode to Psyche is far and away the best thing I have ever read on that still under-appreciated poem. 

Keats's Odes and Joe Moshenska's book on Milton make me think there may be a whole dazzling wave of books by literary scholars that are aimed at the literary-but-not-necessarily-academic readers. As a retired academic who has waded through enough dissertation-ese to satisfy me for this lifetime, I'm ready. 

Edmund Wilson, _The Fifties_

 WHEN I WAS in graduate school in the late 1970s and early 1980s, there were a few critics/theorists whose names, when dropped, would elicit wise head-nods from one’s peers: Adorno, Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson. I was too cowardly to mention my own great allegiance, except when I had had too many drinks, but there was a secret shrine in my heart for Edmund Wilson. 

Wilson was a bit dated, not very theoretically rigorous, had tended to publish in the New Yorker and similarly unscholarly publications. His politics were left, but in an Old Left way, and well short of 1980s sophistication about race and gender. His prose was lucid and graceful, which seemed a sign of shallowness at the time. You knew Derrida and Jameson were the real deal because you could barely understand what they were driving at.

I loved the lucid and graceful prose, however; I loved that he had learned as many languages as he had and could read the great Russian novels and the Hebrew scriptures in the original languages. I loved that even when writing about relatively minor figures—James Branch Cabell and Henry Blake Fuller, say—he read the whole corpus of their work. An essay by Wilson on anybody was a portrait in the round, a full tour.

The north side of Chicago had a used book store on every other block in those days, and with a few years of diligent scouting I acquired and devoured Axel’s Castle, The Wound and the Bow, The Triple Thinkers, To the Finland Station, A Window on Russia, The Dead Sea Scrolls, and my very favorite, Patriotic Gore. I read through the collected reviews and literary journalism: The Shores of Light, Classics and Commercials, The Bit Between my Teeth, The Devils and Canon Barham. 

His journals had been published, too, edited by Leon Edel. I started in on the first volume, The Twenties, in keen anticipation, but didn’t get far. Wilson had a habit, in those days, of writing long passages of natural description—a writing exercise recommended to him by a beloved professor of his at Princeton, Christian Gauss. I can take a certain amount of landscape writing, but not pages and pages, and I just bogged down.

Having heard that he to some extent had abandoned the habit in his  later years, I last year started in on The Fifties. It was like meeting up with an old, old friend. Here was the Wilson I loved, ruminating on what he was reading and the people he was meeting, which included not only various informants behind such books as Apologies to the Iroquois and The Dead Sea Scrolls, but also W. H. Auden, Dawn Powell, André Malraux, Vladimir Nabokov…Max Beerbohm, of all people. 

Should I try The Sixties? I think so. I may even try The Forties to see whether he had already started getting away from the landscape compulsion.

Martin Heidegger, _Hölderlin's Hymn "The Ister"_, trans. William McNeill and Julia Davis

 THE THREE OR four people who regularly look at this blog may be growing weary of my returning to the topic of Heidegger. Sorry. The fever has not passed, unfortunately.

To resume: I love the way Heidegger talks about poetry; he seems to give it its full due. Take "The Origin of the Work of Art," for instance, or his insistence in this book (lectures for a course he gave in 1942) that poetic ideas are not simply philosophical ideas with a lot of frosting and bows. One does not subtract or scrape off the poetry to get the "real" idea. The idea is in the poetry, damn it.

However, I worry that Heidegger's thinking about poetry is fatally compromised by his support of Hitler and Nazism.

Heidegger has some insights here that left me slack-jawed in admiration. The main subject is Hölderlin's hymn to the River Ister (a.k.a. the Danube), and in Part I Heidegger describes a river as at the same time a locality and a journeying. Which struck me as profoundly true. The river is here before us, so it is a locality, but the water we see was upstream yesterday and will be downstream tomorrow, so the river is also an elsewhere. Similarly, the river is a now, while before us, but in its movement is also the past and the future. 

Part III declares that the poet is a river.  The poet is of the now--but also, if he or she is mindful of tradition, also a voice of the past and, in prophetic mode, a voice of the future. And the poet is of here--but also in his or her awareness of other traditions, perhaps also an elsewhere. Great idea, no? So the poet is a river--

--which means the poet is a demi-god, like the river. "Uh oh," you might think here. And then history gets married to the idea of locality and Heidegger starts suggesting  that the West is special, thanks to the Greeks, and the German are special too, since they come closest to grasping what the Greeks were about...and we are well past "uh oh" at that point.

Can we say poets are rivers and call it good, without saying they are demi-gods?

Part II, the longest section of the book at about 70 pages, is about the first choral ode in Sophocles' Antigone, and it too is astonishingly insightful, thankfully without raising so many red flags. A key point: the word deinon in the first line, most often translated "wonder," actually shades off into concepts like  anxiety and terror as well as awe--the frightful, powerful, and inhabitual is Heidegger's formula--so the chorus's claim that humankind has more deinon going on than anything else in the world is worth pondering, and ponder it Heidegger does. Part II is a neat demonstration that the poetic idea is not the pill under the sugar coating, but integral to the poetry itself.

Final note: German has a verb, dichten, which means "to compose" and is not quite the same as the word "to write." Rather than translate it as "writing poetry," McNeill and Davis render it as "poetize," which was odd at first but made sense, as it helps capture the act of discernment or framing that is part of writing poetry.