five IMPROMPTUS
Selected Poems and Some Prose by Gottfried Benn translated by Michael Hofman
and ZIBALDONE by Giacomo Leopardi, both published by Farrar Straus and Giroux
are the two best books published this year 2013
in the United Stated. Both books
are sadly quite expensive though the Leopardi is now down to $47 at Amazon and
the kindle version is 36. The Benn is at
$25.
I
usually do not mention this fact but the reality of money is ever present. Neither book will be exhausted after one or a
hundred readings. If you bought the new
Pynchon novel most likely you did not finish reading it and are not now likely
to and if by chance you did you will never re-read it… same goes for every
single book on the best seller lists, again this year.
The
Zibaldone is the inexhaustible notebook
of the greatest Italian poet after Dante.
I have already written about them but what is finally heartening about
them is that they are devoid of any cheering reflections or news: they truly
reflect the accident of a person’s birth and the sure death to follow within X
of years. And with more than 2500 pages…
eight Gottfried
Benn was a German poet. His years:
1886-1956. He was a medical doctor. He did not leave Germany during 1933-45. Any other details are trivial and a
distraction away from the words he put on the page. I read him as an equal with T.S. Eliot and
Paul Valery and David Jones and Ronald Johnson.
Of
course I know it is not a horse race but it is good to lay down the calling
cards.
Like
most literate people born in the 20th Century into an English
speaking country I discovered Benn through the New Directions anthology PRIMAL
VISION and read a few additional pieces in the Benn volume in The German
Library published by Continuum. Michael
Hofman’s volume compliments these books and adds some new selections and his
own versions of some of the best known Benn poems.
I
wish I could afford to give this book to every friend and acquaintance.
Many
readers will remember that T.S. Eliot quoted in The Three Voices of Poetry from a Benn’s lecture Probleme der Lyrik.
Strangely, all three anthologies do not include a translation of this
lecture and you would have to travel, according to Google, to a small college
in Texas to read a translation and commentary on it. However, Eliot’s description and commentary
is exemplary:
What
asks Herr Benn in his lecture, does the writer of such a poem, “addressed to no
one,“ start with? There is first, he
says, an inert embryo or “creative germ’
[ein dumpfer schopferischer Keim] and, on the other hand, the Language,
the resources of words at the poet’s command. He has something germinating in
him for which he must find words; but he cannot know what words he wants until
he has found the words; he cannot identify this embryo until it has been transformed
into an arrangement of the right words in the right order. When you have the words for it the “thing”
for which the words had to be found has disappeared, replaced by a poem. What you start from is nothing so definite as
an emotion, in any ordinary sense; of it is still more certainly not an idea; it
is--- to adapt two lines of Beddoes to a different meaning---a
bodiless childful of
life, in the gloom
Crying with frog voice, “what
shall I be?”
I agree with Gottfried Benn…
+++the proof is
always in th actual poems++++
Ten And we have the
most memorable of the Benn poems the one
that stays always fresh as it were.
Beautiful youth
The
mouth of the girl who had lain in the rushes
Looked
so nibbled
When
they opened her chest, her esophagus was so holey
Finally
in a bower under the diaphragm
They
found a nest of young rats.
One
little thing lay dead.
The
others were living off kidneys and liver
Drinking
the cold blood and had
Had
themselves a beautiful youth.
And
just as beautiful was their death, and quick:
The
lot of them were thrown into the water.
Ah,
will you hearken at the little muzzles’ oinks!
This poem is from early in his writing life. And from later in the life:
Fragments 1955
30x
endured agonies at the dentist’s
100x
treated myself to expensive imported roses
4x
shed tears beside open graves
Left
25 women
2x
had a pocket full of money and 98x not,
At
the end of the day you take out an insurance policy
At
12.50 per month
To
be certain of being buried.
….
What
are you? A symptom,
An
ape, a gnome---
OR
from the so-called middle of the life as if anyone can define that for himself,
a something that arrives only after.
A
SHADOW ON THE WALL
A
shadow on the wall
boughs
stirred by the noonday wind
that’s
enough earth
and
for the eye
enough
celestial participation.
How
much further do you want to go? Refuse
the
bossy insistence
of
new impressions---
Lie
there still,
behold
your own fields,
your
estate,
dwelling
especially
on
the poppies
unforgettable
because
they transported the summer---
Where
did it go?
Seventeen And
then there is the prose of Benn. None of
the three books of Benn’s writings including this wonderful current anthology,
make room for the longer prose works in their entirety. Instead of the German on the facing pages I
wish that Hofmann had given those pages over to a complete versions of the
NOVEL OF THE PENOTYPE, THE PTOLEMEAN and DOUBLE LIFE… But do not allow this
quibble to standing in your way to acquiring this book.
We
always need books from writers like the Benn in “Aging as a Problem for Artists
remind us:
With
your back to the wall, in the wretchedness of fatigue, in the grey of emptiness,
you will read your Job and your Jeremiah, and you will stick it out. Draft your prepositions as harshly as you
can, because when the epoch draws to a close and kills your song you will be measured
by your sentences. What you don’t write
will not exist. You will make enemies,
be alone, a nutshell on the sea, a walnut shell emitting odd clanking noises, rattling with cold,
trembling with your own revulsion at yourself, but don’t send out an SOS--- in
the first place, no one will hear you, and in the second, your ending will be peaceful
after so much travail.
If
Hofman who translated Ernst Junger’s STORM OF STEEL has the courage to
translate the great prose books of Benn then it might be possible to reorder
the history of the recent century when it comes to the German language: Gottfried Benn, Ernst Junger, Arno Schmidt
and Uwe Johnson in Germany with Peter Handke, Thomas Bernhard, Ingeborg
Bachmann and Robert Musil in Austria with Robert Walser over there in
Switzerland
