" 'Attention', if you allow me a quote from Malebranche via Walter Benjamin's essay on Kafka, 'attention is the natural prayer of the soul'."
(Paul Celan, 'The Meridian', trans. Rosemarie Waldrop)
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Reading some early poems of Celan and regretting I didn't continue with German - I remember the pained look of Richard Stokes on the morning I went to tell him - although I know why (to switch English classes to get Dave Edwards and Richard Jacobs). The influence of teachers!
Reading Celan I know I am missing so much and I'm ridiculously proud of spotting puns as in:
"Mache mich bitter.
Zahle mich zu den Mandeln"
(note: I can't do umlauts in Blogger)
I'm cast back upon Bunting's advice to simply listen to the language and how that will open up the poem. And so with this poem, the tetchy tight teeth-tongue sounds of "zahle" and "bitter" - as if the almonds were being nibbled, searching for the irritating little bits between the teeth.
Then again, might this be a salutary lesson in reading poetry in English - an inherent foreigness? That poetic language is essentially a language 'other than'? Both closer to and further from us?
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... and I've just discovered that "mandeln" are tonsils in German, too. A case of poet's throat? Any Celan scholars out there?
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Today, boys and girls, we’re going to look at ‘Song of the Chinchilla’ by Lisa Jarnot*. I liked the poem immediately – and I’ve given it to ...
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There’s something very odd going on here.
This morning I chanced to pick up Felstiner’s PAUL CELAN: POET, SURVIVOR, JEW, which I’ve been dipping into whenever the mood takes me. I read a discussion of the poem “Schibboleth”, which sent me to Michael Hamburger’s Selected Celan to read the poem there. Then I turn on the computer & find The Carpenter discussing Celan. In the post previous to that you mentioned Lucretius – and I was brought up short, because I’m thinking of using aspects of DE RERUM NATURA in my serial poem. As Robert Duncan says in A SELECTED PROSE (which also arrived this morning), “There is not a phase of our experience that is meaningless, not a phrase of our communication that is meaningless. We do not make things meaningful, but in our making we work towards an awareness of meaning.”
Yours slightly spooked,
Walrus
PS Incidentally, where in DE RERUM NATURA does that Lucretius quote come from – does Hadot say in the endnote? I found the text of PHILOSOPHY AS A WAY OF LIFE on the Net, only the page with the source note was not made available, wouldn’t you know it . . . It would save me a trip to the library. I have two different translations of DE RERUM NATURA, but it didn’t jump out at me in either.
PPS Felstiner is excellent on Zähle die Mandeln (1952), btw, though he may take it too far for some tastes: “The poet is speaking to his mother . . . The Mandeln he wants to be numbered among call to mind the almonds she baked in breads and cakes, as well as the Yiddish lullaby about Zion’s widowed daughter, ‘Raisins and Almonds’, from Goldfaden’s operetta Shulamis. Blooming earliest in Israel, yielding sweet nuts and bitter, oval like the Levantine eye, almonds now betoken Jewishness for Celan. The Israelites’ menorah in the wilderness has almond blossom designs (Exod. 25:33), and Aaron’s rod bears ripe almonds (Num. 17:23). When the prophet Jeremiah is summoned, a play on ‘almond’ (shaked) proves that the Lord will ‘keep watch [shoked] over My word to perform it’ (Jer. 1:11). This pun surfaces in 1952 – ‘Count up the almonds, / count what was bitter and kept you waking’ – after the lapse of the divine promise. Celan’s triple imperative on zahlen (‘count’) also rings of the Zahlappell, a head count in Nazi camps. And it’s possible, though only just, to think of the smell of almonds given off by Zyklon B, the gas the SS used. Against such atrocity, we hear now of attempts – the poet’s, his mother’s – at connecting, at naming, and ‘you’ sounds twelve times in as many lines. ‘There you first fully entered the name that is yours.’ The word Namen (‘name’) resounds throughout Celan’s writing, restoring identity to those despoiled of it.”
Wow.
Yes, this is getting interesting...
I was led to Celan by way of 'Wings of Desire' - something about angels and hands and indeterminate 'you's. As you might have gathered I am always fighting against feelings of inadequacy reading in German (French, too) given how stupid I was at school in setting my mind against 'foreign' languages. That said, I'm getting much more out of Celan this week than I'd imagined.
Yes, almonds - I like the tonsil ambiguity - the throat of the poet and the tonsil as a 'filter' of disease. I could see all sorts of ways of reading this.
And yes, the Biblical almonds - to do with vigilance. I was getting a little spooked about that given the 'attention' theme I've been exploring in terms of Hadot.
I don't have the text with me right now - I will look it up when I get home.
As for the Ducan quote - that is such a great statement. I remember that whole essay sending me buzzing around the house for the rest of the day. (Another great one is his punning on 'responsibility' - the ability to respond.)
Last night I read the Celan 'Meridian' speech - I haven't a clue what the first part is about. Then he seems to shift a gear and it's fabulous. I'll be putting up some quotes from it later.
Cheers
The Carpenter
Yes, funny how a film can sometimes lead to new literary discoveries. I saw Toto the Hero recently & I wanted to know what the poem was that the old man reads in the shed, while waiting to finally dispatch his nemesis. I actually had to resort to freeze-framing & writing down the lines of text seen in close-up on the page. It turned out to be Verlaine's "Mon reve familier", which I hadn't encountered before. A fine poem that actually deepened my emotional engagement with the film. W
“the walls of the world open out, I see action going on throughout the whole void …” (Lucretius)
Hadot footnotes this as 3, 13f, 28ff.
My Penguin edition (trans. Latham) reads:
"the ramparts of the world roll apart, and I see the march of events throughout the whole of space" (p97)
Take your pick!
Thanks, O Carpenter,
I also have a Cyril Bailey translation (1921), which is pretty dire. For instance, his version runs: "the welkin's walls give place, / And show me all that's done throughout the realms of Space." Welkin? Who says "welkin"? Even in 1921...
I still feel I haven't found the right translator. I'm going to try Ronald Melville (Oxford World's Classics) next.
Thanks again,
Walrus
PS Yes, I too am Ed Reardon. A R4 comedy that actually makes me laugh.
PPS I had a great time yesterday evening reading "Spicer's Language" by Ron Silliman (esp. the analysis of Canto LXXXIV), then the said Canto, then "The Lasting Contribution of Ezra Pound" in Duncan's prose collection. It was great, though I'm still not entirely certain I understand the idea of a "line based on the musical phrase". Any musings on the subject would be welcome. W
PPPS Yes, "Towards an Open Universe". Wow.
PPPPS I did check out Felstiner on the "Meridian" speech -- he finds it obscure, too, so you're in good company. Celan wrote it in 3 days & its "root idea", says Felstiner, is that "a poem, encountering what is most strange, sets language free". The key part would appear to be the "breath-turn" or Atemwende: "Poetry that can signify a breath-turn" -- or as Rosemarie Waldrop has it (p.47): "Poetry is perhaps this: an Atemwende, a turning of our breath."
"It was great, though I'm still not entirely certain I understand the idea of a "line based on the musical phrase". Any musings on the subject would be welcome."
***
OK - this is something I ran up against during my discussions with Lisa and I think I can sketch out what Duncan meant.
As I understand it, it comes via Pound and his attack on 19thC poetic flaccidity. Essentially, working a line not by some inherited classical measure (eg Iambic pentamenter) but something much more responsive to the rhythm of utterance and musical cadence. Truer to the statement, if you like.
If you go to Basil Bunting's few lectures on poetry he ties this back to people such as Wyatt where words - as he sees it - are being conceived in terms of the music. (And, as a result, the dire results when poetry severs its ties with music).
Zukofsky is also working in these terms - the 'Testament to Poetry' is highly instructive.
However, I don't think 'musical' necessarily means pretty. In many cases, Bunting is scathing about overly 'lush' sounds. It's more the sound working as energies within and across lines.
There is also this business of the progression of the vowels which Lisa says Duncan got from Pound but I've not been able to locate it. I understand it as working the line by all sorts of modulations of sounds - so, for instance, working long and short vowels, moving through 'a-e-i-o-u', sounds made at the front of the mouth against those working towards the back - I suppose treating language like a kind of keyboard and working 'chords'.
(I have to stress, this is how I understand it and someone else might work it differently.)
Going on, I see/hear it at work in Lisa's poems and Peter Gizzi's (in fact, it seems to be a real hallmark of this 'generation'). I'm thinking especially of some of Lisa's texts in 'Ring of Fire' where the vowel sounds chime and echo and bend off each other at the same time as the rhythm of the phrases work as a kind of counterpoint. I'll freely admit that this is what I'm groping towards in those texts I put up a couple of weeks ago. In a sense it is working abstractly - in another it is using the very material sounds to shape the poem. I find this very exciting!
Alice Notley has also written very interestingly on the music of a line - she looks at Berrigan's lines in some detail and points out the way his handling of sound is so distinctive - his 'signature' in a sense.
I've also spent some time looking/listening closely to early Ray Dipalma poems and - for me at least - he seems to be doing some very very intricate sound work. At times, hyper-subtle shadings off 'sh', 'th', unstressed syllables etc. (There's also that Robert Grenier essay in the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E book where he zooms in on a Keats' line).
Does this help? In a way, that very first poem in The Opening of the Field is the perfect example - as I think we both agree, the music of Duncan's poems is so compelling. Hypnotic.
I tell you what, though, the majority of poems I see set by examining boards for student analysis are appallingly flat. In many cases, simply prose chopped up. The interest working - if at all - in terms of imagery and theme.
Hmmm ... I seem to have gone on a bit.
Let me know if it makes sense.
"Why do birds suddenly appear ...?"
(The Carpenters)
Thanks for that. Yes, clear, I think.
I’ve been looking back over Pound’s “A Retrospect” and his comments at the end of his essay on TS Eliot about “thematic invention” and the poet getting “a ‘chune’ in his head, and that the words ‘go into it’. . .” That makes it sound like an innate skill or an instinct for the musical phrase, which I would prefer to a more prescriptive “progression of the vowels”, but I think you are right there too. Duncan in his lecture on Pound talks about Pound’s ANTHEIL AND THE TREATISE ON HARMONY (1927). I think that’s where the idea of (as you say) “working the line by all sorts of modulations of sounds” occurs.
It’s hard to get hold of ANTHEIL...HARMONY (for less than £70), though I’ll look it up next time I’m in a library. But it is quoted (p.78) in LITERARY MODERNISM AND MUSICAL AESTHETICS by Brad Bucknell. The quote from ANTHEIL...HARMONY runs as follows (and is full of intriguing, if obscure, possibilities):
“A SOUND OF ANY PITCH, or ANY COMBINATION OF SUCH SOUNDS, MAY BE FOLLOWED BY A SOUND OF ANY OTHER PITCH, OR ANY COMBINATION OF SUCH SOUNDS, providing the time interval between them is properly gauged; and this is true for ANY SERIES OF SOUNDS, CHORDS OR ARPEGGIOS.”
Now is that any worldly help in the end, I wonder?
Walrus
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