Luscious faith, left-wing activism and one poet: Michael Buselmeier.

Dante’s German: The Catharsis (2)

by Michael Buselmeier.  
 

Pained-lust, chained burden, you say, you are the field

of God’s graveyard world; you are of life

in chewy circles of death. I’m the bread, the breath

the wine in chalice bright, the word of stone, 

tanned hide, the flag red and white,

the limes’ blossom in the park, the birches’ call,

the incense-smell, the talk of birds, the bells

so near in the wind, as I, half-blind with sleep,

threw open the shutters, and there the children knew

kneeling on the petals, O and A, A and O.    

Will we be the last, to feel God lead us

under the canopy of cloth, winding through the lanes?

to swing ourselves heavenwards, wreathed in jasmine,

singing songs that strawberry ice-cream’s spilt on? 

And at the rear the shimmering monstrance.

(In publishing this workshop-translation, I'm making use of the German "right of citation" or "Zitatrecht". All rights for the original German text, "Dante deutsch: Die Läutering (2)", remain, of course,  with Mr Buselmeier's publisher, Das Wunderhorn Verlag, Heidelberg, Germany. I, Henry Holland, reserve rights for that part of any future published translation of Mr Buselmeier's poem, which uses my text above.)

  

       Blogs aren't meant to be finished things. Why should they match the academic & aesthetic standards that you'd expect from a printed book on the same subject? As most bloggers aren't being paid, it would be foolhardy of them to invest too much time in their online writing. 

      That said, here's a snapshot of a poetry & a poet who needs to be talked about now, before there's time to finish & perfect, time to smooth him for a chapter in a book. The poet's Michael Buselmeier, the poetry book could be called Dante's German in a not-yet written English edition; the German title is Dante deutsch, and came out last year. The section of that poetry quoted & translated by me above is a depiction of the processions for the Feast of Corpus Christi, a religious event still celebrated with vigour in small towns & villages in Catholic southern Germany & in Austria. Carpets made from petals, painstakingly laid out to picture, for example, a smiling Mary embracing an angel, adorn the ground in front of houses & the sides of streets. The consecrated bread, the circular host, is carried in the "monstrance", something like a mini sedan-chair – covered in gold & jewels with sides open so the public can see in – & paraded through the towns.

     For those of you filled with ambivalence or even antipathy for all things Catholic, the fact that Buselmeier originally made a name for himself in the early 80s with a novel in which a left-wing protagonist passionately protects his threatened urban habitat, may add a twist of lemon to the story -- (The Fall of Heidelberg / Der Untergang von Heidelberg, 1981).** On first sight German Catholicism and the grassroots-left are two worlds which could not be further apart. But look again, and you will find attitudes & behaviours shared by the two groups. A commitment to the cause that goes miles beyond the bounds of reason. A belief that the end (the triumph of Catholic values or the triumph of left-wing goals) can justify the means. And a need to do the same thing again and again, the need for ritual. Parading the streets following a piece of chewy dry bread, transformed into the body of Christ. To be seen again this year on the 30th of May. Or the left marching on the 1st of May, same old slogans, same old beer & sausages; the more energetic among them staying up to nightfall of that day, when the ritual throwing of bottles at the riot police, the ritual retaliatory riot police charge, the ritual sofa burning on the streets of Hamburg & other larger German cities commences.

** I made extensive use of Michael Braun's article about Michael Buslelmeier, p. 18, issue 3, 2012, of the print edition of Volltext to write this blog post. 

Picking bones or grinding them? - Lewitscharoff vs. Jelinek

         The non-English literary novel continues to be a globalisation resistant artefact, in an age where it’s the quality of a product and not where it’s made which normally determines whether we’ll buy it or not. Figures like Gabriel García Márquez remain exceptions: just try playing "name three contemporary German novelists we all really enjoy" at the end of your next dinner party if you need further proof of this fact. So why should we bother our heads about a recently famous and deservedly so, German literary great? – Sibylle Lewitscharoff, whose 2009 novel Apostoloff is due out in Katy Derbyshire’s English translation on Seagull Book's German List  in December of this year.
                Because Lewitscharoff's newest creation, her speech on accepting the Austrian Arts Award prize this January, can be read as a compelling manifesto for the future of literature, equally applicable to novels or plays originally written in Persian, English or German: a plea for less realism, and more idealism. In doing so she appears herself to consciously write in the tradition of German idealism; she also writes for the German Schiller Society. Lastly, Lewitscharoff uses the speech to demonstrate her likeable, Alan Bennett-esque “I’m not standing for any old nonsense” quality, in her thinly-veiled attack on Austria’s 2004 Nobel Prize for Literature winner, Elfriede Jelinek. Nicholas Spice wrote about Jelinek in the London Review of Books in 2008 (here), praising the work but damning the specific English translation under review – the novel Greed translated by Martin Chalmers (Serpent’s Tail, 2008). Spice: “It’s hard to imagine that Jelinek’s reputation in the English-speaking world will ever recover.” In her speech, Lewitscharoff principally attacks her plays, which stands to reason, as Jelinek’s had premieres of five new works in German and Austrian theatres since 2009, while her last published novel came out in 2008. What Lewitscharoff calls “atrocity theatre” - a Jelinek play - looks like this on the stage. Hamburg’s Thalia Theatre’s production of The Merchant’s Contract which premiered 2009 was performed for the last time in Hamburg on 8th June 2012.
             This is what Lewitscharoff thinks of theatre like that – and what she proposes as a more deserving alternative for our attention:
       “With regards to atrocity theatre, which is – let’s please be clear about this – mostly of aseptic dreariness: this kitsch stopped being sweet long ago and is now gone sour. The chirpy sparrows, so loved by Peter Handke, have blasted it clean from the roof-tops with the strength of their song. People trying to impress us with their atrocity-wallowing who in their childhoods never got so much as a slap around the ear. Who brag about having looked into the heart of darkness, when they’ve never known anything other than rather drab, regular doses of life, provided for in every way. And who then go and put on the war paint for a big night out. 
        I don’t want to name any names in connection with this matter in this speech; it’s not for me to attack some Austrians who’ve made a comfy home for themselves amid the pornographic, while skinning bodies, in grinding bones, in hate-sex, in a deeply ridiculous play-feminism and in the unceasing activity of Austria bashing.
        The annoying thing about literature monsters like this is that they always march waving the flag of the Enlightenment before them. They’re telling it like it really is, or so they claim, about the Darkness of Mankind or of Austrians respectively. Poppycock I say, a dirty lie. In order to progress towards the heart of darkness, you’ve also got to be able to describe the wayward goodness of humans. People are complex, that’s what’s so devilish about them: the sublime and the loathsome, the generous, the cruel and the beautiful, all living side by side in different chambers of the heart. Only those who are capable of capturing at least a part of that complexity deserve our attention and our affections.
        Because – hand on heart – what’s the good of literature, if it doesn’t conceive the abyss of human turpitude as being anything other than a transgression, in the constantly new task of establishing integrity in humans. Treachery against a process of civilisation, which may only be achieved through perseverance, and to which all the arts should submit themselves. In a huge and unforeseeable variety of forms, naturally.”
(Translated from Lewitscharoff speech as printed in the 1/2012 of Volltext, a bi-monthly, print edition Austrian literary newspaper.)
        Would David Foster Wallace have disagreed with Lewitscharoff? I don’t think so. Hard to imagine Franzen disagreeing either. There may be many good reasons, however, for British novelists being disinclined to take up the mantle of idealism.

The holy - and holy shit.

I just had my first encounter with poetry from Franz Josef Czernin, born 1952. As there’s no published English translation to quote from, I’ll quote the first four lines of his poem sonnet, with the plough taken from his 2002 collection elements, sonnets in my own translation:

with flames. tongues, out and playing at us, up, wild lashing

and edged vivacious wheels which are hot in our hands,

what heaves us up to heaven, fiery in their prompting

until it off it flies, reveals, far off and still akin:

This sonnet sequence is built from, as the title of the collection suggests, the four antique elements and aims – according to Michael Braun writing in the latest issue of the literary newspaper Volltext  - at embodiments of star constellations in concrete poetic material. Braun reads Czernin as writing using the poetics of the early German-language romantics – Friedrich Schlegel, Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis to your man on the street) & Clemens Brentano. Not really knowing these writers myself, Czernin reminds me above all of Gerald Manley Hopkins on first impressions – the way stressed syllables appear to be crammed into a line (the original first line has got 8, my impromptu translation 7), the alliteration, the readiness to break with colloquial idiom & grammar for poetic effect.

Czernin hasn’t only been interested in poetic effects, but also in the subject of affectedness, how the standards with which publishers & literary establishments judge texts in any given period constantly need to be questioned. That’s what lead him to write and publish, in conjunction with Ferdinand Schmatz, a book of purposefully bad poems at the start of his career: Journeys. Around the World in Eighty Poems (1987, Residenz Publishers) tricking his own publishers in the process – a piece of holy shit, in other words. It only became clear that Czernin & Schmatz had done this when they brought out, later the same year, an exposé of what one may have been nothing more than a clever publicity stunt: The Journey. Into the Whole Deep Ditch in Eighty Squashed Dogs (1987, Droschl); - I guess Residenz didn’t have the guts to publish the exposé after the first book had left them looking foolish. Shame.

Is bad poetry, or to go a step further, intentionally bad poetry, possibly just as rewarding & useful to read as the poetry that they’re claiming is good? And what if Czernin enjoyed that early confidence trick of his so much that he’s simply gone on playing it with his audience & his reception into the literary establishment, writing on through his acceptance into the Darmstadt German Academy for Language and Poetry – continuing to write what many readers will experience as in some way holy, though it might only be holy shit? My gut feeling is that Czernin isn’t doing this; but I’m going to keep close tabs on his future poems. And if these turn out to be the latter of these two holys I may keep it up my sleeve; it’s often better to let Squashed Dogs lie.