Posts Tagged ‘The Sheep Meadow Press’

Schneepart

Wednesday, December 26th, 2007

by Paul Celan
The Sheep Meadow Press 2007
Reviewed by Komo Ananda

7.5

“What knits / at this voice? At what / does this voice knit?”

Celan coverIn Schneepart (Snow Part), Paul Celan’s final completed work before his death in 1970, language is used to demonstrate the limits of circumstance; the book is overrun with constriction and death. The use of punchy, poignant words (“slobberedmouth,” “luff,” “tumuli”) entraps the reader in a world of dark and indelible imagery. The poems in Schneepart don’t match the lyrical ambition seen in some of Celan’s standards; however, the poet is still deeply concerned with the grim experience of the Holocaust and the poet’s time spent in the labor camps.

Celan’s compact diction (as translator Ian Fairley terms it in an introduction) suggests inevitability and the unpredictability of circumstances in life: the notion that a person is seldom in control of his/her own fate. One cannot help but feel restricted by Celan’s words. The poems are individual paradoxes; stanzas become snapshots of confinement:

Parcel Freight, baked
groatbig from
unfelled light;

despair shoveled in,
aggregate;

winched onto tracks, the laden
shadow-wheel wagon.

Literally the poem suggests a weathered train car being hoisted onto tracks. Interestingly enough, the scarcity of language and the vividness of words like “baked groatbig,” “aggregate,” and “winched onto tracks” creates a narrow tension reinforced by the line breaks and the very spareness of the poem. Naturally, it is about more than a freight car. The reader is asked to slow down and think about each line of the stanza. What comes to mind in “despair shoveled in, / aggregate” is a mass population being prepped for deportation.

Throughout the book we see Celan still haunted by the hellish events of his youth. It seems to follow naturally, then, that these lyrics are both guarded and spare. Celan subtly describes the minds of the tortured and ostracized; “I Gave a Chance” provides an important example of the helplessness of circumstance faced by so many: 

I gave a chance
to your, even your
ill-rung shadow,

I bestoned
it, even it, with what’s
true-shadowed, true-
rung of mine—a
six-pointed star
to which you gave your silence,
today
take your silence where you will,

strewing tings timeunderhallowed,
long enough, I too, in the street,
I am bound, no heart to embrace,
for home, out into
the stony many.

I see this poem as Celan’s attempt to grapple with a sense of being ostracized with those who kept silent to the injustices committed against the Jews. Long after the liberation of the concentration camps, our poet is helpless to escape a certain kind of psychological imprisonment; these poems struggle with the need to find a “heart to embrace for home.”

“I Gave a Chance” also demonstrates the somewhat ambitious translation style of Ian Fairley; “timeunderhallowed” as a single word seems his way of reconciling the length and feel of the original German word, “zeitunterheiligtes.” In another application, Fairley translates “wahnbrot”—which has no real English equivalent—as “lunebread,” as the German word “wahn” means craze or mania, and “brot”’ bread. In each case, Fairley’s translation adds to the general feeling of constriction implicit in Celan’s German poems.

When I talk about constriction, I tend to view it in terms of hope. Schneepart, with all its dark and grotesque imagery, displays a recognition of faith. And poems that seek to bring to light the many circumstances of the human condition have embedded in them an abstract sense of freedom despite the constrictions of the physical world; in the end, Schneepart accomplishes just that:

LIVE THE LIVES, live them all,
tell the one dream from the other,
look, I rise, look, I fall,
am an other, am no other.

In a time of heightened fear of terrorist attacks, torture, kidnappings, international discord, and infringement of civil liberties, Ian Fairley has done a great service in choosing to translate Paul Celan’s final effort. The book cannot help but invoke our own fears and insanities, those that we experience privately. Whether or not we encounter atrocities like deportation, genocide or war zone violence, we are always subjected to—if not rendered entirely paltry by—circumstances, circumstances which we do not wish to have imparted on our daily lives, but yet, we must somehow come to terms with if we are to contrive any means, however abstract or imagined, of liberation from them.

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The Second Question

Sunday, September 23rd, 2007

by Diana Der-Hovanessian
The Sheep Meadow Press 2007
Reviewed by Steven Karl

3_5

No Stick

der hov coverThe Second Question is preoccupied with identity, specifically Armenian identity. Here is the title poem:

Where are you,
where were your people from?
was the first question
our grandmothers asked
each other when they met.
The second question
was always How?
How did you escape
death?  Now
their children ask
only the first,
where in Turkish Armenia
were your people from?

The poem is an excellent representation of Diana Der-Hovanessian’s poetics—short and tightly wound, rather easy to access. “How did you escape / death?” begs the  question of survival from genocide and how that survival has shaped and transformed a culture and its people. 

But this narrative, recurrent throughout the book, isn’t explored as fully as it could be. Instead the poet spends her time on moves like capitalizing the “H” in “How?” Instead of trusting her readers, the poet instructs them on how to read the poem and what to take away from it, somehow avoiding the fact that the reader might be asking for something else entirely.

X.J. Kennedy’s blurb reads, “If you think you don’t like poetry, The Second Question will quickly change your mind…” Perhaps.  Diana Der-Hovanessian is an accomplished poet, instructor, and translator and I can’t help but wonder if this book was put together with the intent to appeal to—even teach—mainstream readers.  I put this question out there because for the most part, the book is, dare I say, too easy, and many of the poems too “clever.” Their cavalier accessibility detracts from a potentially engrossing personal study of identity, particularly the sense of identity one feels as the descendent of a nearly-obliterated culture.

The book is also distracted by a  peripheral focus on feminine identity which brings no new arguments. Here’s “Earmark”: “ In spite of dangles / hoops and spheres / men seldom notice / girls have ears.”  Strange, but in all my years, I never met a man who fancies a woman earless.  The Second Question contains more than a few poems that follow this formula: men are insensitive and aloof while women remain survivors of subjection; but we are told this and never tempted to explore the deeper machinations implicit to that subjection.   

“Cold Fire” offers a convenient example of clichéd femininity: “A fire once it’s dead stays dead / in women.  But in most men / cold fires can revive and spread.” (“What kind of fire are you?” the teacher seems to be asking). The fourth stanza continues, “A woman wants fire. That’s bred / into her bones, but when / the fire is dead it’s really dead…” I suppose the last thing I want in a collection of poetry is to be given a bland generalization.  And there is little room for penetrating or interpreting “a woman wants fire”; Plath stole away with that concept 40 years ago.

Alas, in the end, do the poems’ simplicities make it hard for the poet’s issues to stick? At first I thought the simplicity was indeed the culprit, a device that made the poems falter or fail to shine. But I’ve carried both Neruda’s Odes and Basho’s haikus with me for years; the real problem with D-Hova’s poems is that they are mostly surface.

Which brings me back to the question of audience: was this collection put together to serve as an introduction to poetry for those less aware?  In the issue of identity Suji-Kwok Kim’s A Divided Country, Shanxing Wang’s Mad Science in the Imperial City, or Carly Sach’s the steam sequence all delve successfully into the complexity of straddling identity and/or maintaining an identity in the face of shifting politics or the erasure that progress/history creates. Der-Hovanessian’s knowledge, experience, and poetic expertise should make this collection one of significant weight and contemplation; unfortunately too many of the poems warrant little more than a passing glance, and the potentially invigorating study of her Armenian identity takes a disappointing back seat.

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