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DARKNESS SPOKEN: the Collected Poems of Ingeborg Bachmann
Zephyr Press 2006 $24.95
Reviewed by Michael Murray
1
Born in 1926 in southern Austria, Bachmann died, after a rollercoaster ride of fame and withdrawal, in somewhat mysterious circumstances, in 1973 at her Rome apartment.
Mysterious? Well, it is still undecided if she died through an unattended cigarette, smoking in bed; or was it a suicide attempt?
Why should we still read her? Obvious answer is: because she was one of the best of her time. So, is she time-specific? You are the judge. But allow me to say that Charles Simic valued and continues to value her poetry; enough to write a generous Foreword to this book: What is it that makes certain poems memorable? Obviously, it could be the sheer mastery of form and originality of the imagination Tastes change, newness wears out (however) I have here in mind that elusive property known as the poets voice it is her voice that one always remembers.
I would go as far to suggest she inhabits that place between modern and contemporary/ post-modern; like Alban Berg in music she looks back to earlier sensibilities, and forward to new ones.
Her tragedy was the inbetween bit, the horrors of the War.
Some commentators have found in her the War-amnesia of many German writers of the period. She herself writes:
The unspeakable passes, barely spoken, over the land:
already it is noon.
(Early Noon)
And noon, of course, casts no shadows.
A necessary amnesia, maybe: no single person can possibly hope to find in oneself the capacity to take on, never mind overcome, all that. Consequently she is a haunted writer: restless, uneasy, unsettled.
Her rise could not have been more auspicious: introduced to the Gruppe 47 (Boll, Grass etc) meetings by no less than Paul Celan, her two poetry books of 1953 and 1956 helped her win the George Buchner Prize, The Berlin Critics Prize, the Bremen Award. And yet after these two books there were no more.
Already proficient in short stories, plays, libretti, radio drama, and ballet libretto, she later accepted the Frankfurt Poetry Chair. In 1953 she first made Rome her residential centre.
Her later published writing consisted entirely of prose and drama pieces. Her most famous book was Malina, part of the large Todesarten cycle. In 1968 she was awarded the Austrian State Prize for literature.
She had a long and productive liaison with Henze Werner Henze, writing libretto for several of his pieces: Der Prinz von Homberg etc, some of which is included in this collection Her later breakup with Swiss writer Max Frisch was long and painful.
2
But were there no more poems? Here collected are the two best selling books as well as poems written throughout the rest of her life, in five time-sections: 1945 to 56; 1957 to 61; 1962 to 63; 1963 to 64, and 1964 to 67. As you can see some of these sections are fuller than others. As you can also see the last five to six years of her life are not covered. The translator Peter Filkins points out, that although the quality of this unpublished work maybe does not hit the high mark of the earlier pieces, it can still own its right as poetry.
Starting out she had to find a language of expression within her native German, As Christa Wolf notes, Ingeborg Bachmann knows that literature cannot be composed outside the historical situation. (The Writers Dimension). The historical situation here implies both contemporaneous, as well as past time.
One of her main influences was Wittgenstein of the Tractatus period: that end comment: What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence must have chimed deeply in her. Wolf also comments, The historical situation is such that all literature must have at its heart the question of mans possible moral existence. (ibid).
Yet, how to express whilst under the enormous pressure of a past that was all around her?
The images of her first book Borrowed Time are of movement away, onward, from:
Smoke rises from the land.
Remember the tiny fishing huts,
because the sun will sink
before youve set ten miles behind you.
The dark water, thousand-eyed,
opens its white-foamed lashes,
studying you, deep and long,
thirty days long
.
(Journeying Out)
Harder days are coming.
The loan of borrowed time
will be due on the horizon
(Borrowed Time)
It would be so easy to read the smoke rising from the land as referencing a broken Europe; to go is to perhaps go towards: there are always horrors waiting for us, unpaid dues, worse things. These poems were published within the post-War period of German restructuring and hope. Their great impact was due perhaps to their tapping into the doubt and darkness behind the confidence.
She can also hit a fuller tone:
Wherever we turn in the storm of roses,
the night is lit up by thorns, and the thunder
of leaves, once so quiet within the bushes,
rumbling at our heels.
(In the Storm of Roses)
Roses have as illustrious a symbolism as poppies. The lurid brightness of their colour here (can you feel Giorgiones Tempest?) maybe borrowing, or reflecting forward to, Plaths Tulips. It is the unease of this piece, how not even the standard pastoral held any way out, that is memorable.
The theme of leaving, moving away from, a past she was inevitably embroiled in, that coloured, toned and muddied every thing around her. To leave, then; but can one possibly leave it behind? Compare the above piece with:
Under an alien sky
shadows roses
shadow
on an alien earth
between roses and shadows
in alien waters
my shadow
(Shadows Roses Shadow, from Invocation of the Great Bear)
The self jostles for place amongst the shadows, and almost succeeds. It is that almost she is most adept at expressing.
She has a Symbolist tone at times in those earlier poems:
As sorrow warms him, the glassblower steps towards us
..
. He boils the lead in the kettle of tears,
making for you a glass meaning a toast to whats lost
for me a shard of smoke ..
(Twilight)
The brittle delicacy of emotional states on the nerves, the dull lumpeness of grief.
Her Great Landscape Near Vienna is in part influenced by Carol Reeds iconic scenes of the shattered (Hapsburg) empire, and moral ambiguity, in The Third Man:
two thousand years gone, and nothing of us will remain
..
only in the square, in midday light, chained to
the columns base ..
the nave is empty, the stone is blind,
no one is saved, many are stricken,
the oil will not burn, we have all
drunk from it .
Her second book Invocation of the Great Bear, has a more confident tone, allowing her to go more deeply into the unease as well as her natural wish to rise, to allow the spirits movement. Where earlier she had suggested immanence, now she can weigh spirit and flesh, or earth: the Shadows Roses Shadow above, in its complete of lack of punctuation, displays a greater confidence in form and tone. But also we have:
Now the journey is ending,
the wind is losing heart.
Into your hands its falling,
a rickety house of cards.
The cards are backed with pictures
displaying all the world.
Youve stacked up all the images
and shuffled them with words.
..
(Stay)
The poem can be read as self-referential, as well as addressed to her peers. The image of the journey now turns its dis-ease inward onto the self, and language.
Wittgensteins idea of picture-language may now read to us now as hopelessly anachronistic, but we must remember in 1956 it still held its fascination and appeal. So how does this piece end, what has she to say?
And how profound the playing
that once again begins!
Stay, the card youre drawing
is the only world youll win
(ibid)
The only way out action linked to the real processes of society seems barred by a hopelessness which feeds non-stop off the alienation she feels when she observes real events. (Christa Wolf, ibid).
This is very much an existential impasse.
It is also an impasse created by language; the concept of the language game of the later Wittgenstein is echoed in the above extract. We need to ask, Where does the I stand in relation to our language, to what we express?
What is the point of writing for whom to express ones thoughts, and what is there to say to people? (Christa Wolf, ibid). Another commentator has noted: The fuse that runs through these powerful poems is the powerlessness of language, its continual failure to measure up: Between a word and a thing / you only encounter yourself, / lying between each as if next to someone ill, / never able to get to either.
In her poetry she reveals a person who is willing and able to endure the conflicts of our own time. Christa Wolf had noted earlier. That able worries me; it should worry us all. It is like a gong, sounding out presumption, over-confidence.
And so, in order to continue at all, the language use must change; the need to express continues, but the form is felt to be no longer adequate:
The oar dips at the sound of a gong, the black waltz starts,
with thick dull stitches, shadows string guitars.
Beneath the threshold, in a mirror, my dark house floats,
the flaring points of light now softly radiate out.
always the surface shifts towards another destination.
..
(The Black Waltz)
The search for a language: she approaches Surrealism, its sudden clinching and clanging of images that reveal meaning, as it were, by accident:
..
a flywheel starts spinning, the derricks pump
spring from the fields, erected forests macerate
the degraded torso of greenness, and an iris of oil
watches over the wells of the land
.
The Ferris wheel drags the coat that covered our love.
(Great Landscape near Vienna)
The second book makes great use of Grimms stories: Snow White and Rose Red, The Three Billy Goats Gruff etc
.
the seven stones turned into seven loaves;
he plunged into the meadows; fragrant air
scattering crumbs for the lost in forest groves
.
(Of a Land, A River and Lakes)
As such, these excerpts are all of techniques of narrative. That last poem has ten sections of strict rhyming quatrains, on domestic rural scenes. The quotidian, all that we can be sure of. The piece is unflinching perhaps in its depictions of slaughter days, and how closely they run to Wars sanctioned excesses. Nevertheless these are landscapes closely guarded by form and metre.
She often uses the first person singular as a way of exploring through identifying basic traits, a universal. Each poem is the uncovering of a host of images that cluster around a central concern, often obliquely approached.
In Advertisement she blends the bland hopes of advertisers with the syntax of lives full of very real broken hopes:
But where are we going
carefree be carefree
..
..
but what happens
best of all
when dead silence
sets in
This attention to syntax prepares us for the concern with pure language systems. that we saw in Stay: the language-game, where truth is textural.
3
What happened next was the meeting of emotional break-up and existential impasse; what happened next was hospitalisation, depression and slow recovery.
The Gloriastrasse poems convey something of that time:
The blessing of morphine, but not the blessing of a letter
and
In a bed
in which many have died
odourlessly, fitted out
in a white smock
..
.
Lost in a haze of morphine
Confessional in mood, shut-off and half-aware at times, these poems are painful reading. Perhaps the hospital poems of Elizabeth Jennings in English poetry come the closest.
With recovery, even if only partial, came the success of the novels; a success based in part on their innovative techniques.
For a writer there is only language: intent, expression, ability, vocabulary, wide reading, and accident. And the contexts and meta-narratives that language use brings with it; what Ted Hughes characterised as the goblins of literature..
These translations are not always at their best, fighting to retain the metre and rhyme schemes of the original German; there are lines padded out with redundant terms, phrases to make up the metre count. Overall, however, the standard is high. This is a big book, a dual-language volume. If one compares these translations with others available on the net one sees how generally successful this book is.
It is always best to let the writer have the last word.
Nach dieser Sintflut
[After this deluge]
After this deluge
I wish to see the dove
saved,
nothing but the dove.
I would drown in this sea
if it did not fly away,
if it did not return with the leaf
in the final hour.
