POETIC AFFAIRS

Celan, Grünbein, BrodskyBy MICHAEL ESKIN

Stanford University Press

Copyright © 2008 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-5831-4

Contents

Acknowledgments…………………………………………………………..ixPrefatory Note……………………………………………………………xiIntroduction: On Poetry, Life, Method, and Sundry Affairs……………………..11 Creative Fidelities……………………………………………………..112 From Encounter to Tryst: Celan and Shakespeare……………………………..253 Metaphors of Subjectivity: Grübein and the Philosophers…………………584 What’s in a Name? Brodsky and the English Muse……………………………..88Closing Remarks…………………………………………………………..129Appendix: Constellations…………………………………………………..131Notes……………………………………………………………………149Bibliography……………………………………………………………..199Index……………………………………………………………………227

Chapter One

Creative Fidelities

… how the event becomes the occasion from which the poetic line emerges.

I like to be particular in dates….

The purpose of poets, then, is “to tell truths,” but in ways necessarily complicated….

Fidelities … she recognizes it as the word on which all hinges.

Affairs to Remember

“UNE VRAIE AFFAIRE DREYFUS”

In early November 1949—more than a year after arriving in Paris, where he would reside until his suicide in April 1970—Celan made the acquaintance of Surrealist poet Yvan Goll (1891–1950). Hoping to find sympathy, so the story goes, from a “Jewish fellow sufferer … for his German ‘poems after Auschwitz,'” Celan presented the senior poet, who was dying of leukemia, with his first collection of poems, Der Sand aus den Urnen (The sand from the urns), published in Vienna in September 1948 after Celan’s immigration to France. Both poets were deeply impressed with each other. Celan considered Goll a “true poet” and a “Mensch”— the “first one,” he wrote to a friend in Vienna, “I have encountered in Paris.” Goll in turn admired Celan’s “clair génie” and endorsed his “mission de poète.” Between November 1949 and Goll’s death on March 14, 1950, Celan paid the dying poet several visits at the American Hospital in Neuilly. It was probably during one of these visits that Goll asked the young émigré to translate his French poems into German. Celan obliged. After Goll’s death his widow, Claire Goll, encouraged Celan to continue translating her late husband’s poems. By the end of 1951 Celan had translated three of Goll’s collections: Élégie d’Ihpétonga suivi de Masques de Cendre (Elegy of Iphétonga followed by the masques of ashes), Les Géorgiques Parisiennes (Parisian georgics), and Chansons Malaises (Malaysian songs). Celan’s translations, however, were never to see the light of day. After sending the batch to Goll’s publisher, Celan was surprised to find it rejected on account of its alleged unfaithfulness to the original. This rejection led to a falling out between Celan and Claire Goll, who had just published her late husband’s posthumous collection, Traumkraut (Dream weeds, 1951).

What was to enter the annals of literary history as the so-called Goll affair began soon after the publication in December 1952 of Celan’s second collection of poems, Mohn und Gedächtnis (Poppy and memory), which includes the poems previously published in Der Sand aus den Urnen. In August 1953, after having been alerted to textual similarities between Mohn und Gedächtnis and Traumkraut, Claire Goll wrote an unofficial defamatory letter to various German publishers, broadcast stations, and newspapers accusing Celan of plagiarizing her late husband’s work. The plagiarism “campaign” gained momentum throughout the 1950s as a result of Goll’s letter, earning Celan notoriety as a “master plagiarizer, who repeats in his own poems in a mediocre way what Yvan Goll had brought to perfection;” the campaign reached its apex in 1960–1962, following the publication, at the end of April 1960 of another letter by Claire Goll titled “Little-Known Facts About Paul Celan,” and did not abate until the late 1960s. Significantly, the publication of Goll’s second letter occurred precisely when Celan was rising to prominence in Germany after being awarded, in May 1960, the Georg Büchner Prize, Germany’s most prestigious literary recognition.

The charges publicly renewed by Claire Goll in her second letter were immediately revealed as untenable. Thus, in an open letter in defense of Celan published shortly after Claire Goll’s “Little-Known Facts,” Marie Luise Kaschnitz, Ingeborg Bachmann, and Klaus Demus (Celan’s friend and fellow poet, who had accompanied him on at least one of his visits to the hospitalized Goll) pointed out that the alleged parallels between Celan’s Mohn und Gedächtnis and Yvan Goll’s Traumkraut adduced by the latter’s widow in support of her plagiarism charges were “the result of … the juxtaposition of sloppily cited passages from Goll’s poems dating from 1949 to 1950 with equally sloppily cited passages from Celan’s poems already contained in the volume, Der Sand aus den Urnen, published in Vienna in 1948.” “As Goll’s widow, who owned it, very well knew,” the authors continue, “the volume had been withdrawn from circulation shortly after its appearance due to an inordinate amount of misprints and had remained virtually unknown outside Austria; its uncomfortable date could be suppressed all the more easily given that the majority of its poems—written between 1940 and 1948 in the Bukovina, Romania, and Vienna—had not been widely known prior to their inclusion in Mohn und Gedächtnis.” Notwithstanding the untenability of Goll’s trumped-up charges, however, her second letter spawned a series of articles in the German media addressing Celan’s poetry in the light of Goll’s allegations, and bestowing, by virtue of their sheer existence, the semblance of a certain degree of validity on the matter.

For Celan the Goll affair was part of what he perceived as a revival of National Socialism in Germany at the time: “What is new about this Nazi renaissance,” Celan noted in 1962, “is that they know how to do it better than Hitler.” It put into question his existence and self-understanding as a Jewish poet “after Auschwitz” and his identity as a survivor: “it is a veritable Dreyfus affair”—”une vraie affaire Dreyfus”—Celan observed in the same year, “sui generis, of course…. It is a true mirror of Germany, the ‘new’ forms assumed by Nazism….” Celan’s racialist reading of the Goll affair was motivated by Claire Goll’s reference to his and his family’s fate at the hands of the Nazis as a “sad legend” in conjunction with the flaring up of anti-Semitic activity throughout Germany after the December 1959 Bundestag’s decision not to sign into law an already ratified antiracism bill.

The Goll affair proved to be the traumatic literary-existential event in Celan’s life after settling in France. As he put it, rather euphemistically, in a letter to Alfred Andersch (July 27, 1956), “this matter, absurd though it may be, is now indelibly part of my life, and what is part of my life I take very personally, it touches me.” Furthermore, because it originated in a poet’s request to be translated, the affair threatened the very core of Celan’s poetics of dialogue and encounter, the basic enactment of which can be witnessed precisely in and through translation as the originary manifestation of poetic encountering. In view of Celan’s belief that the poet “remains given” to his poetry and that “poetry is life,” his poetic output dating from this period in particular can be expected to bear palpable traces of the affair. In fact, it is above all to his poetry and translations (as an integral part of his oeuvre) that we have to look for a serious response on Celan’s part to Claire Goll’s charges. Celan, who was not willing to take a stance publicly and rebut Goll’s allegations, would have naturally (I say naturally having in mind Celan’s notion of poetry as the “counter-word” par excellence in the name of human life) relied on the power of his poetry to contravene the “pure infamy,” as he remarked to Andersch, of the attacks to which he was exposed. How exactly Celan went about mounting what one critic has called his “lyrical offensive” against Goll and her supporters is documented on the basis of his poetologically unprecedented translations of Shakespeare’s sonnets.

“FOR WHICH ANNAEUS SENECA WAS ALSO EXILED”

In 41 C.E., during the first year of Emperor Claudius’ reign, philosopher and statesman Lucius Annaeus Seneca (1–65 c.e.) was accused and convicted of adultery with the emperor’s niece, Julia Livilla, and subsequently banished to the Mediterranean island of Corsica. Seneca’s banishment was the result of a court intrigue initiated by Claudius’ first wife, Valeria Messalina, who was renowned for her insatiable sexual appetites and lust for power. Messalina “became enraged at her niece Julia [Livilla],” Dio Cassius writes, “because she neither paid her honor nor flattered her; and she was also jealous because the girl was extremely beautiful and was often alone with Claudius. Accordingly, [Messalina] secured Julia’s banishment by trumping up various charges against her, including that of adultery (for which Annaeus Seneca was also exiled) and not long afterward compassed her death.” Not until the intervention of Claudius’ second wife, Agrippina, eight years later, would Seneca be recalled to the imperial court in Rome. According to one contemporary, Publius Sullius, the philosopher’s exile was a “well-deserved” punishment for the “pollution of the couch of imperial princesses.” Seneca himself, however, insisted on his innocence in the matter.

The Livilla affair put Seneca’s Stoic beliefs, which he had hitherto been practicing under the favorable conditions of the busy life of an attorney and public official in the imperial capital, to the test. In Corsica, the philosopher would indeed have to prove himself to be a sapiens, a wise man and prototypical Stoic subject: steadfast, apathetic, and impervious to the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.” Little did Seneca know that “two-thousand years later” his “peaceful rest” would be “disturbed” by a descendant of those “louts who caused / trouble for you along the borders of your empire”—a German. Durs Grübein’s election of Seneca as one of his choice poetic and existential interlocutors is indelibly linked to Grübein’s self-fashioning and self-positioning as a contemporary poet. The ways in which Gr·bein engages with Seneca for the purposes of crafting a unique poetic subject are the focus of my affairistic reflections on the poet and the philosopher.

THE BRODSKY AFFAIR

On November 29, 1963, an article entitled “A Quasi-Literary Drone” appeared in the Leningrad daily Vecernij Leningrad. In this article, a budding, virtually unknown poet whose publication record to date comprised no more than a handful of literary translations and original poems was accused, among other things, of “decadence, modernism, … pessimism, pornography, … intended treason [and] a parasitic way of life.” Two weeks later, on December 13, 1963, one of the article’s authors presented his case against Joseph Brodsky to the Soviet Writers’ Union, which in turn filed a complaint with the state authorities, accusing the poet of social parasitism. As a result, Brodsky was arrested, indicted, tried (February 18 and March 13, 1964), convicted of social parasitism, and sentenced to “five years of forced labor in a remote location” in the Soviet Union. “L’affaire Brodski”—a “veritable … Dreyfus affair,” according to poet Samuil Maršak—immediately made the headlines around the globe and was significant in several ways. First, it was the result of false allegations and lies. “In it,” Brodsky remarked at his trial in reference to “A Quasi-Literary Drone,” “only my name and surname are correct; even my age is wrong; even the poems mentioned are not mine; according to this article, I am friends with people whom I hardly know or do not know at all.” Second, even under the harsh statutes of the Soviet Criminal Code, the poet should have been acquitted of the trumped-up charge of social parasitism. Between 1956, when he quit school at the age of fifteen, and 1963, Brodsky had been, as he was able to substantiate at his trial, consistently employed in various occupations. Third, it set a precedent, in the post-Stalinist era, for the state’s dealings with artists deemed anti-Soviet and was a preview of literary trials to come. Finally, and most important in the present context, it gave new currency to “a remarkable theme that runs,” as Brodsky observes, “all through Russian literature, ‘the poet and the tsar.'” This means that from the get-go Brodsky coded his run-in with the state as a “literary fact,” as one of the links in the long chain of fallings-out between poets and the powers-that-be marking Russian literary history. (Think, for instance, of the harsh treatment of Pushkin and Dostoevsky by Aleksandr I and Nikolaj I, respectively; of Gumilev’s execution by the Bolsheviks; and of Mandelstam’s death at the hands of Stalin.) Brodsky’s declaration, in response to Judge Savel’eva’s questioning of his credentials as a poet, that his calling as a poet was a matter of divine dispensation (“it’s … from god”) underscores the “legendary” (in Tomaševskij’s sense) quality of his “dramatic and comical” ordeal. Furthermore, like Pushkin, Lomonosov, Derzavin, and others, Brodsky resorted to the Horatian topos of the longevity of art as opposed to the brevity of life in an attempt to refract, shape, and make sense aesthetically of a particular situation that he would describe many years later as “the bleakest time in my life;” “I wrote poems,” he averred at his trial; “this is my line of work; I am convinced … that what I have written will be of service to humankind and not only to my contemporaries but also to future generations.”

In March 1964, Brodsky set out for the village of Norenskoe in the Russian north in order to serve his five-year sentence; however, as a result of the intervention on his behalf by a number of prominent public figures, his sentence was soon commuted and he was permitted to return to Leningrad in September 1965—only to be expelled from the Soviet Union for good in June 1972.

“Dramatic” though it may have been, it was not the official, judiciary side of the Brodsky case that avowedly preoccupied its protagonist the most. “At that time”—that is, at the time of his arrest, trial, and sentencing, Brodsky would remark yeas later—”I was, for the first and only time in my life, involved in a serious triangle. A ménage à troi—a sufficiently common thing, two guys and a girl—and that’s why I was mostly preoccupied by this. What goes on in your head troubles you much more than what happens to your body”; ” … that was the time,” Brodsky reminisces on another occasion, “which coincided … with my greatest personal trouble, with [my betrayal] by a girl, etcetera, etcetera … and a kind of triangle overlapped severely with the squares of the solitary confinements. … I was more fired up by that personal situation than by what was happening to my body.”

What happened? In early summer of 1962, Brodsky met and fell in love with Leningrad artist Marianna Basmanova. “It was roughly at that time,” Brodsky’s friend, fellow poet, and rival Dmitrij Bobyšev reminisces, that “Brodsky began showing up with Marina Basmanova….” So strong were Brodsky’s feelings for Basmanova that, legend has it, he did not heed his friends’ advice to steer clear of Leningrad until the Vecernij Leningrad scandal had blown over: “It so happened that when ‘A Quasi-Literary Drone’ was published Brodsky was in … Moscow, and his friends were trying to convince him not to return to Leningrad. But he was in love. Love took the upper hand over reason; he returned and was immediately arrested.”

It is at this point that the plot of Brodsky’s “greatest personal trouble” begins to thicken. While Brodsky was incarcerated and subjected to “forensic psychiatric assessment,” from late December 1963 through early January 1964, Basmanova and Bobyšev struck up an affair. “Before the New Years Eve party,” friends of Bobyšev’s and Brodsky’s remember, “Bobyšev [announced] that he was bringing a girl. The girl turned out to be Marina Basmanova. Bobyšev explained that Joseph had asked him to take care of her while he was away.” Bobyšev himself describes the events thus:

the year 1963—a year of turmoil—was drawing to a close…. Marina wanted to celebrate the new year with me…. I told her where I would be on new year’s eve and left for our winter daca…. When she arrived [at the new year’s eve party] the event suddenly became meaningful: as if time itself had been renewed, ticking differently, with a fresh, almost feral energy…. We grabbed two candles each and walked out into the dark, leaving the illuminated windows behind…. I kissed her and smelled the snowy fragrance of her hair….

(Continues…)

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