Abraham Sutzkever | Selected Poetry and Prose / 1991

hush and travail

by Douglas Messerli

 

Abraham Sutzkever Selected Poetry and Prose, translated from the Yiddish by Barbara and Benjamin Harshav, with an Introduction by Benjamin Harshav (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991)

 

Abraham Sutzkever—who died early this year on January 20th at the age of 96—was, as The New York Times obituary mentioned, one of "the great Yiddish poets of his generation." But to describe him in only that way is to miss much of his larger contribution to literary history. Indeed, as Benjamin Harshav begins his Introduction to Sutzkever: Life and Poetry, "Sutzkever is one of the great poets of the twentieth century." Harshav adds:

 

                   I do not say this lightly. He is not a philosophical poet; there was

                   no sophisticated philosophy in Jewish culture. Nor is he a descriptive

                   poet; the language of Modernism was opposed to description, and

                   the fictional worlds of Sutzkever's poetry are presented through ev-

                   ocation and allusion rather than direct statement. But the language of

                   his poetry—the profound sound orchestration and the metaphorical

                   and mythopoeic imagery—is as dense, unmediated, and suggestive

                   as that in the poetry of Mandelstam or Rilke. And his responses to

                   historical reality are as sharp as any in the verse of Brecht. The para-

                   doxical amalgam of these two extremes of twentieth-century poetry—

                   self-focused poetic language and ideological engagement—is successful

                   in Sutzkever's work because both are presented through the events of

                   the poet's own biography.

 

      And what a biography that was! Born in 1913 in Smorgoń, Lithuania, southwest of Vilna, Sutzkever and his family were forced during his second year of birth to leave the city with all other Jews within twenty-four hours, after which the city was burned to the ground, the Russian high command fearing them as German "spies."

     Through connections with other travelers, the Sutzkevers ended up in Omsk in western Siberia, where Abraham lived until seven years of age, when his father died of heart failure. The brutally cold, but spectacularly beautiful landscape, would haunt Sutzkever's poetry for the rest of his life, resulting in what he himself described as "the snow-sounds falling in my head," and expressed most powerfully in poems such as "Frozen Jews":

 

                       They come over me, blue bones in a row—

                                                                        Frozen Jews over plains of snow.

 

     With the end of the Russian Civil War, Sutzkever's mother Reine returned to Lithuania with her three children, settling in Vilna. During those same years, Vilna became a center for Jewish and Yiddish-language activities. For generations since the fourteenth century, Jews had migrated into the area around Vilna until by the eighteenth century this last pagan country in Europe became one of the most important centers for Jewish learning in the world. Although the actual population of Jewish citizens in Vilna was small (at the beginning of World War II, 60,000 Jews lived in the city, with refugees from Poland adding another 20,000 more) as Harshav makes clear,"the area it dominated was immense."

 

                      People would come from surrounding towns and villages to trade

                      or study and return to their hometowns or move to the West, and

                      still be proud of their "Vilna" origins. The parents of the Vilna Gaon;

                      the Haskalah historian of Vilna, Rashi Fin; the founders of YIVO

                      (Yiddish Scientific Institute), Max Weinreich and Zelig Kalmanovich;

                      the Yiddish poet Sutzkever and the Hebrew poet Abba Kovner; and

                      the Polish poets Michiewicz and Milosz were not born in Vilna itself,

                      though their names are linked with that cultural center. Jerusalem of

                      Lithuania was the symbolic focus and aristocratic pride of a vast,

                      extraterritorial Jewish empire.

 

     Even as a thirteen-year-old in Vilna, Sutzkever began writing poetry, first in Hebrew and then—influenced, in part, by the Yiddish linguist and YIVO director, Max Weinreich— in Yiddish. Self-taught, the young Abraham even attempted poetry in Old Yiddish and translated the Yiddish romance Bove Bukh, written in Venice in 1508. Joining the Vilna Jewish scouts' Di Bin (the Bee) Sutkever dedicated himself, like his fellow scouts, to guard secular Yiddish culture. A close friendship with Miki Chernikhov (whose family read Evgeny Onegin) introduced the young Abrasha to other Russian Symbolist poets, Edgar Allen Poe and the Polish Romantic poets such as Cyprian Norwid. One might describe this brief period as an "ecstatic" time. As Sutzkever described just such activities in his Ecstasies:

 

                            When with eyes shut

                            I wrote a poem, suddenly

                            My hand got burned,

                            And when I started

                            From that black fire,

                            The paper breathed

                            A name like a lily: God.

                            But my pen, in awe and wonder,

                            Crossed out the word

                            And wrote instead

                            A more familiar word: Man.

 

                            Since then, a voice unheard

                            Haunts me like an unseen bird

                            That pecks, pecks at my soul's door:

                            —Is that what you traded me for?

 

     Sutkever's group of friends, known as "The Young Vilna Group," included the American Yiddish novelist Joseph Opatoshu, Shmerke Katcherginsky, painter Ben-Zion Michtom, Y. Opatoshu, Chiam Grade, Elchonon Vogler, Moshe Levin, Peretz Mirasky, Shimshon Kaban, and Leyzer Volf. Sutkever's first book was published by the Yiddish Writers' Union in Warsaw, and in 1940, his important book of poetry, Vladiks (From the Forest), was published in Lithuania.

      In September 1939, soon after Sutzkever's marriage, Poland was divided between Germany and the Soviet Union, the Russians entering Vilna, arresting many Jewish leaders, and turning over the city to independent Lithuania, who renamed the city Vilnius.

      On June 22, 1941 the Germans attacked, occupying Vilna two days later. Immediately over 100,000 Jews of the region were liquidated, and those 20,000 left were crammed into a Vilna ghetto of only seven streets. Daily, Jewish men were arrested off the streets and taken to camps or swept into forced labor. Sutzkever hid in his mother's Snipishok apartment, for weeks living in a crawl space under the house's roof. His wife Freydke, having heard of a search for him, came to take him away, but he could not even walk. Soon after, however, he joined Jewish worker brigades, hiding in various spots. But on September 5, 1941 he and two others were captured by the Lithuanians, forced to dig their graves, and were about to be shot. Their countrymen, however, intentionally aimed over their heads, secreting them to hiding places in the ghetto. There Sutzkever rejoined his mother and wife. Having to flee one ghetto for another, he left his mother in a hiding place, but when he returned to free her, she was gone, the location having been discovered and its inhabitants taken off. Freydke, meanwhile, bore their son in the Ghetto hospital, an act that was forbidden; the Germans poisoned the child.

 

     Joining a group of intellectuals who worked each day outside the ghetto at the YIVO building, Sutzkever was set to work on cataloguing the books assembled by the Germans on Jewish history, and designating the most important works for shipment to Germany. Sutzkever and his friends, however, secretly smuggled hundreds of these rare books into the ghetto, burying them. Many of these materials later made it to Moscow or were uncovered in Vilna after the War, with help from Sutzkever and others.

    It was also at YIVO where Sutzkever was smuggled his first machine gun, and later, along with his wife and Shmerke Katcherginsky, he left the ghetto upon the ghetto uprising, joining the partisans led by Zelda, who led forays from the surrounding forests. Here the most physically able fought on, while women and children were abandoned in the ghetto to die or lived in the forests, left to their own devices. Sutzkever and Katcherginsky were assigned to write the brigade's history. Soon thereafter, Russian writer Ilya Ehrenburg arranged for the Sutzkevers' rescue by plane:

 

                     When they finally reached the other partisan brigade, a small

                     plane landed on the ice-covered lake. Sutzkever sat in its

                     opening, with Freydke tied to his knees, and two more partisans

                     were stuck in the rear. The plane veered though the heavy fire

                     of the German front, diving suddenly, and eventually emerging

                     on the Soviet side.

 

     "If I didn't write, I wouldn't live," announced Sutzkever in a 1985 New York Times interview. "When I was in the Vilna ghetto, I believed, as an observant Jew believes in the Messiah, that as long as I was writing, was able to be a poet, I would have a weapon against death."

    In all of Sutzkever's writing, accordingly, there is the spectre of horror, the fear of destruction simultaneously at moments of peace and great beauty.

 

                      From the Forest

 

                      Of grass and flowers, the substance dissolves

                      Into drops of dew.

                      And he who wants can see

                      The subtle play

                      Of black and fire, silver and blue.

                      All around,

                      Trees sleep, sprawling on the ground,

                      Their shadows grow high.

                      The air is cool and soft

                      As dry

                      Water.

                      Silent, calm,

                      Mute paths kiss.

                      Here-and-there,

                      Green glows wink at you.

                      A nest trembles,

                      A spring shines.

                      You see:

                      Worlds spin on their axes

                      And dews are mirrors for the cosmos

 

                      If someone screamed right now,

                      All the skies would dissolve

                      In cosmic panic.

                      But all is hush. Just shadows

                      Cast by the spirited nightingale:

                      Following the star notes, he reveals

                      His lonely night

                                                           And his travail.

 

Los Angeles, May 9, 2010

Reprinted from PIP Poetry (May 2010) and Sibilia [Brazil] (August 2010).

Robin Blaser | The Fire: Collected Essays of Robin Blaser / 2006

the fire behind myself

by Douglas Messerli

 

Robin Blaser The Fire: Collected Essays of Robin Blaser (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006)

 

The death on May 7, 2009 of American-Canadian poet Robin Blaser sent me to my office shelf where I keep books waiting to be read. For three years Blaser's collected essays had burned its presence into my eyes, but only now, six months after his death, have I actually found the time to read this important book.

 

     Beginning with his famous manifesto-like essay, "The Fire," Blaser argues that the business of poetry and poetics is creating a cosmology. He means that, as he explained in 2009 interview with Paul Nelson, not so much in a "religious" sense—although he himself admits to the influence of his Catholic childhood—but in a larger system of a world view. When asked for the specific components of the cosmology that he and his friends Robert Duncan and Jack Spicer attempted to create, Blaser answers in that 2009 interview (published in Golden Handcuffs Review):

 

“The main components are, first, that there isn't one. That was what you felt and this was what the 20th century tried to do to us. It took us away and Marxism didn't help at all unfortunately with that problem. Marxism is quite a different thing, but that's when we're already social and know how to move and then Marxism can speak to you. Otherwise, you're fucked. You've not got a cosmos with which: Where's God? Well you're sure not going to...even an old Catholic like me isn't going to turn into THAT. And Spicer, I mean, Spicer's view of the Catholic Church [laughing heartily] IS ONE KICK IN THE ASS AFTER ANOTHER! HA! and I just loved it. And Duncan, ooooh Duncan. He was an occultist in some part and the occult tradition was a fascinating one. We all came to know of it. But the occult was a counter Christian, counter religious tradition that was also a religious tradition, whatever a religion means, essentially to be tied to a world at large. So all of us were busy working around it, sometimes at quite a loss. ....It was simply a matter of finding language as the way with which you could walk on a piece of earth....”

 

     In short, as Nelson suggests, for Blaser the search for a cosmology, an entire system of being, was a process rather than an end. As opposed to a lyric self-expression, Blaser approached poetry as a serial-like search—what in other essays he describes a revelation of the "real"—that in its intensity metaphorically "burns up" the poet, leaving a fire behind him.

     This "process," he argues, moreover, can only occur in a community, and most particularly in a community of poets. Attacks against "coterie" ignore the reality that poets band together because:

 

                Such communities tend to build a structure for men who wish to keep, hold

                and record the passionate relation with the outside that the world, the

                nation, need. This is the only place where such talk goes on.

 

     Discourse, accordingly, is at the center of Blaser's poetics, even in this early essay, and most of the works in this volume resound with voices, often contrary voices that express a kind of explosion of ideas surrounding the subject at hand.

     This kind of dialectical commentary can often seem an onerous task for the uninitiated reader; Blaser's essays are filled with references not only to his poet friends, Duncan, Spicer, Olson and others but to philosophers and contemporary thinkers, from Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Lacan, Alfred North Whitehead, Giorgio Agamben, Maurice Merleau-Ponty to all of Greek and Roman mythology along with writers such as Homer, Hesiod, Ovid, and Dante. Fortunately, Blaser's commentary is accompanied by an Introduction and highly informative Afterword by Miriam Nichols who expertly takes the reader by the hand through the dense thickets of Blaser's poetics.

      If nothing else, what any reader comes to realize early on in Blaser's work is that his writing, both the poetry itself and the criticism, is not a historical recounting of the "other," but an immersion in both the thinking process and in the lives of the writers on whom he focuses, all creating a kind of Memory Theater, "a box with tiers, where the initiate would take the place of the stage and look out on the tiers, which in an ordinary theater would hold the audience—here there are images upon images, so that a man could hold the whole world in view."

      Such an impossible undertaking, made even more difficult by the impact of differing demands upon the poet's attention, particularly the call for social and political involvement that claim little role in the poetic imagination, itself might truly "burn up" the poet. One by one, Blaser takes up some of those issues, in "The Particles" the role of the political, for example, in which he dismisses various views of what political poetry might be before going on to argue that it is the passionate particularity of poetry, its never-ending search for truth or "reality" and the commitment of the poet to this search that demonstrates most clearly poetry's relationship with the polis as opposed to statements about political positions which merely reiterate frozen thoughts, dead images of the society at large.

     Blaser cites the wonderful example of the Spanish writer, Miguel de Unamuno, Rector of the University of Salamanca. After a rabid speech by General Millan Astray, "thin, emaciated, one eye and one arm," in which he called for the extermination of all who stood against Franco, Unamuno rose and gave a speech beginning:

 

                    "All of you are hanging on my words. You all know me, and are aware

                    that I am unable to remain silent. I have not learnt to do so in seventy-

                    three years of my life. and I do not wish to learn it any more. At times, 

                    to be silent is to lie. For silence can be interpreted as acquiescence. I

                    could not survive a divorce between my conscience and my world, always

                    well-mated partners."

 

Describing the General as a "symbol of death," Unamuno closes: "Unfortunately there are all too many cripples in Spain now. And soon, there will be even more of them, if God does not come to our aid. It pains me to think that General Millan Astray should dictate the patter of mass-psychology. ...You will win, but you will not convince. You will win, because you possess more than enough brute force, but you will not convince, because to convince means to persuade. And in order to persuade you need what you lack—reason and right in the struggle."

     The crowd might have killed the Rector right there had not a Professor of Law taken Unamuno by one arm and Madame Franco by the other and quietly left the dais. Unamuno remained a prisoner in his house, Blaser tells us, until his death at the end of that year.

     For Blaser it is the persuasion, through particularities, the "particles" of reality, that matter and are at the heart of any truthful political act.

     That argument continues in "The Stadium of the Mirror," in which Blaser explores the relationship of poetry to the public in terms of aesthetics and psychology rather than the political. Here Blaser argues against the imaginary stage of poetry which the child mistakes as an "image of psychic wholeness," and argues instead for another version of the Memory Theater in which the mirrored stadium incorporates "as much of otherness as the poet can see and hear," internalizing, in short, a great part of the world inside of the poet's self.

     Blaser's vision of the poet and his roles, accordingly, demand enormous undertakings, a knowledge of history, literature, language, politics, and much else that transforms the poet's role into a near Herculean act. It is, obviously, something that might indeed burn the poet up, actually destroy the living man. And in his beautiful testament to his beloved poet-friend Jack Spicer, we see precisely this self-immolation. Although the story has been told many times, it is worth repeating.

     One of two Spicer essays in this book, "The Practice of Outside," describes some of Spicer's methods, the creation of the serial poem beginning with not having any idea where one is going. Spicer, as Blaser claims, used a simple language that resembled his own way of speaking so to be able to live in that language and, as he wrote in his book, Language, to "have the ground cut from under us." Blaser argues:

 

                    Just here, poetry may become a necessary function of the real, not

                   something added to it.

 

     This living through poetry came, however, at a "remarkable cost." As Spicer once declared: "Neither baseball nor poetry are for amusement." Spicer's life, filled with contrariness and complexity, along with a deep dependence on alcohol, demanded a price.

     At the end of this long essay, Blaser returns to a scene in which he had previously left us, at Spicer's beside in the San Francisco General Hospital, where he is soon to die.

 

                   I have already said his speech was a garble. He could manage a name

                   once in a while. Otherwise there were long-runs of nonsense sounds. No

                   words, no sentences. That afternoon, there was something like a dozen

                   friends around his bed, when it became clear that he wished to say

                   something to me. By some magic I can't explain, everyone left to let

                   it be between us. It was odd because I didn't ask them to leave and

                   Jack couldn't be understood. their affection simply accounted for

                   something inexplicable. Jack struggled to tie his speech to words. I

                   leaned over and asked him to repeat a word at a time. I would, I said

                   discover the pattern. Suddenly, he wrenched his body up from the

                   pillow and said,

 

                                 My vocabulary did this to me. Your love will let you go on.

 

                   The strain was so great that he shat into the plastic bag they'd wrapped

                   him in. He blushed and I saw the shock on his face. That funny apology

                   he always made for his body.

 

     Along with Blaser's observations in short and long essays on Olson, Louis Dudek, George Bowering, Mary Butts, the artist Jess and others, The Fire encapsulates the immense demands he puts upon the role of poet, a figure, like Joan of Arc destined to be burned up in the glory of his or her faith.

 

Los Angeles, November 1, 2009

Reprinted from Sibila [Brazil] (December 2009).

Vítězslav Nezval | Antilyrik / 2001

city for failed acrobats

by Douglas Messerli

 

Vítězslav Nezval Antilyrik, translated from the Czech by Jerome Rothenberg and Milos Sovak (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2001)

 

 After a couple of years in pre-production, my Green Integer press finally published in July 2001 Jerome Rothenberg's and Milos Sovak's excellent translation, Antilyrik, a selection of poems by the forgotten (almost unknown, at least in the US) Czech experimentalist, Vítězslav Nezval.

 

     Nezval, born in the village of Šamikovice in Southern Moravia, studied philosophy at Charles University in Prague at the very time when Czechoslovakia was the "first real and socially oriented democracy in central Europe" (Rothenberg and Sovak), and like most Czech intellectuals of the time aligned himself with the Communist Party. The artistic counterpart of the political revolutionary spirit of the day was, for Nezval, an alliance with what was called the "Nine Powers" (Devetsil), a poet's and artist's collective that included some of the major figures of Czech experimentalism, including Jindrich Styrsky, Jaroslav Seifert, Karel Teige, Frantisek Halas, and Toyen (Marie Germinova). One of his first publications with this group was his long poem The Remarkable Magician, published at the age of 21.

     From 1923 on Nezval presented his own program of poetics described as "Poetism," which set itself against "literary poetry" and proposed "a new art which will cease to be art." This movement would later ally itself with the Surrealists of Paris, particularly after Nezval's meeting with André Breton in 1932. Over the next 35 years Nezval would continue to publish, despite periods in which his art was banned and described as "degenerate," dozens of audacious works of poetry and fiction, as well as works of drama and art.

     Our collection was only the third selection of his work to appear in English, and included several remarkable poems, including "City of Towers," where Nezval mesmerizingly repeats the word "fingers" to celebrate that human tool that helped him to bring his Prague to life:

 

                              o hundred-towered Prague

                              city with fingers of all the saints

                              with fingers made for swearing falsely

                              with fingers from the fire & hail

                              with a musician's fingers

                              with shining fingers of a woman lying on her back

                              ..........................

                              with fingers of asparagus

                              with fingers with fevers of 105 degrees

                              with fingers of frozen forest & with fingers without gloves

                              with fingers on which a bee has landed

                              with fingers of blue spruces

                              .............................

                              with fingers disfigured by arthritis

                              with fingers of strawberries

                              with spring water fingers & with fingers of bamboo

 

     "The Dark City" presents a dream-like ghoulish world, a city like a carousel, houses like accordions, streets composed of beds from which the citizens come out like "giant worms" or "A pack of dogs that leaped out of a mirror." As the narrator escapes this nightmare world, the city crumbles into ruins and is left as only a pile of earth and ash.

     A similar nightmare world is experienced in "The Seventh Chant" from The Remarkable Magician, in which the sights and sounds of the city are linked to European history:

 

                               I heard the secrets in a kiss

                               the words around it circling like a line of colored butterflies

                               saw thousands of bacteria

                               in a sick man's body

                               & every one of them looked like a spiky chestnut

                               like a cosmos making war

                               with a skin of scaly armor

 

                               I saw a human break free from his dying comrades

                               in the pit of history that has no bottom

 

     "Fireworks 1924" consists of 82 directions which Nezval defines as a "cinemagenic poem."

   

   "Diabolo: A Poem for Night" is a longer more narrative work that recounts the movements of a sexually attractive but also vampire-like woman as she removes her clothing and ultimately "her breasts & rests them on the nightstand / then slips out thru the monastery crypt to take confession." Like the poem that follows, the woman's courtier is represented at times as being an "acrobat," a man caught upon the wire "between his wife's bed / & another woman's." The "nite vaudeville" Nezval describes becomes a story of equilibration, a "marriage halfway station for failed acrobats," presumably fallen beings from the wires connecting the city's many spires (Prague is commonly known as the city of a hundred spires).

     In his 1927 poem "Akrobat," Prague is seen as a meeting place of all Europeans as the acrobat, both a marvelous shape-shifter and a fallen fool, reveals the pleasures and tortures of modern life. Like a fairytale, the poem, Nezval argues, "redeems our happiness," to which, by the end of the poem, Nezval bids "farewell": "I leave you now so I can keep returning."

Jerry Rothenberg, is a long-time friend of whom I have written elsewhere. Milos Sovak, who was formerly a physician and now heads up a medical research company in San Diego, also has homes in Paris and Prague, where he grew up. I visited his Paris home on Rue Jacob in 1997, having a beautiful luncheon with him, his wife Dietland Antreter and Diane and Jerry Rothenberg. When I told him where I was staying, the Hotel Notre Dame, he claimed he had always stayed there before buying his Paris apartment. On this occasion Sovak also displayed several of the beautiful books of poetry by friends such as Cees Nooteboom and Manuel Ulacia he had published, each accompanied by original artworks by noted painters.

      In 1999 I visited Milos in Prague.

     Milos, who comes from an illustrious Prague family, spent a couple of days touring me through the city, the first night taking me to the Švejk restaurant whose walls carry the drawings by Joseph Lada and George Grosz for famed Czech novelist Jaroslav Hašek's The Good Soldier Švejk.

       The next day Milos was kind enough to take me on a long walking tour of the old town and other parts of the city. At one point he showed me a large building where, during the final days of Nazi control, his father had worked as head doctor. As the German tanks were leaving the city in the early days of May 1945, one gun tank was conspicuously pointed at the hospital; it was clear that the Germans were determined to destroy the hospital (the only one that would accept Jewish patients) as they left. Those at work in the building, including Milos' father, were horrified by their imminent destruction. Meanwhile, as Milos describes it, an elderly woman who worked as the head secretary, sitting at her window and witnessing the scene, carefully took out her pistol from the drawer of her desk and aimed it at the operator of the tank, shooting him directly in the head. The tank careened around the square for several minutes before finally coming to rest.

       That afternoon, Milos and I visited Argo publishers, where I met the publisher and his assistant, who some days later joined me in Frankfurt (in attendance at the Frankfurt Bookfair) for a Japanese dinner.

        Back in Prague Milos took me out to a splendid dinner at a lovely restaurant. I believe I ordered boar. On our way back home we walked across the Vltava River, stopping in a small park along the way where he pointed across to the home (more like a lit-up mansion, it appeared to me) in which he had grown up. "What a beautiful city," I sighed.

        Prague was in near-complete renovation when I visited. Nearly all of the buildings which had not previously been repainted were enjoying new coats of the bright colors that now identify the Prague skyline. Milos scoffed, somewhat jokingly I presume, at all the renovation. "I somehow got used to and now prefer the old gray city Prague was for so many years under Soviet rule. Everything now seems so artificially bright!"

        A few years later, Milos introduced me in Los Angeles to beloved Mexican poet Manual Ulacia, with whom Horácio Costa had lived for several years before I met him on my first trip to Brazil. Ulacia drowned while swimming in the ocean this year. A good swimmer, he was swept out to sea by undercurrents and was unable to return to shore.

 

Los Angeles, October 17, 2009