They are primarily Works by dead poets, which is what this column is about. The great American poet Mary Ruefle writes in About the deada short lecture that exercise book Number 97 under the title the nature of things “Poets, no matter what camp they belong to, are people who are obsessed with something nobody knows about. That would be death.
They talk to the dead and have a connection with the dead and write about death as if they had accomplished it (…) FROM THE MOMENT THEY ARE DEAD THEY CAN TEACH US ANYTHING. Why – why is that? I think it’s because all their poems about death, the moment they’re dead, become poems about being alive.” So, following Mary Ruefle, this column does it despite dead poets very lively and instructive.
Let’s start with the most artistically beautiful volume of spring: The world wants to see itself with posthumous poems, prose and essays by the important Danish poet Inger Christensen from Kleinheinrich-Verlag. The artist Olav Christopher Jenssen beautifully illustrated the volume with watercolors. The volume presents a selection of poems not previously available in German, such as the long poem I still know the day has begunwhich reads, “Life is something to be overcome / Life is something we must go through / Life is something”.
Expressing what exists, affirming existence as existence through language without becoming pathetic is central to the work of this author. The intensity of these poems is balanced by often strict formal requirements. This decision for radical formal experiments was already known from Christensen’s best-known poem alphabet. In The world wants to see itself the masterful balance of existential power and formal rigor can be experienced throughout her oeuvre.
Christensen had too a fondness for the highly formalized Japanese haiku poetry. who of theirs little rainbow-Want to read haikus further east can do so with haiku Poems from five centuries, edited by Eduard Klopfenstein and Masami Ono-Feller. The magnificent anthology aims to make the development of this strict form of poetry, which originated in Japan and highly pictorial, comprehensible from its beginnings to the turn of the millennium.
305 poems are arranged chronologically and printed in two languages. The three outstanding poets of the Edo period, Matsuo Bashō, Yosa Buson and Kobayashi Issa, are accompanied by authors from Japanese collections as well as numerous female authors who have often remained unnoticed, among them Shina Sonome (1664 – 1726), who in in this haiku speaks of the unbearable summer heat, which is increased by a child on the back of the female speaker: “On the back the child / – it tears my hair – / oh this heat!”
Conversely, the relationship between Christensen’s work and haiku poetry can be stated through the linguistically concise practice of this poetry: “Water reflection – the reflection / now reaches in up to the post / This morning: the beginning of autumn”, writes Narita Sōkyū (1761 – 1842) in one of the haiku, all of which are provided with interpretations in the anthology.
From the water reflection and the reference to one of the four seasons required for a haiku, which can be very extreme in Japan, leads to the poems by Erika Burkart, who could have celebrated her 100th birthday in February 2022. After suffering a heart attack at the age of 33, Burkart was no longer able to pursue her profession as a teacher and from then on lived and wrote in the canton of Aargau in the baroque Kapf country house, which her father had bought and ran as an inn.
Erika Burkart’s poetry comes from Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, Rainer Maria Rilke and Stefan George, as her husband Ernst Halter, who made the selection, notes in the foreword. Burkart’s poems, which in his early work unthinkingly asserted a unity between the speaker’s ego and divine creation, experienced an inner break after a biographical break.
From 1973, with the tape the transparency of the shards, until her last volume published during her lifetime secret letter (2009) creates verses of mystical depth, of clear, almost piercing concentration, a lyric that has emancipated itself from its models, a work that wrestles with the question of the presence or absence of God, one in which the proximity to nature always becomes the source, the “lonely speaking in writing” is a highly scrupulous one: “The late, the short / ever shorter years come / when God disperses / into his demons / you get stuck on the thought / that practically everything you live with / morning trees, loved ones / books and evening windows // goes down / you wake up in a deep sleep / from the dream of life,” Burkart wrote in The dream of lifein which characteristic aspects of her late poetry are clearly recognizable, but in which the close relationship of the poets to death, as stated by Ruefle, can also be read.
Great love zum Lebendigsein speaks from the poems of the Catalan poet Joan Maragall, a selection of which the Munich poet Àxel Sanjosé has now translated into German. Maragall, who lived from 1860 to 1911 and whose work is part of Catalonia’s cultural heritage, is practically unknown in this country. The title of the volume is taken from the poem sea viewswhere it says: “The sky, very cheerful, / colors the sea bluer, / a blue that makes you fall in love / so bright at midday: / I look under the pine trees … / There are two things / I see them together / becomes further my heart: / the green of the pines / the blue of the sea”.
This poetry is enchanting, in which, in addition to Mediterranean cheerfulness, melancholy, the joy of being sad, flashes up every now and then.
exercise book. Journal of Literature Norbert Weir (ed.), issue August 97, 2021, 180 pp., 15 €
The world wants to see itself. Poems, stories and essays from the estate Inger Christensen Klaus-Jürgen Liedtke (editor and translator) with some translations by Hanns Großel, Kleinheinrich Verlag 2022, 376 pages, €40
haiku Poems from five centuries Japanese/German Selected, translated and annotated by Eduard Klopfenstein and Masami Ono-Feller with the participation of Kaneko Tōta and Kuroda Momoko, Reclam Verlag 2022, 422 p., 30 €
mirror writing. Poems – the great selection Erika Burkart Ernst Halter (ed.), Limmat 2022, 336 p., 39 €
The green of the pines, the blue of the sea. Poems Catalan/German Joan Maragall Selected, transferred and with an introduction by Àxel Sanjosé, Stiftung Lyrik Kabinett 2022, 168 p., 24 €