After Aldeburgh, its tangle of
events and impressions, the impossibility of going to everything, there are
always threads to follow – and at least one obsession. This year mine was the festival’s absent centre,
[East] German poet Volker Braun who was unable to come, and in particular one poem
of twelve end-stopped lines. ‘Property’ was written at and stands for a
turning-point in history, after the fall of the Berlin Wall while Germany
was moving towards reunification. I’m
going to type it out, for the pleasure of doing so. I wouldn’t normally do that (copyright) but this poem, originally published widely in the German press in 1990,
now appears to be the best sort of common property. Hope someone will tell me if not.
Das Eigentum
Da bin ich noch: mein Land geht in
den Westen.
KRIEG DEN HÜTTEN FRIEDE DEN
PALÄSTEN.
Ich selber habe ihm den Tritt
versetzt.
Es wirft sich weg und seine magre
Zierde.
Dem Winter folgt der Sommer der Begierde.
Und ich kann bleiben wo der Pfeffer wächst.
Und unverständlich wird mein ganzer
Text
Was ich niemals besaß wird mir
entrissen.
Was ich nicht lebte, werd ich ewig
missen.
Die Hoffnung lag im Weg wie eine
Falle.
Mein Eigentum, jetzt habt ihrs auf der
Kralle.
Wann sag ich wieder mein und meine alle.
Here are the first few lines of
Karen Leeder’s translation. It captures
the poem’s bitter stateliness.
That’s me still here. My country’s
going West.
WAR ON THE POOR GOD BLESS THE
PALACES.
I helped it out the door with all
the rest.
What paltry charms it has it gives
away.
After winter comes the summer of
excess.
The full translation is here. And here is Braun himself, reading the
poem. The Aldeburgh Poetry Paper has an
excellent piece by Leeder on Braun and the poem’s context. As she points out, Braun did not want to prolong
the “winter” of the GDR – “I helped it out the door”. He wished for a third way between that and
the excesses of the West, a democratic, independent country with socialist
ideals. A utopian spring perhaps. “Property” means not only individual replacing
collective ownership (including the theft that went on in former Warsaw
Pact countries) but also a sense of identity and the very meaning and purpose of
Braun’s own poetry – my whole text becomes incomprehensible, he says. To succeed, poetry has to find and fill an
empty space; a crucial role when political repression multiplies such spaces,
but who needs it in times of excess?
How many poems both say and stand
for so much, in twelve lines? More of Braun’s
are here at Modern Poetry in Translation.
In a talk on bearing witness, which
deserves a whole post to itself, Leeder said Braun had asked her to tone down
her translations to the simplest language.
Idea for next year, which I hadn’t
thought of when I filled in the festival survey: if Volker Braun’s health still
prevents him from coming (I’m assuming/hoping they’ll reinvite him), maybe the
Poetry Trust could commission some recordings?
There’s a new selected poems, Rubble Flora, out from Seagull Press, translated
by Karen Leeder and David Constantine.
Unfortunately it’s only in English.
The best German volume to buy alongside it is Lustgarten, Preußen. I know
that thanks to a downpour at Snape one night, which led to a brief conversation
in an archway with Leeder and her fellow German specialist Ian Galbraith who
stood in for Braun at the reading.
Galbraith also did a Close Reading
of the poem Braun had chosen, ‘Tränen des Vaterlandes’ (Tears of the Fatherland)
by Andreas Gryphius, who grew up during the Thirty Years’ War. The poem is stuffed full of war horrors,
including a river choked with corpses:
Dreimal sind schon sechs Jahr, als
unser Ströme Flut
Von Leichen fast verstopft, sich
langsam fort gedrungen.
Contemporary sources, said
Galbraith, confirm that Gryphius was not exaggerating.
***
*** ***
Kathleen Jamie gave a fabulously
good reading – she has a clear, strong, confident voice to fill out and inhabit
her spare and lyrical poems. Some of these
were from a new sequence reflecting the months up to the Scottish
referendum.
It was good to meet (just before the
final bus) Dan O’Brien who read from last year’s Aldeburgh first collection
prize winner, War Reporter. Again, hearing the poet’s voice was a treat –
how did he manage not to run out of breath reading these urgent, horrific and
often long poems? Of which there are two
new ones in the new Rialto.
Another reading that stood out:
Karen McCarthy Woolf from her new book, An Aviary of Small Birds, very moving. Other
people really liked her talk on Poetry and Disobedience, which I missed – am hoping
the Poetry Trust will podcast it and everything else on that festival theme which
was hexed for me, I missed the lot. For
once, people said, the opening Saturday panel discussion lived up to its
promise... and I was still in Aldeburgh, having a swim and eating
porridge. Festival blogger Anthony
Wilson wrote about it here.
More readings: New Poets Chrissy
Williams and Kayo Chingonyi, both strong readers and very brainy writers. I especially like her surrealism and his
syntax. (I was told recently that ‘surreal’
is sometimes used as a put-down for female poets. It is emphatically not that here.) Helena Nelson, last-minute stand-in for
storm-bound Jen Hadfield, filling the hall with her presence. Togara Muzanenhamo (born in Zambia, lives in
Zimbabwe) reading from his new collection Gumiguru,
a calendar for the farming year. When I
met him in London recently he said that from his farm’s study he has a view of
fields and cows.
Thomas Lux did a Close Reading of Hart Crane’s ‘The Air Plant’, written in wonderfully irregular yet perfect iambic
pentameter. It could have been written to
illustrate Lux’s quote from Emerson:
For it is not metres, but a
metre-making argument, that makes a poem,— a thought so passionate and alive,
that, like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its
own, and adorns nature with a new thing.
(This works for Volker Braun’s ‘Property’,
too.) A few of Lux’s metrical readings
were debatable… afterwards people were going around saying to each other, “he
thinks ‘balloon’ is a trochee!”
Lux read with panache to close the
festival. At the end, two huge bouquets
of white flowers with legs appeared on stage, to thank outgoing festival
director Naomi Jaffa for 22 years of her life.
Of course we gave her a long and standing ovation. The legs turned out to belong to the other members of the Aldeburgh triumvirate, Michael Laskey and Dean Parkin. Naomi welcomed her successor, Ellen McAteer,
who has written about the weekend on her own website.
There’s plenty I haven’t written
about: Brazilian poet Adelia Prado, Karen Leeder’s talk on the poet in old age,
South African poet Beverly Rycroft discussing poetry and illness with Anthony
Wilson, the wit of another South African, Finuala Dowling, Hannah Silva’s Schlock! – I think someone else is going
to write about Schlock!, will post a
link if so. Now, one more thing.
***
*** ***
Friday afternoon, ten days ago. Michael Laskey was ending his launch with the
last and title poem from his new collection, Weighing the Present, (smith|doorstop) in the Peter Pears gallery,
one of the old Aldeburgh venues. It’s
off the High Street up an iron outside staircase, which somehow makes it seem
as provisional as the wooden fish shacks on the beach. Naomi Jaffa had told the crowd that festival
founder Michael wouldn’t take full festival honours, so no Main Reading slot.
Nostalgic for the present moment as
well as the past, his poems unwind themselves around something simple in daily
life – going for a bike ride, digging potatoes.
Mostly the nostalgia is pure tone.
It surfaces in ‘Together’, which is set in bed:
even then, so close to her all
but inaudible sigh of wellbeing,
I miss her, I grieve for her, ache
for the small of her back I’m
actually
making much of, stroking – better
pull yourself together, mgl.
Those who know Michael can hear him
in the U-turn of that last line and a bit.
Anyway, he was almost at the end of the
last poem when the fire alarm went off.
Loudly, to startled but gentle laughter.
Perhaps someone set it off on purpose, so that he would have to read the
poem again. It’s one of several in which
the dead appear in dreams.
For an instant he was alive
or I had died, though I knew
neither could be true and pressed on
to the post office past my friend
with the present that needed
weighing,
more or less knowing nothing
was impossible, even heaven.
The alarm was silenced, ‘Weighing
the Present’ re-read. Will Michael write
a poem about this non-incident?
Afterwards there was time for a
quick walk along the Martello tower path, to watch a just-past-full moon rise
over the sea: tarnished but very bright, part-hidden by black clouds blowing up
in dramatic shapes, moonlight reflecting on thinner cloud below and on
wind-ruffled waves.
Gales and the moon, on and off all
week – I stayed up there. Only the
weekend mornings were swimmable. No fish
at the fish shacks. And now I’m feeling
nostalgic for it all. Double or triple
nostalgia? So many layers…
