Dressed in a Naked Question Mark
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It’s one thing to learn a foreign language well, quite another to learn it well enough to be able to feel in it, and harder still, if not impossible, to master an alien idiom so completely as to convey the force of what you feel. A few modern writers have made the leap: Joseph Conrad and Vladimir Nabokov in English, Samuel Beckett in French. But all three wrote their best work in prose. I can’t think of a single poet, who has written great, or even noteworthy, poetry in a language other than his or her own. Poetry, it seems, can only be written well in one’s mother tongue. This was the opinion of W.B. Yeats who dismissed Rabindranath Tagore’s English verse, even though it won the Bengali poet a Nobel Prize. In our own day, one has only to read a few poems by the late Joseph Brodsky to realize that his English verse is, for the most part, hopelessly inept. Brodsky struggles constantly to escape the confinement of his adopted idiom but his English falters, always in small but fatal ways, in the process.
A subtler example is provided by the English poetry of the Austrian poet Rose Ausländer (1901-1988). Ausländer came to New York in 1946 after somehow surviving the Nazi occupation of her homeland and she lived and worked here for almost 20 years. She had been born in Czernowitz (Bukovina) when it was still part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Paul Celan also came from Czernowitz; he and Ausländer became friends during their years in the ghetto. But after the war, she refused to write in her native German; it had become the “language of murderers.” The written word, she said, was her “motherland,” but how to rediscover it in a foreign country and a foreign tongue?
Ausländer knew English well. She had lived before the war in Minneapolis and had worked for a while in a bank in New York; in 1926 she became an American citizen. She was an avid reader of contemporary American poetry, with a marked fondness for the work of Wallace Stevens, E.E. Cummings, and Marianne Moore. After the war, she and Moore became close friends. Though she had published her first book in 1939 in German, she now set about composing in English. These poems have been published under the title “The Forbidden Tree” (Fischer Verlag, 282 pages, 8.45 euros), in a handsome paperback edition (available from Amazon. de).
In Germany Ausländer is regarded as a major poet and her works have been collected in some 16 volumes. Like Celan or like Nelly Sachs, both poets with whom she was associated, she had to reckon with an impossible heritage. Her gift was lyrical but she had to bend it to express the most terrible truths. To attempt this in her mother tongue was just barely possible; the language of the murderers was, after all, the language of their victims too. But in English?
I wish I could say that Rose Ausländer’s poems in English don’t always work because of the awful burden of truth in them, but that isn’t the case. The poems fail for tiny, almost imperceptible reasons. But in failing they illustrate how exact and unforgiving a living language can be. The first stanza of “The Spider” begins promisingly:
The Spider spins his net
Dancing a minuet.
Each geometric line
Clicks in the sly design.
The circles spread
From thread to thread
(almost a merry-go-
But now the poem begins to fall apart, perhaps because “almost a merry-go” strikes a discordant note; and it gets worse:
round), after which strain he relaxes every knee and with hypnotic eyes stares at some luscious flies who, thinking this a nest of bliss, had come to say hello.
The first line, with that dangling “round,” lumbers. No one who experienced English in her bones could write “round), after which strain he.” It is forced, and forced in an unmistakably odd way. And the condescendingly clever phrase “luscious flies” gives it away; she’s not feeling the words in English. Ausländer wants to import the tones of Goethe or Heine into English but it creates a disjunction between the subject and form of the poem; it’s an English poem pressed on a foreign template.
But sometimes she succeeds. The following lyric, whose first line forms its title, seems to me to work from start to finish:
My mind walks miles and miles of mist pursued by questions that insist to stab my sleep and nag my mind in search of something undefined! Essences of this and that robin rattlesnake and rat concept of the beastliest beast, of what is most and what is least, of what is what and what is not and if it were, without a but. My mind walks miles and miles of dark dressed in a naked question mark. Walks miles and miles and miles of mist asking each thing: do you exist?
Here the foreignness of her diction, the slight queerness of her choice of words, work brilliantly; she’s read her Emily Dickinson but has transported her magically to Czernowitz, and the result enchants. Then, too, for once, the poem is exactly about her own predicament, and so it rings true. In a poem she dedicated to Marianne Moore, she wrote:
The door.
Not the thing of wood.
The door open to doors
Open to open doors
To open roads to the grove.
It’s no accident that “door” rhymes with “Moore.” Marianne Moore encouraged Ausländer, she accepted her as a student and awarded her a prize in a poetry competition. But at the same time she urged her to resume writing in German. In 1965, Ausländer returned to Europe and settled in Düsseldorf, where she began publishing the two dozen collections which made her famous. For this Jewish girl from Czernowitz, German was the stubborn “motherland,” and she spent the rest of her life rescuing it from the murderers.