Whether one prefers Longfellow’s version of the Inferno, or Ciaran Carson’s, one knows Dante’s name, as one knows the names Baudelaire and Goethe. Introducing his Leopardi: Selected Poems, Eamon Grennan is blunt: “mention the name Leopardi to ten educated people (poets included) in Ireland, England, America or elsewhere in the English-speaking world, and it is likely that nine of them will shrug, knowing little or nothing about him or his poetry.” Juxtapose our ignorance with Jonathan Galassi’s extravagant claim in his introduction to his complete version of the Canti, “Among the canti [sic] are the first truly modern lyrics, the wellspring of everything that follows in the European poetic tradition,” we respond with a question, Where have you been, Leopardi, all our reading lives?

Giacomo Leopardi was not a nobody. Schopenhauer admired him and lamented not meeting him. Nietzsche called him one of the four finest prose stylists of the 19th century. (For those wondering about Nietzsche’s taste, Emerson, Landor and Merimeé complete the quartet.) In his 1881 essay on Byron Matthew Arnold seems to prefer Leopardi. Selections from Leopardi’s Canti appeared in English in 1923, 1943, 1953, 1966, 1981, and 1997. Three “translations” appeared in Lowell’s volume Imitations. Pound offered one in his 1911 Canzoni. They dropped like pins. There is reason to believe that Galassi’s Leopardi will make a noise.

Galassi’s Leopardi has several advantages over recent selections, even Grennan’s notable 1997 selection. Though Grennan’s book garnered praise and won prizes, and some of his versions of Leopardi’s canonical poems are superior to Galassi’s – for instance his “To Himself” –, Grennan’s Leopardi sounds less like a progenitor than a follower, already the poet who has absorbed the lessons he allegedly taught to his successors. Dip into Galassi’s complete version; immediately one remarks how peculiarly un-Modern Leopardi sounds.

Leopardi was a distinguished classicist. A furious autodidact, he took over his own tuition at 12. Along with Greek and Latin he knew Spanish, French, German, English and, as another Leopardi scholar alleges, “enough Hebrew as a teenager to debate with learned Jews in Ancona.” Study Galassi’s detailed chronology. Leopardi was a prodigy of poetry and of learning. He wrote all the significant Canti in about ten years, churning out work in a variety of genres the while, and died, just 39, in Naples. His principal work, “the enormous notebook of ideas and impressions, the Zibaldone,” was written between 1817-1832, and runs over 4,500 pages. (Leopardi indexed the work himself.)

Reading Galassi’s Leopardi from cover-to-cover one agrees with Plumly’s delicate observation from Posthumous Keats: “[Keats] understood that there are no mistakes in art, only failures.” Even in those rare instances when circumstances have bequeathed us an oeuvre in pieces – a few complete examples, a garland of excerpts – poets who deserve the overused epithet great are not uniformly so. Not every poem padding later editions of Leaves of Grass succeeds. Among Emily Dickinson’s seventeen hundred odd poems a few hundred secure her reputation. What distinguishes the great for those who in a few generations undergo the rigorous editing of the anthologist, the Ph.D. candidate’s dissection, the unabashed fan’s blinding attention, is that even their failures are worth attending to. Leopardi’s are.

Why have the Canti never caught on in English? Several reasons. Their length: thirty-six poems run to three hundred and twelve pages. Galassi includes five “fragments” and four “other texts”, adding thereby another fifty to a book bulging with 135 pages of notes, bibliography, acknowledgements and index. (This is the scholarly model Galassi pioneered with his translation of three volumes of another poet essential to the Italian and Modernist canon, Eugenio Montale.) Subtract the welcome en face Italian and the reader still confronts 156 pages of primary matter. Almost defeating our common-sense definition of lyric poetry, just four of his poems are a single page in length. Some run 200 lines or more. Their tone: As Ottavio Mark Casale puts it in his valuable introduction to his 1981 selection from Leopardi’s works, “we often get the sense in Leopardi’s late works of being in the presence of an ancient tragic Greek or Hebrew come again to speak in modern yet timeless terms.” Their style: one hears the truism that poetry is untranslatable repeated about Leopardi. One hears of the “sublime poverty” of his style. The reader discovers that Leopardi is didactic; often the tone changes drastically from stanza to stanza. This tendency is magnified in translation. The polyphonic effect that form and rhyme serve to unify is diminished; the voices break and waver; and are broken by infelicities. And finally there is Leopardi’s apparent pessimism: Take Byron’s dystopian “Darkness,” subtract the fiends and demons, and one has an inkling of Leopardi’s magnificent lack of consolation. Where Byron sets the war of all against all in a volcano, Leopardi sits on the slopes of Vesuvius, the fresh air perfumed by sulfur, and sees the same unforgiving world.

This last is the block critics and readers can’t move from his tomb: Leopardi’s apparent nihilism. It prompted Arnold to qualify his endorsement, and contemporaries to deride him. Stinging words attributed to Manzoni or Tommaseo—the former then the most famous Italian writer of the period, the latter a scholar Leopardi demolished: “There is no God because I am a hunchback, I am hunchback because there is no God.” Indeed he was. Leopardi suffered severe scoliosis, debilitating eye problems, dropsy; he loved and his love was not returned; his mother was remote, tyrannical; his father profligate and conservative; he hated his small town; it has been alleged that he did not leave his family’s large house unaccompanied until his twentieth year. Was he doomed to write like this?

Everything is evil. I mean, everything that is, is wicked; every existing thing is evil; everything exists for a wicked end. Existence is wickedness and is ordained for wickedness. Evil is the end, the final purpose, of the universe. Order, the state, laws, the natural processes of the universe are all quite simply evil and are directed exclusively toward evil. The only good is nonbeing; the only really good thing is the thing that is not, things that are not things; all things are bad. All that exists, the totality of the many worlds that exist, the universe, are nothing but a minor blemish, a mote in metaphysics. Existence, in its general nature and essence, is an imperfection, an irregularity, a monstrosity. But this imperfection is a very small thing, truly just a blemish, because all existing worlds, however numerous or grand they may be, though not for certain infinite in number or size, are consequently infinitely small compared to what the universe could be, if it were infinite. And all that exists is infinitely small compared as it were to the true infinity of nonexistence, of nothingness.

A person promulgating such views today invites scrutiny. If not allowed to consult in person, psychiatrists and biographers would diagnose from a distance. Law enforcement might be notified. At minimum, medication would be recommended. Deeply unfashionable then, such views now arouse suspicion.

Many offer this excerpt without comment, as exhibit A in the case against Leopardi. I am grateful to W.S. Di Piero for filling in the picture. In his introduction to his 1981 translation of Leopardi’s book of social criticism Pensieri, he adds:

But we learn immediately thereafter that [Leopardi] poses all this as one more risky, unfashionable, unlikable possibility: ‘This system, though it offends our ideas, which hold that the end of all things can only be goodness, may perhaps be more tenable than Leibnitz’s [sic] formulation, or Pope’s, that “everything is good.” I’m not anxious, however, to extend my system so far as to say that the existing universe is the worst of all possible universes, thus replacing optimism with pessimism. Who can ever know the limits of possibility?’” [Italics added, to distinguish Leopardi’s words from Di Piero’s.]

Without its conclusion, this spectacular pessimistic outburst from the Zibaldone is misleading. Few include it because one feels certain, reading this oft-quoted excerpt, that we know who Leopardi is and what he means: he is angry; he is a proto-Camus, a nihilist. Add the concluding section and one realizes that Leopardi is conducting a thought experiment not unlike Einstein’s famous ‘passenger on the train’: An observer on the train leaving the station can’t be sure if the train or the station moves. Leopardi, observing the world, can’t be sure it is good so he essays the opposite, finally admitting neither essay is definitive: the essence of the possible is that it is limitless.

2

Leopardi could be the test case for the merits, and the limits, of biographical criticism. Knowing of Leopardi’s personal difficulties—physical, psychological, his contemporaries would add spiritual—one assumes his work reflects them. It seems impossible not to see Leopardi’s pessimism as the product of his personal suffering. Launched against his work during his lifetime, Leopardi took offense to this line of attack. He resisted it, but resistance was futile. His work is not better or worse for his view of the world, and to think so is to endorse an increasingly popular form of positivist criticism: to be great, poetry must espouse good news.

Against the misguided attacks of Nobel laureates Seamus Heaney and Czeslaw Milosz, Denis Donoghue’s defense of Philip Larkin’s “Aubade” in Adam’s Curse is instructive. I quote at length because Donoghue’s remarks are worth volumes of pseudo-psychologizing:

Heaney and Milosz are emotivists: . . . they assert their merely personal preferences while trying to present them as objective and impersonal. They have no criteria to which they may appeal. In default of such criteria, they resort to merely assertive gestures, employing words with which debate on the relevant issues is futile. “Life” as they use the word is a mere counter, designed to fend off every call for clarification. Supposedly we know what it means and concur in the implied claim that no specification of its kind is required. There is no sense of the difference between one life and another, or of the contradictions operative within any one life. Indeed, Larkin’s “Aubade” should be cited again to make the point that in an implied scene of life and death it avoids the slogans that Milosz and Heaney so easily resort to. “Aubade” imagines the middle passage, doing without slogans while doing the best it can.

Leopardi is a victim of this emotivist fallacy. Arnold, ultimately tilting back towards Byron after flirting with Leopardi—his assertive term is “character”—practices a version of it. As Gerald Dawe, reviewing Geoffrey Hill in “The Irish Times” writes, “poetry [is] moving ever closer to an instantaneous responsiveness and emotional availability, an interior decoration equal in value to other forms of expression and adornment.” The habit of identifying poet and speaker has become so ingrained that we forget that when reading a poem we are regarding an object, not judging the content of personal communication. Heaney plays fast and loose with this distinction in his critique of “Aubade.” Milosz takes it a step further, launching an ad hominem attack when he publishes “Against Philip Larkin.” Of course there is equal danger in severing the delicate but essential connection between creator and text, mourning the death of the author while admiring our mourning finery in the mirror.

If one is to crown Leopardi as the first modernist, as so many in all camps seem eager to, one has to set forth what one means by Modernism. We drag the past with a seine, catching this figure while leaving that one to wait for a more inclusive movement. It is safe to say Leopardi is a limb of the body of work it is impossible to imagine the body of Italian literature without. Petrarch, Dante, Leopardi and Montale are the poets who forged and purified the language of their tribe. Leopardi’s early poems were important to the Risorgimento, the Italian nationalist movement. Leopardi’s later poems, with their deeply personal voice, their “I,” are his alleged gift to modern poetry. In poems Galassi translates as “Infinity,” “To the Moon,” “To Himself” even “The Reawakening” we hear Leopardi’s “I” as if he were our contemporary. But we are mistaken; he is not. Persona is not personality.

Sadly, Leopardi’s ‘modernism’ may be no more than this: that he is one of the first we know enough about to subject him to the emotivist fallacy. Defenders of Leopardi indulge in it too, rationalizing or excusing his pessimism—Casale goes so far as to report on Leopardi’s “incredibly beautiful smile”, as if a tendency to frown might further damage his reputation. Leopardi doesn’t need apologists; he can survive spirited attacks. We don’t have to like his views, but to marginalize or dismiss him outright is to dismiss a great part of ourselves.

Like Nietzsche, Leopardi “turn[ed] his head away” from consoling ideas that might merit capitalization, God first and foremost. As the Pensieri are a study of the limitless mendacity of society, the Canti dwell on the corruption of meaning and value, and on their necessity even in corrupt and diminished form. The first poem in the collection concerns itself with “Italian” national identity. In Leopardi’s time there was no Italy, as we know it; lamenting “Italy” Leopardi laments Hellenistic Rome. Galassi translates line twenty-four of “To Italy” as “You were a lady, and now you are a slave.” It might be the most succinct statement of the book’s themes. A paraphrase of Leopardi’s statement might read, ‘you were a symbol, and now you are an object.’ A symbol is full of meaning; an object is a mere commodity. Even in Leopardi’s insipid melodrama “Consalvo” he develops the theme of decline from the symbolic to the materialistic: “And so excessive love / had made him into a slave and a child.” Even love, in excess, is dangerous and reductive.

3

Consider Galassi’s version of this long passage from “Broom, or the Flower of the Desert.” Speaking of the Italian original Arnold appears to be speaking of this passage, which he says is superior to anything in Byron. (Galassi’s en face Italian does not include the first line Arnold refers to—it does include the last— and this review is not the place to sort variations among editions.)

Often I sit at night on these deserted
slopes which the hardened flood
clothes in black that seems to undulate,
and over the sad plain
I see the stars
burning above the purest blue,
which the sea reflects in the far distance
and, twinkling everywhere, the world
glistens in the empty sky.
And once my eyes have focused on those lights,
which seem a tiny point to them,
though they’re enormous, so that next to these
the earth and sea
are in truth no greater than a speck
to which not only man
but this globe where man is nothing
is totally unknown; and when I see
these still more infinitely distant
nuclei, it seems, of stars
that look like haze to us, to which
not only man and earth but all our stars
together, infinite in size and number,
the golden sun among them,
are unfamiliar or else they appear
the way these look to earth: a point
of nebulous light—
how do I think of you then, sons of men?
And considering
the way you are down here,
to which the earth I walk upon bears witness,
and that even so you see yourself
as lord and end assigned to Everything,
and how you were often flattered to relate
that the authors of the universe
came down to this mere grain of sand called earth
for love of you, and often condescended
to speak with you and yours,
and how you keep retailing absurd notions
insulting to the wise, down to our day,
which seemingly surpasses every other
in knowledge and civility; what emotion, then
mortal unhappy race, what notion of you
finally assails my heart? It’s hard to say
whether it’s laughter or pity that prevails.

Galassi’s archaism “to speak to you and yours” allows one to entertain the possibility that Leopardi condescends to his audience. Unless we identify searching pity with the Hebrews, one can’t agree with Casale that Leopardi’s tone is ancient. Galassi’s translation may be complicit in ‘modernizing’ Leopardi, but this is inevitable; Leopardi would be the first to acknowledge, and the first to lament, this inevitability. (It is also desirable—we need Leopardi, in whatever form we can get him.) In “Broom” and elsewhere in the Canti, Leopardi adopts the perspective of a telescope, looking deeper into space, and finding there fewer and fewer reasons even to hope much less believe in God or human eminence.

Leopardi sounds the first note that even the animals know by 1923, when Rilke restates it in the first “Duino Elegy”: “and already the knowing animals are aware / that we are not really at home in / our interpreted world.” Rilke’s “interpreted world” is akin to Leopardi’s world of infinite possibility. The ‘interpretations’ Rilke speaks of are the ‘limits’ Leopardi knows are false, and in the next breath admits they are essential. We are not at home in the actual world, nor in the world of interpretations. There is no tradition to receive. A more extreme statement of the same predicament: “Nothing is granted to me,” Kafka writes to Milena, “everything has to be earned, not only the present and the future, but the past too.”

Take “Night Song of a Wandering Shepherd in Asia,” a poem many consider Leopardi’s finest. A shepherd addresses the moon as it rises, comparing his own wanderings to the moon’s wanderings in the sky, and a beautiful parallel of structure and experience develops: “Aren’t you tired / of plying the eternal byways?” The shepherd asks the moon, and the moon’s silence allows the shepherd freedom to ask and answer, talking to himself as only the mad, or madly lonely, do. It is hard not to see the poem in light of Psalm 23, “the Lord is thy shepherd,” or this passage from the Gospel of Matthew: “when [Christ] saw the multitudes, he was moved with compassion on them, because they were scattered abroad, as sheep having no shepherd.” The shepherd speculates that the moon has knowledge, as the Lord allegedly has, but the moon remains silent, and the shepherd merely hopes, he is certain that he does not know, that life has a purpose.

I ask myself:
Why all these lights?
What does the endless air do, and that deep
eternal blue? What is the meaning of
this huge solitude? And what am I?
I ask myself: about this boundless,
wondrous space
and its numberless inhabitants,
and all these works and all this movement
of all heavenly and earthly things,
revolving without rest,
only to return to where they started;
any purpose, any usefulness
I cannot see. But you, immortal maiden,
surely understand it all.
This I know and feel:
that from the eternal motions,
from my fragile being,
others may derive
some good or gladness; life for me is wrong.

The last clause sounds a false note. In attempting to preserve Leopardi’s tone Galassi injures sense. (If someone says, “life for me is wrong” we move to correct, gently.) We might accept “life for me is pain” or “life is suffering,” even “life is bad,” though the former would introduce a misleading off rhyme with “maiden.” Elsewhere, in a bid to preserve rhythm Galassi introduces otiose words. But to second guess this translation is to disarticulate the bones of an intact skeleton.

The “Night song” is the renovation and resurrection of a symbol. The moon is the shepherd’s interlocutor and companion. As if under the pressure of the shepherd’s attention one wants to ask, is it the moon or the shepherd that changes? We know the moon is a sphere, and know it only appears flat — but does the shepherd, who has only ever ‘seen’ it? We know the moon is a sphere even as we only see one side, but we read Leopardi as the shepherd views the moon, as a disc. When we conflate him and his work, and him and his personae, we deprive him of substance; we flatten him. When we fail to take him at his word, and recognize that his vocation is not only as a thinker or as a poet, or when we conflate these two not inimitable activities, we deprive him of his gift. We judge his thoughts while he wonders what others imagine. Are the moon’s seas reservoirs of the analogical imagination, or arid craters? does not even deserve to be described as a rhetorical question, and yet our prejudicial emotivism answers it. The typical reading has the shepherd express unqualified despair, but in the last stanza every clause begins with “maybe”. He has nothing to declare. The poem is speculative, not conclusive.

Like the unidentified speaker in “Broom,” the shepherd formulates and expresses every idea; the poem’s title identifies the poem as the shepherd’s own words. The moon serves in the poem a similar purpose to the blooming weed in “Broom:” the insentient becomes the prompt for an inquiry into the limits of sentience and sapience. To the shepherd the moon offers permanence, to the poem’s speaker broom offers fragrant impermanence: neither, in and of themselves, offers consolation. The speaker in “Broom” and the shepherd in “Night Song” console themselves with their inconsolable reflections. As readers we partake of their consolation even if the vision that prompts it is absolutely bereft, and devoid of comfort. Whatever one calls these objects— illusions, interpretations, supreme fictions—Leopardi is among the first and most eloquent advocates of fictions: not necessarily supreme, merely necessary.

Angina Days | Selected Poems by Günter Eich
Princeton University Press, 2010, Cloth, $24.95

     The narrative of discovery and recovery of a writer we can describe quite reasonably as essential is compelling.¹ But the case of Günter Eich is more complicated than this extraordinary new collection makes it appear. Thanks are due to Princeton University Press and to Nicholas Jenkins, series editor of Facing Pages, for Angina Days | Selected Poems, the best effort yet to bring Eich to our attention.² Thanks to the translator, poet and critic Michael Hofmann, who has worked, it seems indefatigably, to bring English readers the riches of recent German literature.

     Why do we know almost nothing about Günter Eich? In part it is a matter of his temperament. Born in 1907, he studied law at his father’s behest, Chinese for pleasure. He became a full-time freelance writer in Dresden in 1932, an inopportune moment to begin any self-directed project in Germany. In his own version of his story, Eich was drafted into the Wehrmacht in August 1939, and discharged after a stretch in an American POW camp in 1945, left with nothing but a backpack. According to Hofmann, an Allied bomb destroyed his Berlin apartment in 1943. “A little late, in summer of 1945, I came back . . . but with the balance of my goods and chattels on the far side of the Oder-Neisse-Line.”³ Eich continues:

I wrote my first poems at the age of ten, and first saw my name in print at twenty. The poems I have for you now came about after ten years in which I didn’t write a line, in POW camp and after. They do not mean to project the reader or listener into a more beautiful world; their aim is to be objective.⁴

     Eich received the inaugural prize of Gruppe 47 in 1950, and the Büchner Prize, Germany’s highest literary honor, in 1959. “Eich seems to have been entirely without the careerist ambitions of most poets — even the successful ones. Books were tickled out of him by impatient or silver-tongued publishers; prizes came to him without anxiety or agitation on his part: the most important radio drama prize, the Hörspielpreis der Kriegsblinden (Radio Play Award from the War-Blind) in 1953 . . ..” ⁵ What Hofmann idealizes in the first part of his sentence he addresses after the colon. Eich was an acknowledged master of the radio play.⁶ The success of his radio plays, and reading tours sponsored primarily by the Goethe Institute, allowed Eich an extraordinary degree of freedom.⁷

     We also know so little about Eich because of how little he may want us to know. Eich applied to join the Nazi party on 1 May 1933. In November of the same year “the membership process had been stopped on the basis of a letter.”⁸ Eich did join the Reich Chamber of Literature, and he worked for German radio, one of the principal instruments of Nazi propaganda, until 1940.⁹ “More than a third of Eich’s postwar volume of poetry Distant Farms (Agelengene Gehöte, 1948) was written during the Third Reich and partly published in journals and newspapers.”¹⁰ Hofmann renders Distant Farms as Remote Smallholdings. It is the first collection he selects from.

     It cannot pass unnoticed that Hofmann has given us Eich as he wanted himself to be seen. Crucially, these omissions cast doubt on the status of all the biographical information in Hofmann’s introduction. And there is reason to doubt it. Though Eich was drafted in 1939 and trained as a radio operator, he served in Berlin at “a secure desk job,” where he reached the rank of sergeant, until 1944.¹¹ In the spring of that year he was transferred, serving in a communications unit in Dresden and Geisenhausen bei Landshut. The Americans captured him on the Western Front in 1945.¹²

     The matter of the bomb that destroyed Eich’s apartment is of some importance in sorting out Hofmann’s views of Eich, and our views of the two of them. Eich filed for compensation for the loss of his possessions in an Allied bombing on November 20th, 1944. It seems unlikely that Eich would wait more than a year to recoup the losses incurred during the bombing, suggesting that Hofmann’s dates the bombing incorrectly.¹³

But Hofmann is not merely sure of his facts; they carry him away. Eich repudiated his pre-war poetry, and simply denied that there was any work at all from the Nazi era.¹⁴ Hofmann argues that Eich “ . . . Betjeman-like, had cause to be grateful to the Allied bomb . . . that demolished his flat.” Good riddance to bad lyrics. But his first post-war collection contained a few examples in a more straightforward lyric style.¹⁵ Hofmann purged this work from his selection. He swallows Eich’s own editorial decisions about his life and his work whole. The historian Glenn Cuomo, who has written extensively about Eich, offers an opposing view of both issues: “ . . . after the collapse of the Third Reich less than a year later, the loss [of his apartment and manuscripts] became very advantageous to [Eich], since with the annihilation of the overwhelming majority of his radio texts from 1933 to 1940, almost all evidence of his Nazi-era writing had disappeared.”¹⁶

     Why does Hofmann let Eich mislead us as he misled his post-war auditors? This is a difficult problem, and a review is not a place to contemplate or assign blame. It is a troubling decision, particularly in a volume that strives to “introduce” Eich, as this carefully selected collection does. Even if his biography gives us second thoughts, even makes one queasy, Eich’s reputation as a poet is secure.




2.

     Eich’s work travels from the lyric to the gnomic. If Hofmann had included a few of the lyrics that Eich included in his first post-war selection, Eich’s astonishing development would have been more apparent. In Remote Smallholdings, his 1948 collection, the title poem is in four rhymed four-lined stanzas. (The pattern is a b a b, c d c d, a e a e, f g f g.) Hofmann does not carry this rhyme scheme into English. (Fortunately, en face originals allow us to see rhymes in German.) The presence of rhyme seems to be a residue from Eich’s youthful lyrics. Everything else about the poem speaks to Eich’s postwar style: narration, when present, is drained of agency. Metaphor is kept to a minimum. The penultimate line is almost witty: “the saps of the world learn to circulate.” The final line reads: “smoke rises like a fiery poem.” The line might invoke smoke from concentration camp chimneys; it might suggest poetry is a destructive force.

Inventory

This is my cap,
my coat,
my shaving kit
in the burlap bag.

This tin can:
my plate and my cup,
I scratched my name
in the soft metal.

Scratched it with this
precious nail,
which I keep out of sight
of thieving eyes.

In my bread bag is
a pair of woolen socks
and some other things
I don’t tell anyone about,

it serves me as a pillow
for my head at night.
This piece of card I lay
between my body and the ground.

The pencil lead
is my favorite:
by day it writes out lines
that come to me at night.

This is my notebook,
this my canvas,
my towel,
my thread.

     The canonical “Inventory,” one of the most widely read poems in all of German literature, a poem that “makes a haunting pair with its exact contemporary, Paul Celan’s ‘Todesfuge’” is deceptive. ¹⁷ It is a list of possessions, including a secret. The poem points to its own creation in the fifth stanza but the pencil lead is the speaker’s favorite, not his essential, possession. The remarkable thing happens in the fourth stanza: “and some other things / I don’t tell anyone about”. These unnamed things are kept in a sack that pillows the speaker’s head. Given the poem’s commitment to the literal we assume the speaker refers to a physical object. But the pillow is the poem’s sole image of comfort. The secret consoles him. Enduring the deprivation of liberty, confined in captivity, the importance of privacy — a kept secret — cannot be discounted. Given Eich’s actions before his internment, the sense of secrets kept has added meaning.

     This becomes Eich’s enduring theme: telling refusal. As Hofmann aptly puts it, Eich “affirms one of the most ancient human freedoms, that of saying ‘no.’” (Some might accuse Eich of saying yes precisely when he should have said no.) At times he even refuses to refuse, as when he describes himself in “Delayed” as “caught at the left moment, / the right having already gone.” This again displays wit, a stoic acceptance of circumstance, an almost Zen-like knowing: even if the left is not the right or the ‘right’, it isn’t wrong. Marx’s “social hieroglyph” appears, giving the poem an explicit political meaning. But Eich does not choose between right and left. He chooses left because right has flown.

     As Hofmann seems blind to Eich’s biography, occasionally he misses what is most characteristic of Eich’s poetry, even when he remarks on it. Hofmann asserts, “ . . . it seems to me, in a piece like ‘And,’ Eich was making poems almost without words.” Hofmann’s praise teeters on the precipice of his qualifier ‘almost.’ Hofmann can’t mean “almost without words” literally, so he must mean ‘almost’ as a comment on the apparent poverty of Eich’s vocabulary. The poem “And” uses plain words, but to immense effect. Of fifty-two, “belongs” appears twice, “what” three times, “with” twice, the first line repeats “fog” thrice, and “and” appears six times, seven if we count the title. In German the compression is more profound. Hofmann translates the last line as “It’s enough, thanks, its plenty” but the phrase “es reicht” appears three times. Hofmann’s version is more colloquial – he is honest about preserving tone at the expense of linguistic exactness — but in this case he deprives the poem of a crucial element of repetition.

     And “And” is crucial. “Experience tells /what belongs with what, /what belongs with and, /only with and, /no rationale.” This is as close to a program as we are likely to find in late Eich. The debate is settled. The hypotactic is long gone, diminished and dismissed as “rationale.” The paratactic is fragile. Fragments are fitted together without explanation, which is to say links are made but not explained, and may in fact be unexplainable. In the next stanza, and by this point in Eich’s oeuvre the term fits loosely if at all — the poems shrunken, almost skeletal in appearance — Eich offers a poignant endorsement of his “and” (the translation reinforced with italics): “it will last/so long as the and doesn’t/ slip my mind like the other words. / It’s enough, thanks, it’s plenty.” Eich says, at minimum, so long as the fog does not seep into my head, then fog and friendship are proof of life.¹⁸

     There are outstanding poems in this selection, too many to mention by name, much less discuss in detail. In our current poetic climate, where Pound-inspired homage remains an accepted — even celebrated — mode, Eich’s “Friend and Reader of Horace” is a sober alternative, a rebuke to the reader of Horace and the reader of Eich’s poem.

Please don’t talk to me again about Horace
and learning to die.
No one learned that,
it just befell them,
a bit like being born.

The penultimate poem in Hofmann’s selection is “Hospital Colors.”

It’s possible to
get on the case of that gray green,
the walls, the paper,
the second you come round you will experience it;
if you still have a question,
bite it back,
so that the grass green girls
can’t take it away with them
in their grass green bonnets, surgical masks,
their grassgreen words.

Here unfamiliar circumstances intensify natural suspicion: the speaker, a patient, is afraid to ask even an innocent question, since the first thing one says on regaining consciousness is given a weight that it may not deserve. In this setting a question can be taken as a symptom, an action characterized as a ‘behavior.’ One might keep one’s pain a secret for instance so as to feel something. The kept secret is the one thing that doesn’t happen. Unlike birth and death it doesn’t “befall” one. It is a compliment to say “he took the secret to his grave.” Eich, who died in 1972, apparently took his share. According to his wife his last wish was to have his ashes “deposited in Switzerland next to those of the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin.”¹⁹

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Foreign poets who receive the “FSG treatment” are guaranteed attention. When I learned that Michael Hofmann, the German-born English poet was to receive it this spring, I expected more. Hofmann is a prolific and often trenchant critic. He is a respected and amazingly prolific translator who has Englished, among others, Hans Fallada, Franz Kafka, Ernst Jünger, Wolfgang Koeppen, Durs Grünbein, Joseph Roth, and several works by his own father Gert Hofmann. I am grateful for his version of Roth’s masterpiece The Radetzky March, especially grateful for Roth’s “The Auto-da-Fé of the Mind.” From 1933, that piece appears in the collection What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920-1933, and reads like an extraordinary, terrifying prophecy of the Holocaust.¹

Hofmann, who has published four collections, writes short poems. He is an aftermath poet. (He employs the hyphenated ‘aftermath-poems’ to describe Joseph Brodsky’s work.)² He walks through the remains before they are proper ruins and takes notes. His tone is so even that he might be sleepwalking. No loss surprises him, which is not to say he is unmoved.

When reading Hofmann, Americans are liable think of another recent beneficiary of the “FSG treatment.” Though Farrar Strauss Giroux has published August Kleinzahler, the ‘poet of New Jersey,’ for years, his New and Selected was a sort of coronation. And Kleinzahler is indubitably king of the White Castle pictured on the cover of his Sleeping it Off in Rapid City. Both poets are liberated from conventions that they cannot but disdain as bourgeois. (Both seem proud to put the ‘boor’ back in bourgeois.) Both offer a hard-to-credit accounting of a natural history of self-destruction, a proud catalogue of self-destructive behaviors. Even if we can’t quibble with the hangovers, the condom-wrappers, times “… the vinegary/ smell of cruel spermicide carried all before it,” reading them can be too much like hearing the neighbors have sex. Some nights I listen with prurient interest, some I count the groans as I might count sheep, most nights I cover my ears.

The next line – it begins the fifth stanza – of “Between Bed and Wastepaper Basket” is pitch-perfect: “Familiarity breeds mostly the fear of its loss.” This is a characteristic poem. The scene is intimate. The figures in the carpet and wallpaper receive as much attention as the figures in the drama. The language is contemporary; the setting is squalid; and the action is gritty melodrama, as filmed by Mike Leigh.

Among seven previously collected poems, the six-liner called “Poem” is rare, because it is so explicit. It testifies to sympathy, and the strain of suppressing it. It is a sort of artists’ statement.

When all’s said and done, there’s still
the joyful turning towards you
that feels like the oldest, warmest, and quite possibly
best thing in me that I must stifle,
almost as if you were dead,
or I.

The need to stifle is clear; the cost of this stifling is huge.

Reading Hofmann I thought of a remark of Lucian Freud’s, another transplant from Germany who has gone native. “Freshly felt emotions can’t be used in art without a filter. It’s like people thinking manure is just shit, so they shit in a field and they think the plant will grow and in fact it half-kills it.”³ I don’t quote Freud’s pungent speech to suggest that Hofmann stinks – far from it. If Hofmann fails it is because he stifles so much that, on occasion the poems are not smoke from great fires but ephemera, smoke-signals from cigarettes.

When he opens up; when he turns his jaundiced, blood-shot, exile’s eyes outward, when he surveys the aftermath of Europe and the past century, the results are superb.

On Fanø

Acid rain from the Ruhr strips one pine in three …
To supplement their living, the neutral Danes
let out their houses during the summer months –
exposure, convexity, clouds and the shadows of clouds.
Wild grass grows on the manure of their thatch.

There are concrete bunkers among the sand dunes –
bomb shelters, or part of Heligoland and the V2s …?
German hippies have taken them over, painted them
with their acid peace dreams; a cave art of
giant people, jungles, a plague of dragonflies.

This short poem from his first book, published in his twenties, is what Hofmann does best. He is an excellent craftsman. “Acid” bites the ear, the vowel audible in and corroding “living” and “hippies.” Hofmann makes much of how acid, or some other substance, exfoliates not just trees but strips minds (and no doubt mines) too. No word retains its innocence in his hands. The next poem in this selection chronicles an earlier generation “destroyed by madness.” In the elegiac “Fates of the Expressionists” Hofmann, no hysteric, dryly observes: “Their hold on life was weaker than a baby’s.” Indeed.

The finest kind of reporter, he lets things speak for themselves. Listen to this, from “Aerial Perspective”:

I can only hear the big AWACS aircraft
homing back in the fog across the North Sea –
tailplanes like leg-nutcrackers, and ridden by
their great, rotating, white-striped black toadstools –

No one who reads this will ever see an AWACS the same way again. Hofmann’s malevolent image is exact and indelible, bleeding across the boundary between nature and the apparatus of fear.

He is not inclined to declare yet one of my favorites finds him declaiming. “Nighthawks” begins: “Time isn’t money at our age, its water./ You couldn’t say we cupped our hands very tightly…” This must be among the most succinct definitions ever written of precocious youth. An instant classic worthy of the Classics, it exhibits one his tics: he is in love with the ellipsis.

I could devote the whole review to “Nighthawks.” Among other things, it anatomizes an excruciating feeling we all know too well: hell might not be other people but we have all wished others dead.

I met a dim acquaintance, a man with the manner
of a laughing-gas victim, rich, frightened and jovial.
Why doesn’t everyone wear pink, he squeaked.
Only a couple of blocks are safe in his world.

The word that saves this harrowing portrait is ‘victim:’ Hofmann acknowledges that the man has turned into what he turned to for relief.

He encounters this dreadful type often. In “White Noise,” the first poem in the book, Hofmann judges himself while remarking on the commitments of another:

You hoover twice a week, and in my eyes
that amounts to a passion for cleanliness.
The vacuum, its pre-war drone in the corridor.
Thin and snub-nosed, a gas-mask on a stick.

Whether these folks are born without souls, or lost their souls along the way, is not clear. He has written: “I grew up as an English poet: small-scale, occasional, personal, wincingly witty, articulate about dirt.” I’m not sure how many English poets would accept this characterization. For small-scale he means willing to air dirty laundry, confusing an admiration for stains with the transvaluation of all values. Even in situations of domestic agony, Hofmann remains a character in character, a method actor unsure if he can resist the world’s corrosive blandishments.

Hofmann begins a review of Robert Lowell’s Collected Prose with Lowell’s observation about Hawthorne: “His most confident writing is, perhaps, autobiographical.” Hofmann, acknowledging a debt, continues: “…it might be at least as true of [Lowell] himself.”⁴ He is committed, even devoted to the aesthetic Lowell posed as a question, looking back from “Epilogue:” “Yet why not say what happened?” Hofmann does not eschew the “blessed structures” Lowell evokes in the poem’s first lines, but he seems less troubled by the dichotomy that urges us beyond mere responsibility: to give “each figure in the photograph/ his living name.” Of course the named figures need not live, nor is there any reason to assume they did. They might just as well be figments a name vivifies.

Lowell hardly knew how apt he was in turning to Vermeer as his august model of terrestrial grace. All agree that Vermeer employed a camera obscura that made the visible new.⁵ There is disagreement about whether this device allowed Vermeer to capture mere effects or reproduce ‘a new knowledge of reality.’ In the poem, Vermeer’s grace is the accuracy of recording the sun’s illumination, the word with more syllables, and so much more symbolic weight than mere ‘light,’ it swamps the mapped world. But how to comport Lowell’s praise with the fact that what gives Vermeer’s girl her solidity is yearning? She is nameless.

Compared to Lowell, who is comfortable setting poems throughout History, Hofmann’s cast of characters is small. He dares to be intimate with History only on those rare occasions it is intimate with him, as when his neighbors are kidnappers intent on making it. Memorable poetry is the product of these encounters. ⁶Take the last two stanzas of “Withdrawn from Circulation”:

I was going to Cambridge. A few doors down
was the cellar where the RAF kept the Berlin Senator
they had kidnapped and were holding to ransom.

From time to time, his picture appeared
in the newspapers, authenticated by other newspapers
in the picture with him. He was news that stayed news.

As he does with military hardware, so he does with aphorisms. Hofmann has left his graffito on the Modernist cliff. I will never hear Pound’s dictum without this echo. Of course this tweaking of Pound is respectful, but it is nonetheless a pinch. Gallows irony at the expense of a Senator martyred to a bookish ideology, pointed joke at Pound’s virulent prejudice. (The Senator makes the news, and is authenticated by the news, a pawn in an ideological battle, or what some have called “the terrible battle for meaning.”) Kidnapped from the present he becomes the past before he has passed. And this is remarkably similar to the fate Pound chose, living his last years in Italy in a self-imposed silence, an exile in aphasia. Withdrawn from the world, Pound and the Senator lead a posthumous existence in the only way Hofmann acknowledges life after death: as and in texts.

What gives solidity to Hofmann’s senator? What gives it to his neighbor pushing her “gas-mask on a stick?” To his “dim acquaintance?” (Hofmann means, “dim” in both senses. The man himself is dim; and the acquaintanceship is dim, either because it is a product of ill-lit places like the station bar, the nighthawks’ perch, or because real affection has never lit up their faces.) Is there a characteristic force that guides the fate of Hofmann’s figures, and of Hofmann himself? It is not yearning so much as yearning curdling into loss. Contempt is innate; intimacy is terrifying. (Hence the need to stifle it.) More of his poetry has come from his fraught relations with his father than from any other source.

What Hofmann praises about Elizabeth Bishop applies just as well to his most memorable work: “The particular virtue of Elizabeth Bishop is the balance between the self and the world, between the eye (or ‘I’) and what it sees.”⁶ It is what Hofmann opts to eye, to size up, or, as is more often the case with him, to downsize, that makes him different. Like Bishop he writes well of his elsewheres, especially of Mexico. Not so well of the States, where he spends part of the year teaching at the University of Gainsville. We offend so many; we stifle so little here.

To continue regarding Hofmann in light of Bishop: he has “looked and looked [his] infant sight away.”⁷ The poetics of the recent “Poem” means just this. Hofmann knows himself, knows his instincts and knows he must do more than, and quite possibly the opposite of, what comes instinctively. This sets him apart from so many poets who interpret the advice “write what you know” to mean, “Write only about yourself –” those grown-ups with the focal length of infants. If it is a weakness, and I think, even if it is conscious and intentional, it qualifies as a limitation, it is also undoubtedly a strength.

Hofmann’s best work is deeply gratifying: “Outside, the controlled prostitutes move smoothly/ through the shoals of men laughing off their fear.” “Dogs vet the garbage before the refuse collectors.” “Whitewashed against white ants, the yew tree trunks/ look spindly and phosphorescent, like stalagmites/ in the caverns of their shade. The birds wont sing.” “It was – what? –/ the triumph of hope/ over experience. / But what triumph/ (and what hope)?” So gratifying in fact that I forget about the weak or the vague until I page past it. “Tea for My Father” (my favorite poem about their fraught relationship) and the elegy “A Minute’s Silence” are sadly missed in this Selected. If the selection had been more rigorous Hofmann’s seriousness would have been made plain. His best work will last.

*

1. In his review of Hofmann’s translations of Roth J.M Coetzee has taken him to task for exceeding the translator’s task, and improving Roth’s writing. See Coetzee. J.M., Inner Workings: Literary Essays, 2000-2005, with an introduction by Derek Attridge, New York, 2007, PGS 91-93. Coetzee introduces his analysis this way: “However, Roth did not always write as well as he could, and what Hofmann does when Roth is at less than top form is cause for concern.”

2. Hofmann, Michael, Behind the Lines: Pieces on Writing and Pictures, Faber & Faber, London 2001, PG 128.
Lucian Freud: Recent Drawings and Etchings, including an interview with the artist by Leigh Bowery and an essay by Angus Cook, Matthew Marks Gallery, New York, 1993. Unpaginated.

3. See Behind the Lines, PG 35.

4. “Indeed, many found the image of a camera obscura superior to the painted image. As Constantijn Huygens (1596-1687), secretary to the Princes of Orange and an art enthusiast, wrote in 1622: ‘It is impossible to express the beauty [of the image] in words. All painting is dead by comparison, for this is life itself, or something more elevated, if one could articulate it.’” quoted from “Vermeer of Delft: His Life and His Artistry” by Arthur Wheelock, published in Johannes Vermeer, ed. by Arthur Wheellock, Royal Cabinet of Paintings Mauritshuis, The Hague, and Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1995, The Netherlands, PGS 25-26.

5. See Behind the Lines, PG 45.

6. See “2000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance” in Bishop, Elizabeth, The Complete Poems 1927-1979, Farrar Strauss Giroux, 1983, New York.

7. The lines quoted are from “Nighthawks”, “From Kensal Rise to Heaven”, “Progreso” and “End of the Pier Show” respectively.