Pickford Review of Hein Distant Lover

Houghton Library of the Harvard College Library Review Author(s): Henry Pickford Review by: Henry Pickford Source: Harvard Book Review, No. 13/14 (Summer - Fall, 1989), pp. 4-6 Published by: Harvard Review Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27545410 Accessed: 12-01-2016 06:20 UTC Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/ info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Houghton Library of the Harvard College Library and Harvard Review are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Harvard Book Review. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 131.173.17.161 on Tue, 12 Jan 2016 06:20:51 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions HARVARD became BOOK REVIEW shih tz'u (lyric poetry), and ch'u (regular poetry, verse), the literati was shih which During Tang, mainly composed verse). (dramatic written in regulated formswith a set numberof syllables (each Chinese character being tones The four basic lines, and rhyme and tonal schemes. level, rising, falling-rising, falling) were used to vary the auditory effect of giving a musical quality to poetry which was often heightened by chanting The modem Chinese reader misses out on many of the rhymes and poems. monosyllabic), (high of the musical of the original tonal sequences effect since T'ang was very different from any Chinese Inaddition to phonology spoken today. in the original, the reader in translation loses the artistic losing the music much of the characters. appreciation style" poetry, or regulated common forms being five-syllable "Modern with the most verse, in the T'ang developed and seven-syllable eight-line in the "old style" quatrains. Poetry verse, or five-syllable and seven-syllable to be written and was less strictly regulated Tu Fu was a master of many poetic forms, continued style." create in form. innovations than that in the "modern to elements combining he perfected the technically de verse form, setting a new tone by using this form 1450 of Tu Fu's poems are extant, topics. Some In his manding eight-line regulated for both serious and mundane later years one hundred-and-twenty in his Selected David Hinten translates Poems one hundred-and-ten shih poems eight of them, all shih. Robin Yates presents In is approximately one-third of his total in this genre. by Wei Chuang, which addition he translates tz'u, all the extant fifty-five of Wei's lyrics which he has decided can be attributed toWei. Yates quotes James Hightower's definition and of tz'u: [It is] "a song-form characterized by lines of unequal length, prescribed in a large number of variant patterns, rhyme and tonal sequence, occurring each of which bears the name of a musical air." from the Lyrics came world entertainment from Central Asia and were and to a written lesser to tunes extent introduced to Chinese into T'ang folk melodies, China and and Taoist ritual chants. Wei Chuang is lauded as a pioneer, with indeveloping the genre of lyrics so that itbecame T'ing-yun (8137-870), to literati. Wei used the lyric form to record his emotions, his earthy acceptable in the of wine and the courtesans' He helped to set delight pleasures quarters. Buddhist Wen a more became down-to-earth, simple and emotional popular as an art form and enjoyed tone in Chinese itsmost productive poetry as period tz'u in the tenth through the twelfthcenturies. Classical Chinese was a written form, much sparer than the spoken at itsmost minimal. Chinese poetry was classical language, and syntactically Itwas also uninflected, without cases, gender, mood, or tense, and the same character could function as noun, verb, adjective, adverb, etc. This is one of the great strengths of Chinese poetic language, which can so easily portray and timelessness; but this openness of poetic lan ambiguity, universality, is difficult to portray in English without becoming guage confusing. Given the form of classical Chinese faced poetry, these translators a difficult task; what Stephen Owen has referred to as the linguistic-cultural and aesthetic limitations of translation. not to attempt Both of them chose Hinten gives the rhyme or to retain many of the formal features of the originals. reader some indication of the varying forms by translating poems with five lines in quatrains and those using seven-syllable lines in couplets. He syllable also differentiates between modern lines style and ancient style by beginning in the former with capital letters and lines in the latter with lower-case letters. Yates gives a visual sense of the uneven line lengths inWei's lyrics by placing of this technique longer lines further to the left on the page. Here is an example in one of Wei's lyrics on a favorite theme, the rejected woman: Wild flowers and scented grass, silent the road to the frontiermountains; willows spit out golden catkins, warblers liltearly, despondent inthe perfumed chamber, growing old inseclusion. of the destruction chronicles poem which Lady of Ch'in," a long narrative woman. of an upper-class rebellion through the experiences use of literary is the constant for the translator Another problem literati the small group of highly educated in classical allusions poetry. Since texts during their long years of have memorized would many of the standard their nature of much poetic the allusive language would enhance education, erudite and some of the greatest of the poetry. Tu Fu was especially enjoyment Hinten has him for that reason. have shied away from translating translators but the poem, to the minimum required to understand kept his annotations Yates readers may find the constant intrusive, while necessary. explanations itmore has made but the publisher faces a similar problem with Wei Chuang, for the reader by putting the notes at the bottom of the page rather convenient than at the book's end as in the Tu Fu translations. the linguistic in general, handled to find a of amount fair did sleuthing admirably. liked to see them Iwould have the best editions and determine authenticity. easier looks neater and is generally use the Pinyin form of romanization which For example, to pronounce for English using Pinyin Tu correctly. speakers Li Po is Li Bo, Tang is Zhuang, first name is Du, Wei Chuang's Fu's surname Ifound Hinton's use and the Tao (Way) is Dao. isChengdu, isTang, Ch'eng-tu terms rather jarring; e.g., koto for the more to translate Chinese of Japanese common Making Tu Fu refer zither, goior chess, zazanfor sitting inmeditation. That great American. too casually as "the kids" seemed to his children Both cultural delicacy camel's poetry by the emperor, although forWei favored narrators the rejected woman it is not clear if Wei camel's of T'ang cuisine, In his biography hoof soup. as in his most has famous poem, have, Yates is translated by Hinten as hump soup, the risks confusing of Wei Chuang, Yates to his subject by his surname Wei, but in of the necessary as Chuang. Because correct) the reader will have to proceed slowly. But these are and the patient reader will find riches here. Aesthetically, many of all quibbles, the music with the are fine poems in English, these translations retaining transla the stage when most poetic We are finally moving beyond meaning. "recreations" tions from the Chinese were by poets, such as Ezra Pound, with little knowledge of Chinese language these poets, audience. international formaking congratulated to a modern, and culture. so distant In closing, Hinten and Yates are to be in time and culture, accessible Iquote Wei Chuang, who is recorded as having chanted the followingsad but hopeful lines froma Tu Fu poem every day of the lastyear of his life (Yates, p. 35): White sands, halcyon bamboo, the rivervillage at dusk; As we say farewell by thewicker gate, the moon's color renews. Kandice The Distant $16.95 Lover Christoph ISBN 0-394-56634-3 Hein, translated by Krishna Winston. Hauf Pantheon, a David Friedrich completed In 1824 the romantic painter Caspar destruction the articulated polar ice by colliding wrought painting depicting one another, floes: massive ice, snow and rock jutting against glacial slabs save twisted, buckled, a natural sublimity. One imagines a bitter crisp stillness until each other, of the ice floes ceaselessly for the creaking grinding against of the ice once the surface vectors of force beneath the errant and aleatory of natural history. A monument again turn kinetic and hurl the ice into another further to the painting the viewer attends It is only when of surfaces. question amid the sculptured discernible that another shape, and another story, become to the its hull rolled almost the stern of a sailing ship, natural destruction: of a tattered mast a lone a of scrap slab off, beneath horizontal ice, snapped canvas lifted slightly by a listless breeze. landscape, "The Lament referring (technically inboth books annotations narratives for the official passed this inmind here. Women by usually nonspecialist some places confessions stood translators The Polar Sea) and painting bears the title Das Eismeer( Hein's "Die gescheiterte Christoph Hope). (Shattered Hoffnung" and like it, the memoirs are the logbooks of that ship and others across the glacial and wandering of the shipwrecked, dispersed calling to each other and to their pasts. Friedrich's She regrets tying a lover'sknotwith her lightsilk girdle for she leans alone on the scarlet railing,deep in thought; awakes froma dream, half the bed inslanting moonlight, by the smallwindow, a breeze makes the zither sound. ("PureSerene Music No. 2, Second Series") inChinese of these side of translation the subtitle Often HARVARD REVIEW BOOK HARVARD over are of the first work Winston. intimates Hein's The Distant Lover (DerFremde Freund, original 1983) ishis to be translated and very capably so, by Krishna into English, but also to translation not only a challenge of "fremd" covers a spectrum The German title itself presents the motion of the book. The 4-? This content downloaded from 131.173.17.161 on Tue, 12 Jan 2016 06:20:51 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions HARVARD BOOK REVIEW HARVARD stranger") through their strong assonance, adding further to the uncanniness of their conjunction, the negative dialectic between intimacy and alienation, across which moves the skein of the narration and the skin of the narrator's body. of reified human autopsy is a successful Claudia no children with divorced, relations and in our time. East German two abortions. doctor The book in her mid-forties, a is technically definition of a narration of a single unusual event holding to Goethe's unerhoerte Here the event appearing to ("eine sich ereignete Begebenheit"). motivate the narrative occurred before the book's outset: the death of novella, Claudia's distant her relationship funeral. is composed of her reflections lover, Henry. The novella to him and to her co-workers, as she prepares to attend Ionce the power hesitation. asked of hearing One also a writer friend where she would go "The cemetery," thoughts. people's thinks of Rilke's and Wim Wenders's the locus of conscience, at least since dead) of Homer and Virgil: the journey the surface, where we encounter on his Hein's style in one mode reliably delivers what medical examination, Death is angels. (the dialogue with the to the underworld is a descent below terms. Walter Benjamin put itwell: Death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell. He has borrowed his authority fromdeath. Inotherwords, it is natural history to which his stories referback ... The storyteller: he is theman who could let thewick of his lifebe consumed completely by the gentle flame of his story. This is the basis of the incomparableaura about the storyteller, in Leskoff as inHauff, inPoe as inStevenson. The storyteller is the figure inwhich the righteous man encounters himself (in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt: New York, 1969). This is Hein's narrative viewpoint-first-person-historic-past, re privileged on hope and resignation. A later book, Horn's End (Horns Ende, is a collection Luchterland, 1985), which equally deserves English translation, flections of monologues by the inhabitants of a small East German village, years after the suicide of Herr Horn. Each chapter is prefaced by a minimalist dialogue one voice prompting between the other to remember. The first voice is that of are confessions Horn, and the testimonies that refuses to be forgotten. in response to an insistent history From Having performing lated essay Swiftian this locus Christoph Hein dissects the modern sensibility. he is particularly of logic for four years at university, capable Ina parenthetical in an early, untrans aside surgical syllogisms. studied Hein presents the oxymoron of civilization and progress with precision: A marginal note on civilization: we understand "civilization" as the totalityof material and social livingconditions, which are produced and continually improvedby the progress of science and technology. As these improvements in livingconditions on at least two continents have developed extremely questionably, we can equate civilization only with the present state of technology. And since the technological develop ment in all nations of the earth is pursued most exorbitantly, most ruthlessly and most successfully in the military research and industrial spheres, and since even the smallest inventionforthe civilian sphere, for instance a domestic utility,only too often reveals itselfas a by-product of military research, we could posit a more precise definition :civilization at any given time is the achieved state of weapons technology with its civilianwaste-products and the thereby resultantmaterial and social and livingconditions of the state-dependent citizens. So much for the verbal charm "civilization." (from "Woreuberman nicht reden kann, davon kann die Kunst ein Lied her friends provides and workmates. such demystifying and unsparing For example, her friend Anne: commentary narration moves {fremd) description, or the narrator herself, the are "depth" as it is is also Claudia's you ask of it, nothing more." as a doctor: her activities This is also the level of the We've settled on the surface. A limit imposed by both reason and civilization. "real problems can't is also the taut grin of life's facie Hippocratae: are life, you drag them around with you all your life; they anyway; and at some point you die of them." of surface and makes what travels the expanse is repressed, What The surface be solved recur in the book with surprising which it ripple, is hope and its forlornness, At the very outset of the novel Claudia waits for the and subtlety. persistence in the depths of the elevator shaft came "Somewhere in her building. elevator for, a rustling, a vibration of steel cables, the promise of a change long wished that is a depth shaft The elevator the sort of hope that fosters patience." an the surfaces building, and its tiny chamber pierces (floors) of the apartment rather a negative invitation which becomes utopia: a no-time and no-space, inversion of a the parodie and their shoes, travellers looking at their watches each other. between infinite distances brushing against people community, recurs in the narrative: the of this spatial alienation The temporal complement of of a child, the divorce or separation the abortion of a promise, betrayal made first the met in this She night they elevator, Henry who, Henry spouses. "Then he talked about me and about the pos love, spoke of understanding: another person"; and who, when of understanding sibilities and impossibilities that we had an under said: "I thought... Claudia reveals a trace of emotion, for Isaid I'd been waiting and looked at me. Then he lita cigarette standing. to stop, we He turned away and told me brusquely him, I'd been worried. as border as empathy, and understanding weren't married." Understanding Another uncanny word of multiple surfaces. patrol, as the Wall. singen") Claudia the entire To live insocieties at all, individualsapparently have to set up barriers inside themselves. The deep, dark dungeons of our souls, where we incarcerateanything that threatens the thin layerof our humanity. Every day Irepress a flood of events and feelings that hurtand humiliate me. Otherwise Iwouldn't be able to get out of bed in the morning. Barriers that separate us fromchaos. A slight tear inour tender skin lets the blood gush out. At the sight of an open, beating heart, most people get sick to their stomachs. A simple hollowmuscle that functions pretty much me chanically takes theirbreath away, causes them to sweat, vomit, faint. Yet this littlebundle of flesh and blood has such an importantplace inour consciousness that itserves as a symbol of ourmost beautiful feelings. Of course, that'swhen it's discreetly hidden beneath a more human seeming surface, covered over with smooth layers of fat and a soft epidermis. Think how terrifiedwe'd be ifwe had to lookat all the layers of sediment at the bottom of our existence. And why dredge up things that trouble us, threaten us, make us helpless? Our personal radioactive waste, which remains potent indefinitely,whose almost audible rum blings alarm us, and with which we can liveonly ifwe entomb it,seal it, sink it inour deepest depths. In inaccessible oblivion. granted said without us, yet on their own book. Almost is that of a "superficial" only, that of distant and dispassionate "The more her only passion: chief pastime, landscape photography. perhaps for Iwork in the darkroom, the less Ihope for unexpectedly perfect pictures, Ididn't notice in the an amazing by the instrument, something sight captured The camera no unexpected no amazement, There's viewfinder. discovery. the katabasis the dead within HARVARD friends, objects of which, be they work schedules, remove: at the same observed intimacy loses its sheltering Surface of description. to the surface description brought ifshe were she REVIEW Anne's three years older than Iam. She started out as a dentist but had to give itup a few years ago, because herwrists tended to get inflamed. She went back tomedical school and became an anesthesiologist. She has four children and a husband who rapes her every twoweeks or so. Apart from that they enjoy theirsex life,which ispretty regular,she says, but now and then he rapes her. She says he needs it.She doesn't want a divorce because of the children and because she's afraid of being alone. So she puts upwith it.Whenever she's had a drink or two she starts to bitch and moan about her husband. Ikeep my distance. It'sa strain being friendswith a woman who's resigned to her own degrada tion. Her husband, who's also a doctor, is fourteen years older. Now she's justwaiting for him to "go limp."Senility as hope. Isuppose there are crazier things to look forward to. to "foreign," else's" ranging from "someone "alien," "distant," "Freund" is literally "friend," but also means "lovers." Hein's title "unknown"; knots these like "intimate contradictory meanings together (something signification The novel is prefaced of Claudia, the by a surreal dream-vision with an unnamed male companion on the ruins of a bridge narrator, exposed The novel itself iswritten in the "zero-degree" jutting out over a chasm. style of the nouveau of contextual roman; a minimum exposition (we are given name only once Claudia's in the book) and an almost lack of complete and lyricism. The style is surgical. The text can be read as an figuration BOOK on but only repressed, Yet the hope cannot be redeemed protected, like a child in the Utopian interstices of human conscience, nurtured shielded, and mourned, entombed the true unique event of the novella, deep, deep This content downloaded from 131.173.17.161 on Tue, 12 Jan 2016 06:20:51 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions HARVARD BOOK REVIEW ? HARVARD below the finallysuperficial affairwith Henry, below her failedmarriage, is Claudia's I would a school first love, for Katharina, never again love another friend. "At the time Ididn't know that The loss hurts me." person so unreservedly. Iwon't divulge here, tells a political as well as story of Katharina, which that is not lost on the East German Ina culture of State gender allegory public. revisionist historiography, the responsibility of memory enters the public stage The as Antigone. Katabasis becomes the political Horn runs a small museum in the East German InHorn's End, Herr imperative. from village after being ousted the party, and tells his young assistant: we have, and "It's only a small museum It'swe who guarantee whether the truth or falsehood yet we also write history. is reported... that's a terrible responsibility. He who has really understood that would Mistress BOOK Bradstreet." Finally, her relationship for his own over-wrought space the reader not being secure enough crucible of thought, time, Berryman's anguished after killing his king. "Sleep no more," said Macbeth is protection, Claudia demarcates armor, facade. to Henry: "The distance us gave our relationship between a cool the title Dragon's Claudia an allusion (Drachenblut), the gloss: "Like Siegfried, Ihave Blood provides to the Nibelungenlied, in dragon's bathed and blood, and no linden leafhas lefta single spot of me unprotected. I'minside this skin for the duration. will I die inside my invisible shell, I'llsuffocate with longing for Katharina." Elizabethans. and absolute Lover \s the book of Hein's most reviewed in the West German press, find a strong reception in the US as well, as the "Me generation" settles into stable and Vietnam historico-cultural relationships undergoes i.e. as it is narratively Itmay be that capitalist materi encoding, "managed." unbroken cult of "new and improved" progress alism, whose empties history and should of all non-utilitarian past into a teleological Collected Poems Charles Thornbury. edition Berryman of his collected introduced itself out as confessed, resolved." content, and dialectical self-justification, share which petrifies the materialism, more than surface affinities. Henry Pickford 1937-1971 John Berryman, Edited and Introducedby ISBN 0-374-12619-4 Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.00 is among the most difficult of poets. In this welcome of the Dream Songs), poems (exclusive ably edited and career works the course of Bern/man's by Charles Thornbury, his struggle with difficulty. "I'm a follower of Pascal," he once "in the sense that Idon't know what the issue is, or how it is to be he imposes upon his reader, hoping to convey an This quandary the words, an experience of thought and stress more beyond than meaning. Berryman was a long time finding his voice. Metrical but unmusical, he wrote against the line, crowded the stanza, "crumpling a syntax at a sudden In his first book, The need," and the result was sometimes unintelligible. he emulated the detachment and formality of Yeats, but the Dispossessed, experience immediate his master's could not manage aristocratic academic poise. As he in "The Animal Trainer," his circus animals were not the creatures recognizes of myth, Yeats's "stilted boys"; they were the beastly bourgeois: the entering inorder to Songs") is rarely possible, Surprise personality. But from time to to settle into expectation. sound and feeling astray, does working himself from letters and poems, a poet of surprise, as puts together constantly the poet who the case challenging Berryman made and redirecting for his and as to give form to person expectations, struggles contact in the of others, spokesmen with and interlocutors personalities ality like the heroine of Bern/man's fractured dramatic monologue to "Homage readers' -? inAnne voice Also Ifox 'heart',strikinga modern breast Hollow as a drum, and 'beauty' Itaboo; Iwant a verse fresh as a bubble breaks, As littlefalse ...Blood of my sweet unrest Runs all the same--! am in lovewith you Trapped inmy rib-cage something throes and achesl to its limits. is taking the poetry of experience turned with the age toward simplicity. While In the sixties, Berryman his voice became free as ever to scatter and snarl a sentence, straightfor a loss of poetic tension, as in the The result was sometimes wardly dramatic. This But in the Dream Songs, seriocomic lyrics of Love & Fame. autobiographical in the colloquy of Henry and Mr. Bones, Berryman giving loose to his demons in modern an assurance of stance and fertility of wit quite unique achieved adolescence his narcotic had endured American long poetry. Berryman itcould be. to see how funny and scary itwith maturity, about life was thrown into moral confusion by his father's Berryman's The thought of death troubled his mind with the poet was eleven. suicide when in He regarded poetry as a "terminal activity" and believed little interruption. enough to write towards annihilation," the poet, of last works, when the authority "moving buried some and passions and acceptances for powers becomes "a mime last for good...." His own etc., in men where Delusions, work, impressive is the record of his late after the finish of his struggle with suicide, published with God and death. Berryman's faith, like his poetry, "so inhope His last as much as a source of strength. of desolation out," was an avenue that of the suffering Christ in his imagination-"unconquer attitude resembles confrontation able As he prays beseeching." at the end of another poem, so of rareHeart repairmy fracturingheart obedient to disobedience minutely, wholesale, that come midnight neither my mortal sin nor thought upon it loseme. John William Nicolson, For much of his career, Berryman gave himself over to chronicling, ifnot justifying, the bourgeois torments-depression, adultery, drink-of which he had no reason to feel dispossessed. In his long and informative Professor introduction, Thornbury, ignite, as prayer: suburban They quarrel, snort, leap, liedown, their delight Merely a punctual meal and to be warm. Justify their existence in the nightl intentions, Berryman's embar "love" to his lady with a "hollow leg," is comically Berryman, proposing of words, at the rassed at how little he can come up to the traditional meaning same them: time feeling better off without Peter Weiss and Peter Together with Christa Wolf, Botho Strauss, Hein belongs with the very best writers in post-war German literature in itsmajor topos: Germany's with its confrontation (East, West, and Austrian) The Germans call it "Vergangenheitsbewaeltigung," to grips past. coming with and managing of force in "bewaeltigung" also allows (the connotation Distant be about toward the upper registers of the strays always of the the syntactical luxury, the pitch and moment his is saved from pastiche Yet the poetry irony annihilating by to Chris," nerve. In the anti-Petrarchan squalor of the "Sonnets Berryman's He covets tradition. Handke, the past, and as Hein brilliantly demonstrates, it is largely a manhandling) in the private realm. The question of historical narrative, with its exact parallels this may tortureme, Father, lest not Ibe thinel Tribunal terrible& pure, my God, mercy for him and me. Faces half-fanged, Christ drives abroad, and though the crop hopes, Jane is so slipshod Icry. Evil dissolves, & love, Ike foam; that love. Prattle of children powers me home, my heart claps like the swan's under a frenzy of who loveme &who shine. surface that I found pleasant. I had no desire to reveal myself familiarity to another i enjoyed another's skin person completely again, caressing to crawl inside it." The West German edition of the book bears without wanting as give is of a poet chronically the disturbed ("The Nervous make no more." sleep Informative the impression that the poems of the religious and personae Bradstreet's HARVARD REVIEW Faulkner: American Writer Frederick B. Karl. Weidenfeld Farrell and ISBN 1-55583-088-4 $37.50 of In the opening paragraph sets The Unquiet Grave, Cyril Connolly can come only at that maybe candor in the London rained bombs and when, his wartime meditation on premise with like that, when out his book's life and art, the kind of the sky of lulls, what gloomily nervous him: we was brought into focus all too quickly. To paraphrase really mattered are put on this earth for only one truly important reason, and that is to write a that has to come to mind in any considera is something Which masterpiece. as time goes by, more evident it becomes tion of William Faulkner, who, definitely wrote three, maybe B. Karl's Frederick These facts show a man a moment intermittent four, masterpieces. new thousand-page intent on proclaiming 6 This content downloaded from 131.173.17.161 on Tue, 12 Jan 2016 06:20:51 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions the facts. gives biography and on himself ordinary