A Poetics of the Holocaust? Three Exemplary Poets
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.31261/NoZ.2020.06.20Keywords:
Holocaust, poetry, trauma, poetics, Abraham Sutzkever, Paul Celan, Czesław MiłoszAbstract
Whether or not we understand the Holocaust to be unique or following a series of catastrophes in Jewish history, there is no doubt that the writing that came out of those traumatic
events is worth examining both as testimony and as literature. This article looks again at Holocaust poetry, this time circumventing Adorno’s much-cited and often misquoted dictum on
poetry after Auschwitz. The essay challenges the binary of either “Holocaust poetry is barbaric and impossible” or “art is uplifting and unaffected by the Holocaust.” I analyse three individual cases of Holocaust poetry as a means of both survival and testimony during the Holocaust – not retrospectively or seen by poets who were not there. Aesthetic and ethical issues are very much part of a writing in extremis which is conscious of the challenge well before Adorno and critical theory. In a comparison of Celan, Sutzkever, and Miłosz we can see their desperate attempt to write a poetry that meets the challenge of the historical moment, for all the differences between them in their cultural backgrounds, language traditions, and literary influences. As I argue, although scholars and critics have read these poets separately, they should be studied as part of the phenomenon of grappling with an unprecedented horror which they could not possibly at the time understand in all its historical dimension and outcome. We should no longer ignore their sources and antecedents in trying to gauge what they did with them in forging a “Holocaust poetics” that would convey something of the inadequacy of language and the failure of the imagination in representing the unspeakable, which they personally experienced on a day to day basis. By not reading “after Adorno” we can arrive at a more nuanced discussion of whether there is
a Holocaust poetics.
References
Aaron F.W.: Bearing the Unbearable: Yiddish and Polish Poetry in the Ghettos and Concentration Camps. Albany 1990.
Adorno T.W.: Aesthetic Theory. Eds. G. Adorno, R. Tiedemann. Trans. R. Hullot-Kentur. Minneapolis 1997.
Adorno T.W.: Gesammelte Schriften. Frankfurt/M. 1951.
Adorno T.W.: Negative Dialectics. Trans. E.B. Ashton. New York 1973.
Adorno T.W.: Notes to Literature. Trans. S.W. Nicholsen. New York 1992.
Adorno T.W.: Prisms. Trans. S.M. Weber, S. Weber. Cambridge 1981.
Alexander E.: “Patterns of Holocaust Poetry: Representative Voices in Yiddish and Hebrew.” In: A.D. Colin (ed.): Argumentum e silentio: International Paul Celan Symposium. Berlin 1987, pp. 296–319.
Antelme R.: “Poetry and the Testimony of the Camps.” In: D. Dobbels (ed.): On Robert Antelme’s The Human Race: Essays and Commentary. Evanston 2003, pp. 31–34. First published in Le patriote resistant 1948, vol. 53.
Bekker H.: “Remarks on the Early Poetry of Paul Celan.” In: H.M. Block (ed.): The Poetry of Paul Celan: Papers from the Conference at the State University of New York at Binghamton, October 28–29, 1988. New York–Bern–Frankfurt/M.–Paris 1991, pp. 6–12.
Benjamin W.: Illuminationen: ausgewählte Schriften. Frankfurt/M. 1977.
Benjamin W.: Illuminations. Ed. H. Arendt. Trans. H. Zohn. New York 1968.
Błoński J.: “Biedni Polacy patrzą na getto.” Tygodnik Powszechny, 11.01.1987. Translated as “Poor Poles Look at the Ghetto.” Yad Vashem Studies 1988, vol. 19, pp. 357–367.
Böschenstein B.: “Celan als Leser Hölderlins und Jean Pauls.” In: A.D. Colin (ed.): Argumentum e Silentio: International Paul Celan Symposium. Berlin 1987, pp. 183–198.
Buck T.: “Kommentar.” In: P. Celan: Todesfuge. Aachen 1999, pp. 9‒51.
Cammy J., Figlerowicz M.: “Translating History into Art: The Influences of Cyprian Kamil Norwid in Abraham Sutzkever’s Poetry.” Prooftexts 2007, vol. 27, no. 3, pp. 427–473.
Celan P.: Collected Prose. Trans. R. Waldrop. Manchester 1986.
Celan P.: Die Gedichte. Ed. B. Wiedemann. Berlin 2018.
Celan P.: Gesammelte Werke. Ed. B. Allemann, K. Reichert. Vol. 3. Frankfurt/M. 1983.
Celan P.: Selected Poems and Prose. Trans. J. Felstiner. Bilingual edition. New York 2001.
Celan P.: Todesfuge. Aachen 1999.
Colin A.D. (ed.): Argumentum e Silentio: International Paul Celan Symposium. Berlin 1987.
Eagleton T.: The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Oxford 1990.
Ezrahi S.D.: By Words Alone: The Holocaust in Literature. Chicago 1980.
Feldman D.: “Writing Nothing: Negation and Subjectivity in the Holocaust Poetry of Paul Celan and Dan Pagis.” Comparative Literature 2014, vol. 66, no. 4, pp. 438–458.
Felman S.: “Education and Crisis, or the Vicissitudes of Teaching.” In: S. Felman, D. Laub: Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. New York 1992, pp. 1–56.
Felman S., Laub D.: Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. New York 1992.
Felstiner J.: Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew. New Haven 1995.
Forché C. (ed.): Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness. New York 1993.
Forché C., Wu D. (eds.): The Poetry of Witness: The English Tradition, 1500–2001. New York 2014.
Forster L.: “‘Todesfuge’: Paul Celan, Immanuel Weissglas and the Psalmist.” German Life and Letters 1985, vol. 39, no. l, pp. 1–20.
Franke W.: “Poetics of Silence in the Post-Holocaust Poetry of Paul Celan.” Journal of Literature and Trauma Studies 2014, vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 137–158.
Fussell P.: The Great War and Modern Memory. Oxford 1975.
Fynsk C.: “Poetic Relation: Celan’s Bremen Address.” In: H.M. Block (ed.): The Poetry of Paul Celan: Papers from the Conference at the State University of New York at Binghamton, October 28–29, 1988. New York–Bern–Frankfurt/M.–Paris 1991, pp. 22–29.
Gubar S.: Poetry after Auschwitz: Remembering What One Never Knew. Bloomington 2003.
Gubar S.: “The Long and Short of Holocaust Verse.” New Literary History 2004, vol. 35, no. 3, pp. 443–469.
Hölderlin F.: Poems and Fragments. Trans. M. Hamburger. Bilingual edition. Cambridge 1980.
Hölderlin F.: Sämtliche Werke. 6 vols. Stuttgart 1953.
Hoyer J.M.: “Flowerless Gardeners: Poetry after Auschwitz.” In: D. Stuber (ed.): Holocaust Literature. Ipswich 2016, pp. 182–199.
Kac D.: Wilno Jerozolimą było: Rzecz o Abrahamie Sutzkeverze. Sejny 2004.
Kligerman E.: “Celan’s Cinematic Anxiety of the Gaze in Night and Fog and ‘Engführung’.” In: D. Bathrick, B. Prager, M.D. Richardson (eds.): Visualizing the Holocaust: Documents, Aesthetics, Memory. Rochester 2008, pp. 185–210.
Kvietkauskas M.: “Poetisches Zeugnis: Abraham Sutzkever.” In: Vilne, Wilna, Wilno, Vilnius: eine jüdische Topografie zwischen Mythos und Moderne. Eds. E.-V. Kotowski, J.H. Schoeps. Berlin 2017, pp. 91–101.
Langer L.: The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination. New Haven 1975.
Liska V.: Die Nacht der Hymnen: Paul Celans Gedichte 1938–1944. Bern 1993.
Liska V.: German-Jewish Thought and Its Afterlife: A Tenuous Legacy. Bloomington 2017.
Lyotard J.-F.: Heidegger and “the Jews.” Trans. A. Michel, M.S. Roberts. Minneapolis 1990.
Lipszyc A.: “The Stylus and the Almond: Negative Literary Theologies in Paul Celan.” In: M. Fagenblat (ed.): Negative Theology as Jewish Modernity. Bloomington 2017, pp. 304‒321.
Miłosz C.: Poezje. 3 vols. Paris 1981‒1982.
Miłosz C.: The Collected Poems, 1931–1987. Trans. the author with R. Hass and others. London 1988.
Miłosz C.: The Witness of Poetry. Cambridge 1983.
Owen W.: The Poems of Wilfred Owen. Ed. E. Blunden. London 1933.
Pollin-Galay H.: “Avrom Sutzkever’s Art of Testimony: Witnessing with the Poet in the Wartime Soviet Union.” Jewish Social Studies 2015, vol. 21, no. 2, pp. 1–34.
Pollin-Galay H.: “The Epic Demands of Postwar Yiddish: Avrom Sutzkever’s Geheymshtot (1948).” East European Jewish Affairs 2018, vol. 48, no. 3, pp. 331–353.
Rosenfeld A.: A Double Dying: Reflections on Holocaust Literature. Bloomington 1980.
Roskies D.G.: Against the Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe in Modern Jewish Culture. Cambridge 1984.
Roskies D.G.: “Did the Shoah Engender a New Poetics?” In: K. Smola (ed.): Eastern European Jewish Literature of the 20th and 21st Centuries: Identity and Poetics. Munich–Berlin 2013, pp. 347–363.
Roskies D.G. (ed.): The Literature of Destruction: Jewish Responses to Catastrophe. Philadelphia 1989.
Roskies D.G. (ed.): Voices from the Ghetto. New Haven 2019.
Rothberg M.: “After Adorno: Culture in the Wake of Catastrophe.” New German Critique 1997, no. 72, pp. 45–81.
Rowland A., Eaglestone R. (eds.): “Holocaust Poetry special issue.” Critical Survey 2008, vol. 20, no. 2.
Rowland A.: Holocaust Poetry. Edinburgh 2005.
Rowland A.: Poetry as Testimony: Witness and Memory in Twentieth-Century Poems. New York–London 2014.
Sartre J.-P.: What Is Literature? New York 1949.
Savage R.: Hölderlin after the Catastrophe: Heidegger, Adorno, Brecht. Rochester 2008.
Schiff H. (ed.): Holocaust Poetry. London 1995.
Schmidt D.J.: “Between Meridians and Other Lines: Heidegger and Celan.” In: H.M. Block (ed.): The Poetry of Paul Celan: Papers from the Conference at the State University of New York at Binghamton, October 28–29, 1988. New York–Bern–Frankfurt/M.–Paris 1991, pp. 30–37.
Shapiro S.E.: “Failing Speech: Post-Holocaust Writing and the Discourse of Postmodernism.” Semeia 1987, vol. 40, pp. 65–91.
Steiner G.: Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature, and the Inhuman. New York 1967.
Striar M.M. (ed.): Beyond Lament: Poets of the World Bearing Witness to the Holocaust. Evanston 1998.
Sutzkever A.: “My Life and My Poetry.” In: A. Sutzkever: Zingt alts nokh mayn vort / Still My Word Sings: Lider / Poems. Trans. and ed. H. Valencia. Bilingual edition (Yiddish and English). Dusseldorf 2017, pp. 18–53.
Sutzkever A.: Zingt alts nokh mayn vort / Still My Word Sings: Lider / Poems. Trans. and ed. H. Valencia. Bilingual edition (Yiddish and English). Dusseldorf 2017.
Teichman M., Leder S. (eds.): Truth and Lamentation: Stories and Poems on the Holocaust. Urbana 1994.
Tettlebaum M.: “‘Nothing is meant quite literally’: Adorno and the Barbarism of Poetry after Auschwitz.” In: D. Stuber (ed.): Holocaust Literature. Ipswich 2016, pp. 200–213.
Trakl G.: Dichtungen und Briefe. Eds. W. Killy, H. Szklener. Salzburg 1970.
Trakl G.: Poems. Trans. J. Reidel. Calcutta 2015.
Vice S.: “Holocaust Poetry and Testimony.” Critical Survey 2008, vol. 20, no. 2, pp. 7–17.
Wiesel E.: “The Holocaust as Literary Inspiration.” In: E. Wiesel, L. Dawidowicz, D. Rabinowitz, R.M. Brown (eds.): Dimensions of the Holocaust. 2nd ed. Evanston 1990, pp. 5‒23.
Wisse R.: “Introduction: The Ghetto Poems of Abraham Sutzkever.” In: A. Sutzkever: Burnt Pearls: Ghetto Poems of Abraham Sutzkever. Oakville 1981, pp. 1–18.
Zilcosky J.: “Poetry after Auschwitz? Celan and Adorno Revisited.” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 2005, vol. 79, no. 4, pp. 670‒691.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
The Copyright Owners of the submitted texts grant the Reader the right to use the pdf documents under the provisions of the Creative Commons 4.0 International License: Attribution-Share-Alike (CC BY-SA). The user can copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose.
1. License
The University of Silesia Press provides immediate open access to journal’s content under the Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/). Authors who publish with this journal retain all copyrights and agree to the terms of the above-mentioned CC BY-SA 4.0 license.
2. Author’s Warranties
The author warrants that the article is original, written by stated author/s, has not been published before, contains no unlawful statements, does not infringe the rights of others, is subject to copyright that is vested exclusively in the author and free of any third party rights, and that any necessary written permissions to quote from other sources have been obtained by the author/s.
If the article contains illustrative material (drawings, photos, graphs, maps), the author declares that the said works are of his authorship, they do not infringe the rights of the third party (including personal rights, i.a. the authorization to reproduce physical likeness) and the author holds exclusive proprietary copyrights. The author publishes the above works as part of the article under the licence "Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International".
ATTENTION! When the legal situation of the illustrative material has not been determined and the necessary consent has not been granted by the proprietary copyrights holders, the submitted material will not be accepted for editorial process. At the same time the author takes full responsibility for providing false data (this also regards covering the costs incurred by the University of Silesia Press and financial claims of the third party).
3. User Rights
Under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license, the users are free to share (copy, distribute and transmit the contribution) and adapt (remix, transform, and build upon the material) the article for any purpose, provided they attribute the contribution in the manner specified by the author or licensor.
4. Co-Authorship
If the article was prepared jointly with other authors, the signatory of this form warrants that he/she has been authorized by all co-authors to sign this agreement on their behalf, and agrees to inform his/her co-authors of the terms of this agreement.
I hereby declare that in the event of withdrawal of the text from the publishing process or submitting it to another publisher without agreement from the editorial office, I agree to cover all costs incurred by the University of Silesia in connection with my application.
