The Long and the Short of Holocaust Verse

Abstract

The enormity of the Shoah often propelled poets in two diametrically opposed directions: on the one hand, toward ellipses, fragmentation, in short poems that exhibit their inadequacy by shutting down with a sort of premature closure; on the other, toward verbosity in long poems that register futility by reiterating an exhausted failure to achieve closure. Composed in what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari called "deterritorialized" languages, the laconic stalls of short poems and the repetitive stutters of very long poems illuminate linguistic consternation after Auschwitz. Through translations of Hungarian, Hebrew, German, Yiddish, and Spanish texts, as well as several works composed in English, this essay studies the semantic panic or philological consternation of a range of writers: from such first-generation authors as Miklós Radnóti, Dan Pagis, Paul Celan, and Yitzhak Katzenelson to such contemporaries as Marjorie Agosín, Anna Rabinowitz, Micheal O'Siadhail. Patently mediated in its defiance of sequentiality, verse in this trans-national tradition puts on display the blockage of testimony.

A Poetics of the Holocaust? Three Exemplary Poets

“…6 Susan Gubar has pointed to the paradox of Holocaust poetry caught in a vice between the inadequacy of minimalism and verbosity that blocks testimony. 7 She proposes that poetry can nevertheless be testimonial in ways that show the inadequacy of language to testify: "Verse is the most unrealistic of languages, […] and thus it produces a posthumous facsimile of a living voice." 8 Gubar's promotion of "Holocaust poetry," or more precisely post-Holocaust poetry in English which excludes wartime writing, derives from her anxiety that memory of the genocide is "dying" with the last survivors and rests on her conviction that the imagery of poetry can prevent foreclosure of memory of an event which in many ways resisted narration, as well as prevent it slipping into cultural amnesia.…”

Poetry as testimony: Primo Levi'sCollected Poems

“…34 Psalms which are hymns, or songs of praise, begin 'on a joyful note in which the psalmist summons [the] self or a cummunity to praise the Lord' for reasons such as 'God's creative activity and saving intervention in Israel's history' (p.627). Instead, in 'Shemà' (which was first called 'Psalm'), the 'description of distress' becomes the details of suffering, in which the 15 Lord refused to intervene; the initial 'joyful note' turns into a criticism of an entire community of secondary witnesses.…”

Holocaust Poetry and Testimony

“…Wittgenstein argues that 'a poem, even though it is composed in the language of information, is not used in the language-game of giving information'. 34 Non-fiction prose testimony, which may well 'give information', depends on just the close fit between author and narrator which Holocaust poetry denies; although poetry may include or quote testimonial elements, the 'fabricated words' 35 of its first-person address are always primarily aesthetic.…”