Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Selected Poems and
Lighter than Air
Hans Magnus Enzensberger: Selected Poems, 255pp; Lighter than Air, 101pp; both Bloodaxe Books 2002, £8.95 each.
Taken together, these two books provide a comprehensive and challenging introduction to the work of one of Germany's greatest living poets. Enzensberger was born in 1929, and thus represents a generation which came to consciousness under the Third Reich, to maturity in a divided post-war Germany, and lived on to experience the complex ironies of re-unification. The earliest work in the Selected Poems displays an often bitter and questioning rhetoric:
Germany, my country, unholy heart of the nations,
pretty notorious, more so every day,
among ordinary people elsewhere:
my two countries and I, we've gone separate ways,
and yet I am wholly here
in sackcloth and ashes, and ask:
what is my business here?
"Language of the Country"
Enzensberger again and again stresses the need for people to question and resist, to speak up against that which would destroy them, as in the poem "Shore", with its echoes of the Death Camps:
Cry out, then, I say.
Cry out with your pale voice.
The words will not go far
in a haze of smoke,
or this, from a poem "For the Grave of a Peace-loving Man":
One thing for which he fought all his life,
with words, tooth and claw, grimly,
cunningly, off his own bat:
the thing which he called his peace,
now that he's got it, there is no longer a mouth
over his bones, to taste it with.
The remarkable, fractured Modernity of "Summer Poem"
Everywhere
the old shadows fall
at the edges
new errors open
rustle
in our mouths
like birch leaves
this taste
in the night
a window opens
a poem
about contradiction
and the sudden take-off
is a complex, ambiguous placement of the poet's personal life in the context of global politics and its multiply-mediated imagery, and seems almost horribly prescient today.
Enzensberger's 1978 masterpiece, "The Sinking of the Titanic", is represented by selections from the author's own, notably free and lively, English version (the translations in the bilingual Selected Poems are divided roughly equally between the author and Michael Hamburger). The poem's wide historical sweep, from imaginings of Renaissance artists at work in their studios to a visit to a philosophy congress, reaches its apotheosis in "The Reprieve", where Icelanders whose homes are under attack from a volcano resort to their hoses:
pointing more and more hoses at the advancing fiery lava
and turning it into a towering wall, higher and higher,
of lava, hard, cold and wet, the colour of ash, and thus postponing,
not forever perhaps, but for the time being at least,
the Decline of Western Civilisation.
The metaphor, deflated in the act of being pointed, is characteristic of Enzensberger's relentless satire on human self-importance.
The later work is both sparer and more personal in its scale, tending to make its comment on the world by closely watching individuals and their lack of concern for what they can't immediately see:
He puts four dimes into the slot
he gets himself some cigarettes
He gets cancer
he gets apartheid
he gets a couple of far-away massacres
"Vending Machine".
These late poems, supplemented by Enzensberger's brilliant 1999 collection Lighter than Air (translated by David Constantine and the author), are my favourites: there's a lightness of touch which at times reminds me of Tom Leonard's Situations Theoretical and Contemporary:
Here in the thick of the grossest capitalism
round the corner comes the shining fire brigade
and extinguishes, or suddenly
there's silver in the beggar's hat.
. . .
As though in a time of deepest peace.
A splendid sight.
"Optimistic Little Poem".
The poems often take metaphors from mathematics or computing science, but the intention is always to increase, not to deny, our tolerance for doubt and error. Enzensberger has been deeply influenced by Gödel's theorem, which he quotes in an early poem ("In any sufficiently rich system / statements are possible / which can neither be proved / nor refuted within the system, / unless the system itself / is inconsistent"), and its formalisation of uncertainty is everywhere in the work of this utterly human, dogmatically undogmatic poet:
Some poems, for example,
might have been perfect,
had not a slight oversight
come to their rescue.
Our moment of bliss comes about
inadvertently, by a fluke.
But something is always amiss.
"Eror" [sic.]
This review appeared in issue 32 of Northwords magazine.
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