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Extraliterary IAN COOPER Miehael
Eskin POETIC
AFFAIRS Celan, Grunbein.
Brodsky 252pp.
Stanford University Press. $60: distributed in the UK by Eurospan.
£52.95. Three events,
and the way those events feature in the literary self-understanding of
three
poet', form the basis for the subtly interlinked and suggestive
argument of Poetic
Affairs by Michael Eskin. In 193 Paul Celan was accused by Claire Goll,
the widow
of the Surrealist poet Yan Yoll of plagiarizing her late husband's
work. The
charges, though unfounded, haunted Celan until his death in 1970: he
regarded
this persecution in print as a continuation by other means of his
suffering
during the Nazi period. In 1964, eight years before his eventual
expulsion from
the Soviet Union, Joseph Brodsky was convicted on trumped-up charges of
"social
parasitism”, while at the same lime being involved in an emotionally
frantic rivalry
for the affections of Marianna Basmanova, who in Brodsky's eyes
betrayed him.
The two events-or, to give them Eskin's other, double-edged
designation,
affairs–play out against an unmistakably twentieth-century backdrop,
but for
Eskin they are tantalizingly connected by another: the exile to Corsia,
in AD
41, of Lucius Annaeus Seneca, following his conviction for adultery
with the
niece of the Emperor Claudius. And Seneca's fate is aligned with that
of Celan
and Brodsky not just because of the common experiences of accusation
and exile,
but because it has become something of a leitmotiv in the work of the
contemporary
German poet Durs Grunbein, For Grunbein, Celan is himself such a
forceful presence
that counting the echoes would be to miss the point (Grunbein's
acceptance speech
on receiving the Georg Buchner Prize in 1995, for example, never
mentions Celan
by name, but functions as a sort of tonal modulation of his own Preisrede of 1960, delivered as the"Goll
affair" entered its second phase). Moreover, Grunbein, like Celan and
Brodsky styles himself a successor to the original twentieth-century
exile
poet. whose silhouette can dimly be made out on the black dust jacket
of
Eskin's book: Osip Mandelstam. Navigating
this network of themes and literary affiliation, Eskin explores what,
following
the Russian formalists, he calls the "legendary biography" running
through the work of these poets. He is interested in how the
"extra-literary"
event (Celan's treatment at the hands of Claire Goll, Brodsky's at the
hands of
the Soviet state and Marianna Basmanova, Seneca's exile) is made part
of the literary
enterprise, becoming absorbed into the practice of writing where it
ceases to
be a purely extrinsic biographical fact and is capable of receiving
further
inflections and determining a variety of contexts. The event (which
Eskin
understands philosophically in terms laid out by, among others, Alain
Badiou)
unfolds in the poetic response to it. With this in mind, Eskin devotes
most of
the book to nimble and attentive close readings of his three poets, in
effect
putting forward an interpretive method to go beyond not just reductions
of literature
to biography but also tired poststructuralist mantras about there being
nothing
outside the text. Indeed, underlying the emphasis on the event b n
strong
ethical concern: the epigraph to Eskin' introduction quotes Brodsky's
view that
"what goes into writing a book ... is, ultimately a man's only life:
good
or bad but always finite". And though Eskin does not dwell on it, one
of
his poets makes us ask what happens if a writer finds that the events
they find
most poetically powerful happened only to other people. While Celan and
Brodsky
transpose central events in their own live .. Grunbein must have
recourse to
one in Seneca's. For the purposes of Eskin's argument, the fact that
the events
treated are not "biographically homologous", as he says, does not
matter: all three writers are engaged in an "existentially and
ethically significant"
incorporation of these affairs into poetry. But the fascination of
Grunbein's
writing is that it depends on the register of the poet in exile, while
remaining archly aware that the experience of exile it evokes with
often
daunting erudition might be the comparatively banal one of, in Eskin’s
words,
"exile as cosmopolitan’s other name". The lesson of this may seem to
be that it isn't easy to compare yourself to Mandelstam if you're a
contemporary metropolitan man of letters, but Grunbein has given us
very moving
poems on the destruction of Dresden (his native city) from the
perspective of
one born after the event. A central term
for Eskin' translation. He asks us to read Celan' version of
Shakespeare’s Sonets
in the context of the Goll affair. Again, there is nothing reductive
about his
claims: the process of translation offered Celan a framework whose
elements are
simultaneously poetic and moral-fidelity, betrayal and the creativity
that must
ultimately be understood as love of the literary interlocutor
(Shakespeare). Eskin
convincingly argue, that Celan’s poetics demand a lyric response to his
defamation
by Goll, and that the poetry is where we must look for one. In
Gnunbein,
translation is understood a intimately related to metaphor, and Eskin
shows how
Grunbein’s journeying through time - his poetic dialogues not only with
Seneca,
whose banishment serves Grunbein as a structuring trope, but also with
Descartes
and Dante - is based on a Nietzschean view of metaphorical linkage and
displacement
as belonging to the nature of temporality itself. From Nietzsche,
Grunbein
derives an emphasis on the irreducible physicality of experience, and
the
ethical interest of his poetry consists in attending to the way his
interlocutors' voice manifest a bodily presence across time. In his
final
chapter, Eskin investigates Brodsky's complex adoption of various
literary
personae (in particular Byron and, again, Dante), as part of the
"dialectic
of fidelity and betrayal" that marked his relationship with his muse,
Marianna. The effect of these readings " powerfully cumulative, and in
arguing with such sophistication for what he terms their shared
"affairistic
conception of poetry. Eskin creates
conversations between Celan, Grunbein and Brodsky which less innovative
approaches would scarcely allow.
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