Forché Carolyn Reading the Living Archives the Witness of Literary Art Poetry of Witness
-
Upload
lynda-riley -
Category
Documents
-
view
220 -
download
0
Transcript of Forché Carolyn Reading the Living Archives the Witness of Literary Art Poetry of Witness
-
8/9/2019 Forché Carolyn Reading the Living Archives the Witness of Literary Art Poetry of Witness
1/17
-
8/9/2019 Forché Carolyn Reading the Living Archives the Witness of Literary Art Poetry of Witness
2/17
CAROLYN FORCHE
Reading the Living Archives: The Witness of Literary Art
The letter arrived on a series of
plain postcards
in
Joseph Brodsky's
penciled
cursive,
mailed
separately
from his
newly imposed
exile
in Ann
Arbor,
Michigan, very
near the
township
of
my
childhood.
They
contained his advice to a
young poet
brash
enough
to
send her
youthful
efforts to him. You should consider
including
in
your poems
more
of
your
own,
well,
philosophy,
he wrote.
And
on
another card: It
is also a
pity
that
you
do not read
Russian,
but I think
you
should
try
to
read
Anna Akhmatova.
It
was,
I
believe,
two
years
earlier that
I had
read
excerpts
from the
transcript
of
Brodsky's
trial
in
the
former
Soviet
Union,
condemning
him to forced labor. When asked on what
authority
he
pronounced
himself a
poet,
he had answered that the vocation came from God.
Now he
was
advising
me to read
Akhmatova,
and so that winter
I went into the stacks of the
Library
of
Congress
and found a vol
ume of
her
poems,
translated
by Stanley
Kunitz and Max
Hayward.
Kneeling
on the floor between the
shelves,
I read a
passage
no doubt
well
known to readers of
Poetry:
In
the terrible
years
of the Yezhov terror I
spent
seventeen
months
waiting
in line outside the
prison
in
Leningrad.
One
day somebody
in the crowd identified me.
Standing
behind me
was a
woman,
with
lips
blue from the
cold,
who
had,
of
course,
never heard me called
by
name before. Now she started
out
of
the
torpor
common to
us all
and
asked
me
in a
whisper (every
one
whispered
there):
"Can
you
describe this?"
And I said, "I can."
Then
something
like a smile
passed fleetingly
over what had
once been her face.
Akhmatova referred
to
this
passage
as Vmesto
predisoviia
(Instead
of a
Preface),
adding
it as
prologue
to her
great poem, "Requiem,"
written
during
the
years
of
her
son
Lev Gumilev's
imprisonment.
The
poem
was her
podvig,
her
spiritual accomplishment
of "remem
bering
injustice
and
suffering"
as
experienced
within herself and as
CAROLYN FORCHE
159
This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Mon, 9 Feb 2015 12:10:08 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
-
8/9/2019 Forché Carolyn Reading the Living Archives the Witness of Literary Art Poetry of Witness
3/17
-
8/9/2019 Forché Carolyn Reading the Living Archives the Witness of Literary Art Poetry of Witness
4/17
-
8/9/2019 Forché Carolyn Reading the Living Archives the Witness of Literary Art Poetry of Witness
5/17
the
saying
of
poetry
which
calls the reader to her
irrevocable and
inexhaustible
responsibility
for the other
as
present
in the testamen
tary
utterance.
A
poem
is
lyric
art,
but
Levinas claims that
a
poetic
work is at the same time a
document,
and the art that
went
into its
making
is at once a use of discourse.
This discourse
deals with
objects
that are also
spoken
in
the
newspapers, post
ers,
memoirs and
letters of
every
passing age
—
though
in the
case of
poetry's strictly poetic expression
these
objects merely
furnish a
favorable occasion and serve as
pretexts.
It is of the es
sence of art to
signify only
between the lines
—
in the
intervals
of
time,
between times
—
like
a
footprint
that would
precede
the step, or an echo preceding the sound of a voice.
This voice is the
saying
of the
witness,
which is not a translation of
experience
into
poetry
but
is itself
experience.
Philippe
Lacoue-Labarthe,
writing
on the work of
Celan,
proposes
to call what
[the
poem]
translates
"experience," provided
that
we both understand the word in its
strict sense
—
the Latin ex
periri,
a
crossing through danger
—
and
especially
that we avoid
associating
it with what is
"lived,"
the
stuff
of anecdotes.
But a
poem,
in its
witnessing,
"arises out of
experience
that is not
perceived
as
it
occurs,
is not
registered
in the
first-person 'precisely
since it ruined
this first
person,
reduced it to a
ghostlike
status,
to
being
a "me without me.'""
So the
poem's
witness is not a
recount
ing,
is not mimetic
narrative,
is not
political
confessionalism,
and "it
is not
simply
an act of
memory.
It
bears
witness,
as
Jacques
Derrida
suggests,
in
the manner of an ethical or
political
act."
The
"poetry
of
witness,"
as a term of
literary
art,
had not
yet
had
its
genesis,
but soon after
learning
of
Brodsky
and Akhmatova I
began
an
epistolary friendship
with the
late Terrence Des
Pres,
author
of
The Survivor: An
Anatomy of Life
in the
Death
Camps,
in which he
cites Akhmatova's
preface
to
"Requiem"
as
epigraph
to a
chapter
on
the survivor's will to bear
witness. Within months of
meeting
Des
Pres in the summer of
1977,
I traveled to
Spain
to
translate Claribel
162
poetry
This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Mon, 9 Feb 2015 12:10:08 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
-
8/9/2019 Forché Carolyn Reading the Living Archives the Witness of Literary Art Poetry of Witness
6/17
Alegria,
herself a
poet
in
exile,
and in
January
of
1978
was welcomed
by
one of her relatives to
El
Salvador,
where I was to work as a docu
menter
of
human
rights
abuses
in
the
period immediately
preceding
a
twelve-year
civil war
(working closely
with associates of
Monsignor
Oscar
Romero,
then
archbishop
of San
Salvador,
and with
my
contact
in the International
Secretariat
of
Amnesty
International.)
If
asked when
I
returned from El Salvador for the last time in
those
years,
I have said March
16,
1980,
a week
before the assassi
nation of
Monsignor
Romero. After
thirty years,
I
now understand
that I did not return on that
date,
that the woman
who traveled to
El Salvador
—
the
young poet
I had been
—
did not
come back.
The
woman who did return
wrote,
in those
years,
seven
poems
marked
by the
El
Salvador experience, and also an essay, published in the
summer of
1981
in American
Poetry
Review,
in
which this return
ing
poet
states: "It is
my feeling
that the
twentieth-century
human
condition demands a
poetry
of
witness." Two
years
later,
Czeslaw
Milosz would
publish
his
monograph,
The Witness
of Poetry,
and
a
phrase, "poetry
of
witness,"
entered the lexicon of
literary
terms,
re
garded skeptically by
some
as
a
euphemism
for
"political poetry,"
or
as
political poetry by
other means. "Witness" would come to
refer,
much
of the
time,
to
the
person
of
the
poet,
much as it refers to a man
or woman
testifying
under
oath
in
a court of law. "Poets of witness"
were considered
by
some to be
engaged
in
writing documentary
litera
ture,
or
poetic reportage,
and in the mode of
political
confessionalism.
As
compelling
as
many
such "witness"
poems
are,
"poetry
of
witness"
originated
in a
very
different
constellation of
thought,
in which it was not
regarded
as
constituting
a
poet's identity,
nor
prescribing
a new litterature
engagee.
"Poetry
of
witness,"
a term
descending
from the literature of the Shoah and
complicated by
philosophical, religious, linguistic,
and
psychoanalytic
understand
ings
of
"witness,"
remains to be set
forth.
In
my
sense of this
term,
it
is a mode of reading rather than of writing, of readerly encounter with
the literature of
that-which-happened,
and its mode is
evidentiary
rather
than
representational
—
as
evidentiary,
in
fact,
as
spilled
blood.
While the solitude and
tranquility
thought
to be the
condition of
lit
erary production
were absent for
many
twentieth-
and
twenty-first
century poets,
even in the aftermath of their
survival,
writers have
CAROLYN FORCHE
This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Mon, 9 Feb 2015 12:10:08 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
-
8/9/2019 Forché Carolyn Reading the Living Archives the Witness of Literary Art Poetry of Witness
7/17
survived and written
despite
all that has
happened,
and
against
all
odds.
They
have created
exemplary literary
art with
language
that
has also
passed through catastrophe.
The
body
of
thought
that
informs
"the
poetry
of witness"
suggests,
moreover, that
language
can itself
be
damaged.
This idea of
"damaged language"
appears
in
George
Steiner's
Language
and
Silence,
when he considers the
German lan
guage "being
used
to
run
hell,
getting
the habits of
hell into its
syntax":
Languages
have
great
reserves of
life.
They
can absorb masses of
hysteria,
illiteracy,
and
cheapness
... But there comes a break
ing point.
Use a
language
to
conceive,
organize,
and
justify
Belsen;
use it
to make out
specifications
for
gas
ovens;
use it
to
dehumanize man during twelve years of calculated bestiality.
Something
will
happen
to it—
Something
of the lies and sadism
will settle in the marrow of the
language.
Imperceptibly
at
first,
like the
poisons
of radiation
sifting
silently
into the
bone.
But
the
cancer will
begin,
and the
deep-set
destruction. The
language
will no
longer grow
and freshen. It will no
longer perform, quite
as well as it used
to,
its two
principal
functions: the
conveyance
of humane
order which we call
law,
and the
communication of
the
quick
of the
human
spirit
which we call
grace.
The
damage
need
not be
regarded,
however,
as
always irreparable.
In the words of Paul
Celan in his
speech
at
Bremen:
One
thing
remained
attainable,
close and unlost
amidst all
the losses:
language. Language
was not
lost,
in
spite
of all
that
happened.
But it had to
go through
its own
responselessness, go
through
horrible
silences,
go through
the thousand
darknesses
of
death-bringing speech.
It was this language, this poetry that had passed through death
bringing speech,
that I set out to find
and
gather
in
my anthology,
Against Forgetting.
I
hoped
to
discover the trace of
extremity
that
might
remain
legible
in these
poems.
Common
among
them is an
explicit
will to bear witness. Here
is Wislawa
Szymborska:
Write it. Write. In
ordinary
ink
on
ordinary paper: they
were
given
no
food,
they
all died of
hunger.
"All.
How
many?
164
POETRY
This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Mon, 9 Feb 2015 12:10:08 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
-
8/9/2019 Forché Carolyn Reading the Living Archives the Witness of Literary Art Poetry of Witness
8/17
It's a
big
meadow. How much
grass
for each one?" Write: I don't know.
History
counts its skeletons in round numbers.
— From Hunger Camp atJaslo
There are inventories of
losses,
as in Akhmatova's
"Requiem":
Nothing
I
counted
mine,
out of
my
life,
is mine to take:
not
my
son's terrible
eyes,
not the elaborate stone flower
of
grief,
not the
day
of the
storm,
nor the trial of the
visiting
hour,
not the dear coolness of his
hands,
not the lime trees'
agitated
shade,
not the
thin
cricket-sound
of
consolation's
parting
word.
The difficulties of
forgetting
and
remembering
are marked. Vahan
Tekeyan:
Forgetting.
Yes. I will
forget
it all.
One after the other. The roads I crossed.
The roads I did not.
Everything
that
happened.
And
everything
that did not.
—
From
Forgetting
Guillaume
Apollinaire:
Memories composing now a single memory
As a hundred furs make
only
one coat
As these these thousands of wounds make
only
one
newspaper
article.
—
From Shadow
Of the self's
fragmentation,
we read in
Angel
Cuadra:
CAROLYN
FORCHE
This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Mon, 9 Feb 2015 12:10:08 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
-
8/9/2019 Forché Carolyn Reading the Living Archives the Witness of Literary Art Poetry of Witness
9/17
The common man I
might
have been
reproaches
me
now,
blaming
me for his ostracism
his solitary shadow,
his silent exile.
—
From In
Brief
Early
in the twentieth
century,
there is evidence of faith and
prayer
in
poetry,
and of belief in the sacred. Toward the middle of the
century,
there is a discernible shift toward alienation from the
deity.
Celan:
They dug
and
they dug,
so their
day
went
by
for
them,
their
night.
And
they
did not
praise God,
who,
so
they
heard,
wanted all
this,
who,
so
they
heard,
knew all this.
—
From There Was
Earth
Inside
Them
The
temporal
sense seems
changed.
In Velimir Khlebnikov's
"Suppose
I make a
timepiece
of
humanity,"
we read this:
I
tell
you,
the universe is the scratch
of a match on
the
face of
the
calculus.
And
my thoughts
are a
picklock
at work
on a
door,
and behind it someone is
dying.
There are
many
other shared
qualities,
such as the
experience
of
consciousness itself as
fragmented
and
altered,
and for the first
time,
soldier
poets
write of the
extremity
of
the
battlefield
explicitly
in
terms of its horrors. Poetic
language attempts
a
coming
to terms with
evil and its
embodiments,
and there are
appeals
for a shared sense of
humanity
and collective resistance. There are
many poems
of address:
to war as figural, to death and evil, memory and hunger as figural, and
of course
to the world to come:
We
speak loudly
but no one understands us.
But
we are
not
surprised
For we are
speaking
the
language
That will be
spoken
tomorrow.
—
Horst
Bienek,
from Resistance
l66 POETRY
This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Mon, 9 Feb 2015 12:10:08 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
-
8/9/2019 Forché Carolyn Reading the Living Archives the Witness of Literary Art Poetry of Witness
10/17
In conditions of
extremity
(war,
suffering, struggle),
the
witness is
in
relation,
and cannot remove
him or herself. Relation is
proximity,
and this closeness
subjects
the witness to the
possibility
of
being
wounded. No
special protection
can be
sought
and no outcome in
tended.
The witness who writes
out of
extremity
writes his or
her
wound,
as
if such
writing
were
making
an incision. Consciousness
itself is cut
open.
At the site of the
wound,
language
breaks,
becomes
tentative,
interrogational, kaleidoscopic.
The
form of this
language
bears the trace
of
extremity,
and
may
be
comprised
of
fragments:
questions,
aphorisms,
broken
passages
of
lyric prose
or
poetry, quota
tions,
dialogue,
brief and lucid
passages
that
may
or
may
not resemble
what
previously
had been written.
The word "extremity" (extremus) is the superlative correlative of
the word "exterior"
(exterus).
Extremity suggests
"utmost,"
"exceed
ingly great,"
and also
"outermost," "farthest,"
implying
intense suffer
ing
and even
world-death;
a
suffering
without
knowledge
of
its own
end. Ethical
reading
of such works does not inhere
in
assessing
their
truth value or
efficacy
as
"representation,"
but rather
in
recogniz
ing
their
evidentiary
nature: here
language
is a
life-form,
marked
by
human
experience,
and is also itself material evidence of
that-which
occurred.
This evidence continues
to mark human consciousness.
The
aftermath
is a
region
of devastated
consciousness of barbarism and the
human
capacity
for
cruelty
and
complicity
with evil. In this
aftermath,
we are able
to read
—
in the scarred
landscape
of
battlefields,
in bomb
craters
and unreconstructed
ruins,
in oral and written
testimony
and
its
extension in
literary
art
—
the mark or trace of
extremity.
In the work of
witness,
of
writing
out of
extremity,
the
poem
does
not become a means
to an
extra-literary
end:
the
poet, according
to
Maurice
Blanchot,
is excluded from the
facile,
humanistic
hope
that
by writing,
or
"creating,"
he would transform his dark
experience
into
greater
consciousness. On
the
contrary:
dismissed,
excluded from
what
is written
—
unable even
to be
present
by
virtue of the
non
presence
of his
very
death
—
he has to renounce
all conceivable
relations of a self
(either
living
or
dying)
to the
poem
which
henceforth
belongs
to the other.
CAROLYN
FORCHE
This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Mon, 9 Feb 2015 12:10:08 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
-
8/9/2019 Forché Carolyn Reading the Living Archives the Witness of Literary Art Poetry of Witness
11/17
-
8/9/2019 Forché Carolyn Reading the Living Archives the Witness of Literary Art Poetry of Witness
12/17
Q&A
Your connection
of
the
poetry of
witness with the ideas
of
Emmanuel
Levinas
suggests
that,
for you, poetry
has a
distinctly
moral
purpose,
that
it
should
awaken us to the
plight of
other
people.
Is this true? Do
you
be
lieve that a
right reading of poetry
leads to this kind
of
moral awareness
and
openness?
Poetry begins
in a
not-knowing
rather
than a moral
impulse.
A
poet's
consciousness
is,
in this
sense,
improvisational
and
open
to transfor
mations,
felicitous
accidents,
and an
intuitive
response
to
language
generating meaning
and music
—
that is true whether
the
spark ignit
ing the poem comes from a word, a phrase, an image, or a moment in
experience, present
or remembered.
This
spark
is what Mandelstam
calls
poryv,
or
impulse,
and what Emerson
thinks of as what is oldest
and best in
us,
the alien
visitor. This
not-knowing
is a
hovering
and
receptive
state of consciousness without intention
(in
the traditional
meaning
of that
word).
Levinas
proposes
an ethics based on our infinite and inexhaustible
responsibility
for the
"Other,"
whom we meet in the
face-to-face
encounter,
and for whom
we are also the "Other." The
thought
of
witness
proposes
that we consider what is made
present
to us in cer
tain
poetic
texts,
what is
opened
up
to
us,
transmitted
to us.
In
this
sense,
it
might
resemble the face-to-face
encounter and its attendant
obligations.
If we read a
poem
as
witness
(and
there are
many
other
ways
of
reading),
we
open
ourselves to another
way
of
knowing.
We
read in
response
to an ethical
imperative.
We are not bound to read
this
way,
of
course,
but if we
do,
we are
responding
to
the
poet's
call
to the
future,
to a
writing
from the
past
that addresses the reader to
come,
addresses the one who will lift the corked bottle from the sea
waves and read its
message.
I don't know if there is a
"right reading"
of
poetry,
but rather
many readings, many ways
of
reading,
and one of
them is a read
ing
of the
poem
as witness that is
perhaps
also
testamentary,
but is
certainly always
evidence of that from which it
arose. Whether this
way
of
reading
leads to moral awareness and
openness,
I don't know.
In
Levinas's
sense,
certainly
it would
provide
an
occasion for ethical
awareness. Mandelstam and also Bakhtin would
say
that the
poet
is
always writing
in
response
to a
listening
from an unknown future
reader. This means that we can't
know what the
poem
means because
CAROLYN FORCHE
169
This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Mon, 9 Feb 2015 12:10:08 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
-
8/9/2019 Forché Carolyn Reading the Living Archives the Witness of Literary Art Poetry of Witness
13/17
we can't know what it will mean later. We are
writing
what
future will be the irrevocable
past.
Does an
"evidentiary
"
reading preclude
an aesthetic one? Can a
poem
be
successful
as evidence
and
yet
a
failure
as art?
No
reading precludes
another. When
poetry
is read as
witness,
the
poem
is
judged by
its truth as a
poem,
and what this truth does in
the reader. This is
Mandelstam's criterion. If the
poem
is true in
Mandelstam's
terms,
it doesn't fail as
art. If it does fail as
art,
it isn't
a
poem,
but remains
a
piece
of evidence. If one
reading
of Kant
sug
gests
that the
categorical
imperative
demands a freedom that can be
found through the aesthetic experience of the sublime, then aesthetic
experience
offers
the
freedom
that is the
ground
of
ethics,
so
perhaps
it
—
the
poem
—
can
offer a sense of
responsibility
or
blessing.
You
say
that "most
of
the
prominent twentieth-century
poets beyond
the
English-speaking
countries
(and
even some within
them)
had endured
such
experiences
during
their lives." Does that mean
that the
greatest
poetry
somehow
depends upon having suffered
some
extremity of expe
rience? And how would
you respond
to
John
Berryman's
idea
that the
"luckiest" artist is the one who
is
presented
with
the worst
possible
ordeal
that will not
actually
kill him?
Great
poetry might
in
part depend
on
engagement
with the
extremity
of
existence,
but this does
not
necessarily
entail the
greatest suffering;
these extremes
can be
experienced meditatively
and involve awareness
of the radical
contingency
of all human life. There are
poets
—
and
in
the
twentieth and
early twenty-first
centuries
they
have been
many
—
whose
engagement
includes man's
inhumanity
to
man,
and
this was the form of
extremity
I
collected
into the
anthology Against
Forgetting: warfare, military occupation, imprisonment, and other
forms of
extremity
endured
through
the
depredations
of the state.
Not all
extremity
is of this kind.
As for
John
Berryman's
statement,
I would
guess
that he was
referring
to those
artists,
such as confessional
poets,
who view their
experience
as
material,
and
perhaps
"suffering"
is then also material
and
provides
a more resonant
self-expression.
He
might
also be re
ferring
to
the
necessary
education of the
soul
in certain
poets,
who
seem almost
determined to
subject
themselves to all manner of
pain
170
POETRY
This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Mon, 9 Feb 2015 12:10:08 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
-
8/9/2019 Forché Carolyn Reading the Living Archives the Witness of Literary Art Poetry of Witness
14/17
for reasons that
may partly
have to do with their
literary
art. But this
isn't about the
economy
of
converting personal experience
to
literary
art. No
one is a
great poet
because
she is a miserable drunk. No one
is a
great poet
because he has had a nervous breakdown.
Suffering,
however,
can be
experienced
as a curse or a
blessing;
the luckiest is
the one who can
experience
it as a
blessing.
You
say
that not
only
the
poets "pass through"
their
experiences
but also
their
very languages,
which continue to "bear
wounds,
legible
in the line
breaks,
in constellations
of imagery,
in
ruptures of
utterance,
in
silences
and
fissures of
written
speech."
Can translation
convey
this? What is the
effect of reading,
in
translation,
all
of
these
poems
that trauma has so sin
gularly shaped and stamped?
Poetry
is an art of words but also the
energy
that moves
through
them
—
what comes
from
spirit
or
noumena,
the
impulse,
the
spark,
and this is what makes the
poem
unparaphrasable.
A successful trans
lation allows the
spirit
or
impulse
of the
original
to enter and flow
through
the new
language.
The
poem
will not sound like the
original,
and the music of the
original
will be lost
(together
with connota
tive
resonances),
but in a
good
translation a
new music is
found,
and
the new
language
is suffused
with
the
original impulse.
If
you
have
faithful and literal translation
by
itself and without this
energy,
you
have
paraphrase.
Hans
Magnus
Enzensberger
said "Was nicht sel
ber Poesie
ist,
kann nicht
Ubersetzung
von Poesie sein"
—
what is
not
poetry,
cannot be a translation of
poetry. According
to Walter
Benjamin,
translation is the afterlife of the
original,
and is marked
by
its
ongoing
life
(and
in this
sense,
language
is a life
form).
In
witness,
this afterlife is the
poem's
survival in another
language, along
with
the mark of
extremity.
Can the "poetry of witness" transcend trauma? Can it include joy, or at
least an uninhibited shriek
of being
(the
late work
of
Mandelstam,
say)?
One cannot transcend trauma. Trauma is
trapped
and
clings
to that
which
happened.
We live not after trauma but in its aftermath. There
is a
process,
which some
imagine
as the work of
"healing,"
which is
not
perhaps
accurate. This
process
is one of trans-memberment: one
is
always attending
to the
metamorphoses:
the nausea and
psychic
ruin of trauma
moving
into wisdom and
strength, again
and
again;
CAROLYN FORCHE
I7I
This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Mon, 9 Feb 2015 12:10:08 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
-
8/9/2019 Forché Carolyn Reading the Living Archives the Witness of Literary Art Poetry of Witness
15/17
every day
one does the work of
turning
trauma into what
might
be
called
grace
or fortitude or wisdom.
Can
poetry
of witness be
experienced
or read as
joyful?
I
don't
know
why
not. A better term
might
be as
blessing.
In
many poems
read as
witness,
there is an
affirmation,
a fullness of life. The
poet
writing
in the mode of witness is never within the trauma.
The
poem
is marked
by
it and
bears the remains of what has been endured.
In
this
sense,
it
might produce
"more
life,"
more of what life is. It isn't
subject
matter that makes a
poem
witness;
poems
are not what
they
are
"about."
If
they
were,
that would be
paraphrase
and not
poetry.
Can the
poetry
of
witness be a
purely spiritual phenomenon?
That
is,
can
the dynamic that you're describing in this essay, the permanent wound
ing of
consciousness
and
language,
occur
from metaphysical,
as
well as
physical,
trauma?
If we think of the
spiritual
as a
way
of
knowing,
one can be wounded
spiritually.
Jean-Francois
Lyotard
would
argue
that the
language
of
the Torah is
permanently
wounded
by
the
experience
of the divine.
Jacob
endures
wrestling
with the
stranger,
his
angel.
The
slightest
shock or event
can
send
you
from one
thinking
to
another;
trauma is
said to occur when this shock is
sufficiently
strong
as to overwhelm.
If the
experience
of God is
traumatic,
it is because we meet with the
incommensurate.
In
1981
you
wrote,
"It is
my feeling
that the
twentieth-century
human con
dition demands
a
poetry of
witness." Do
you
still
feel
this
way?
How well
does a
poet
like Elizabeth
Bishop,
who is
easily
the
most
highly-regarded
American
poet of
the second
half of
the twentieth
century,
meet
this demand?
Witness is not demanded
of
every poet.
Witness,
as a mode of
reading,
is a response to certain works — those that bear the mark of extremity,
and often those written in
light
of
catastrophic experience.
The work
of
Wallace
Stevens,
one of the
greatest poets
of our
language,
would
not often be read as
poetry
of
witness,
but rather of
contemplative
states,
formal turns of
mind,
and
poetic accomplishment.
However,
if we think of witness in
light
of
catastrophic
events,
we would
have to consider The Auroras
of
Autumn
and its
implicit
confronta
tion
with the violence of wwn. Charles Altieri reads
this work in
part
as Stevens's
need
172
POETRY
This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Mon, 9 Feb 2015 12:10:08 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
-
8/9/2019 Forché Carolyn Reading the Living Archives the Witness of Literary Art Poetry of Witness
16/17
to
explore
in
what
ways imagination
may
be
complicit
in one
mode of evil and then to see
how he
[Stevens]
might
reconstitute
his
projections
so that he could
foster an
imagination
capable
of
taking responsibility
for this
complicity
and so
working
toward a
different mode of
self-consciousness.
This seems to me a
species
of the
reading
I have in
mind. Works of
witness have
something
to do with the
intimacy
of world
engage
ment. In
Bishop,
there is a confrontation
with radical otherness: the
moose
in
the
road,
the fish
pulled
into
the boat still
wearing
the
hooks
of his
past struggles.
She writes
out
of her
shock at
coming upon
these
creatures. The shock
that shifts
thinking
from one to
an other.
Your
essay
is
full
of major postmodern
thinkers but veers
far from post
modern
thought,
which
typically
asserts the
instability of
the
self, identity,
and
language.
The notion that a
particular poet
or
poem
could be
witness
to,
could in
some
way express,
general suffering
—
many
people
will
find
that a
hopelessly
Romantic notion. What would
you say
to that?
Rather than
postmodern
thinkers,
I would
say
that
those
I
have cited
are continental
philosophers
of the war
years
and
after:
Benjamin,
Levinas,
Lyotard.
These are thinkers who re-read
Heidegger.
Poetry
read as
witness does not become
"protest poetry"
or,
necessarily,
"poetry
of
resistance." This work
involves a
reading
that isn't
post
modern;
it
is,
perhaps, post-Shoah: writing
in the aftermath of
events,
or what Walter
Benjamin
would
call their "afterlife."
In
any
event,
suffering,
in
literary
art read as
witness,
is
not
gen
eral
but
specific,
what Blake would call
"particular."
In
English
it is
akin to a
Wordsworthian
perception
that still holds in
contemporary
American
poetry:
that the
past
has a
way
of
coming
back,
and
pro
ducing
what will
happen
in
the future. In
Wordsworthian
terms,
the poetry comes out of returning memories one doesn't plan to
have,
and if
you imagine
that what these
memories
bring
with
them
aren't
simply
instances of childhood
but historical
extremity,
then
yes,
this is
a
Wordsworthian
—
or
Romantic
—
idea.
(Here
is
how
Wordsworth's sense of
memory
enters continental
philosophy:
Wordsworth influences
Ruskin,
Ruskin
influences
Proust,
Proust
in
fluences Lanzmann and also Levinas.
Benjamin
was a translator of
Proust,
but also
Baudelaire.)
This
has
nothing
to do
with stabiliz
ing
or
destabilizing
selfhood. If
you
wish to think in
terms of
self,
it
CAROLYN FORCHE
173
This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Mon, 9 Feb 2015 12:10:08 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
-
8/9/2019 Forché Carolyn Reading the Living Archives the Witness of Literary Art Poetry of Witness
17/17
is the self
in Levinas who comes into
being through
the
address of
the other. The self who
grounds
her existence in otherness is not so
much unstable as
dialogic.
The
permeability
of self and other
in
such
work
might
be
profoundly
disturbing
if one wishes to control one's
own
thoughts,
but this is
instability
of a different kind: that which
comes when
your
existence is involved with another's. Witness can
welcome
an
intimacy
that
might
seem,
to
some,
offensively
invasive.
There is
nothing,
in
my
view,
that is not
personal.
Witness
might
be
read as a
public
voice,
but also a
deeply
intimate one. This
might
not
be
public
oratory
but
lyric whisper.
174
POETRY