Sunday Poetry Selection

Paul Celan

Paul Celan was not an easy man—why would he be?—and his poetry, as his translator Michael Hamburger writes, is not easy either. Celan, Hamburger says, “calls for an application and effort so intense that it may have to be broken off and resumed over the years.” That is definitely true of “Death Fugue.” It is hard to take in without a break. But to take in even a portion of it is to have taken in something unforgettable. Celan wrote almost exclusively in German, so it makes sense that his most successful poem, "Todesfuge," or “Death Fugue," is in the language of the Nazi death machine. Here is a selection:

Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night

we drink you at noon in the morning we drink you at sundown

we drink and we drink you

a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete

your ashen hair Shulamith he plays with the serpents

He calls out more sweetly play death death is a master from 

            Germany

he calls out more darkly now stroke your strings then as smoke

            you will rise into air

then a grave you will have in the clouds there one lies unconfined

(from "Death Fugue" by Paul Celan)

A Commonplace Entry

 

Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages, And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes, To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry longes; And specially from every shires ends Of Engelond to Caunterbury they wende, The hooly blissful martir for to seke, That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke.

- from the Prologue to The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer

Top Ten Books for 2023

 Annual Top Ten Favorites

 Top Ten Favorite Books of 2023

Since January 1, 2023, these books have been my favorites.  They span a wide range of reading genres, from non-fiction to fiction, from lengthy to short works, and from the Classics to modern literary fiction.  The inclusion of Samuel Beckett's Trilogy is one example of an exception, and the pairing of Cormac McCarthy's two last novels because they enhanced one another is another. If I were to enlarge my list, I could have included more novels from this year, which was a really rich reading year.  Even though the other works were excellent, these ten will be with me for a long time; in fact, I reread the Faulkner and Ellison volumes. 

The list is in no particular order, but if I had to pick my favorite of the year it would be Three Novels by Samuel Beckett. I read these together as one book in the final months of the year and they stand out as the most powerful novels I have read in a long time. They have joined the other classics on my top ten books of all time. 

Things We Lost to the Water by Eric Nguyen

Independent People by Halldor Laxness

Landscape: Memory by Matthew Stadler

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

The Passenger / Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy

All Down Darkness Wide by  Sean Hewitt

The Wrong End of the Telescope by Rabih Alameddine

The City of God by Augustine of Hippo

The Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett

A Modern Trilogy

Molloy / Malone Dies / The Unnamable 

by Samuel Beckett

“In other words, or perhaps another thing, whatever I said it was never enough and always too much.”   ― Samuel Beckett, Molloy

Beckett's three great novels like his plays, break new ground in their structure and narrative. A bleak emptiness hovers throughout the three novels that one may consider a sort of trilogy. I was mesmerized from the opening pages of Molloy and wondered what it was in this bleak indeterminacy that was so beguiling. Reading slowly and closely I slowly found a method in this seemingly chaotic world. Drawn inward by moments of humor that counterposed the strange events, if they can be called that, I was drawn forward by the narrator even as the narrative itself seemed to be collapsing. These are three novels with so much wonder and ideas to think about that the attentive reader cannot fail to be impressed. I found these novels to be moving in a unique way and important additions to the literature of modernism.

In Samuel Beckett's novel, Molloy, the first sentence states bluntly, “I am in my mother's room.” This is followed on the first page of the novel with the phrase “I don't know” repeated five times, and if you add “I don't understand” and “I've forgotten” you have eight assertions of lack of knowing. How can or should the reader interpret those comments as establishing anything but a high level of uncertainty both about what the narrator (I) is telling us and what the narrator, may or may not, believe about himself and the world around him? Of most interest to this reader is the comment that the narrator would like to “finish dying” and that his mother is dead, although he is not sure exactly when she died.

What is the reader's expectation for the succeeding 167 pages of the novel based on the first page filled with uncertainty and death? There is work mentioned, but the pages he works on are filled with “signs I don't understand”. Can we say the same for ourselves as readers? At best we are left with snippets of possible information about a handful of others (the man who comes every week, they who may or may not have buried his mother, the son that he may or may not have, and the chambermaid without true love, and yet another who was the true love-whose name he has forgotten, repeatedly). As I reread these lines I cannot help but note the humor of the situation.