(My translation as usual)
I want to go to Palestine with the boy. Maybe if he's with me I can really bear everything. I know how miserable it would make him, but I can hardly bear things with him as they're. He's on the edge of things, so anxious... has been through so much toll and bad health, but all the same... things could be different than they are.
The dettachment would show him to which extent Germany is completely lost for us, but if I bring myself to the point of that decision I think there's really no way to return. Life as it is now had very little charm for me if alone, but still I must follow through even if he doesn't make up his mind. It can't be that good for the kid either, to grow up in such conditions. An unhappy mother can never aspire be, a good educator.
Sometimes I want to be dead... when I think about it, that I must go on.
I love him so much, and he loves me no less... but the expression of his love is so different from mine. So soon I turn into despair and my love, can already alienate him so much at the same time that it makes my own life so difficult to bear while I can only lament about the whole affair. Until everything comes out or I just suffocate. Then suddenly we just go through it and I realize that everything is just OK, but such agony.... these agonies!
I wish, that he would think about me a little more sometimes - why do I have evermore this need, this need to afford him some glee? But in the main it all has to do with education. He has the education of my parents, that kind of idiosincracy that makes him so embarrassed of the simple things, like sending flowers to each other. I'm so overflown with feelings for him, I want to lay the whole world in front of him... but this is how it goes, whoever loves more, suffers all the more so.
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
'Little Life'
'You have to know, dear Leo, that the real Cain is not an invention of yours or anyone (and as being Cain he will always resist the creation, he's not like all the invented Cains). But this is the most beautiful thing. He's -let's say- the absolute negation of your astheticism, the eternal motif and your greatest anger.'-K.
Margarete Susman
1.901
Life is so small, death yet so enormous
And thus death
pours her whole counterfeit gifts
Onto mighty enmities in her lap
And seizes herself loosely and weeping blood,
Out of a grave.
Yet, the love in her eternal rainbow
Stretches in blaze through both the living and the dead;
She's got that eternal, unique ribbon
Protracted all through the foreign land.
She follows all the departures, into the vaults down there
And lets herself die away, mumbling and yearning with them, sidewards;
She stays with the abandoned, over the graves
And returning with them, in the dark, walking with a stick
Into the wide world.
Margarete Susman
1.901
Life is so small, death yet so enormous
And thus death
pours her whole counterfeit gifts
Onto mighty enmities in her lap
And seizes herself loosely and weeping blood,
Out of a grave.
Yet, the love in her eternal rainbow
Stretches in blaze through both the living and the dead;
She's got that eternal, unique ribbon
Protracted all through the foreign land.
She follows all the departures, into the vaults down there
And lets herself die away, mumbling and yearning with them, sidewards;
She stays with the abandoned, over the graves
And returning with them, in the dark, walking with a stick
Into the wide world.
'Silence'
My most beautiful poem?
I didn't compose it
It rose from the deepest abyss
And I keep it silent.
Mascha Kaleko
I didn't compose it
It rose from the deepest abyss
And I keep it silent.
Mascha Kaleko
21:12
To K. and G.
I'm pondering, what will I say?
Maybe just that I'll call later, but that's already three quarters of a lie,
If only for the time being.
I can at best unlive with my worst noises,
So that I keep so silent...
How could I then, dare speak with others?
For the rain has turned so dark and dry
And all my woes, a sweeter lullaby!
The ways through the city, so salty and illuminated
From the Christian smells of the summer,
All the voices are highways, of marshmallows, leading us to slumber.
The night so old, from surplus of days
And the beloved traveller, so distant and warm.
But yourself, so frozen from the rapid motion
Seeking the compassion of the stranger
If only for the lack of passion, the ratio,
Your own somber descent, into the eyelids of the passing.
The tawdry is always the finest, makes you oblivious of your presence
In concealing so swiftly, the stumbling of the present...
But cowardice is a willow, it yellows and yells
With the voice of the breach on the edge
And the mistake is repeated again, the painting never changes...
For your body ills so swiftly, you're not up for complications
But on that account, you bind yourself to them,
In order to delay one day more or two, that final laughter
And alas! You can never jump over Rhodes!
That's how I keep so silent, shield myself inside the rain.
I'm pondering, what will I say?
Maybe just that I'll call later, but that's already three quarters of a lie,
If only for the time being.
I can at best unlive with my worst noises,
So that I keep so silent...
How could I then, dare speak with others?
For the rain has turned so dark and dry
And all my woes, a sweeter lullaby!
The ways through the city, so salty and illuminated
From the Christian smells of the summer,
All the voices are highways, of marshmallows, leading us to slumber.
The night so old, from surplus of days
And the beloved traveller, so distant and warm.
But yourself, so frozen from the rapid motion
Seeking the compassion of the stranger
If only for the lack of passion, the ratio,
Your own somber descent, into the eyelids of the passing.
The tawdry is always the finest, makes you oblivious of your presence
In concealing so swiftly, the stumbling of the present...
But cowardice is a willow, it yellows and yells
With the voice of the breach on the edge
And the mistake is repeated again, the painting never changes...
For your body ills so swiftly, you're not up for complications
But on that account, you bind yourself to them,
In order to delay one day more or two, that final laughter
And alas! You can never jump over Rhodes!
That's how I keep so silent, shield myself inside the rain.
Poem in 13 minutes
I love the night life in the city,
One's granted, be just this lonesome
From the urgent aquous abyss
That extends from one comma to the other,
And how little thrill here... but yet fearless there
One becomes, from hindering himself in the wait
And how happy and pure, cleaner than birth
Are the verses in days of hunger, of melancholy.
A certain vitality arrives home, if only from despair
O how much love, in the sad harmony of the far-aways;
They glee at me, yes, the lines...
When I remain so silent,
Not because the heart has died, it is just furious
From having so little to add, so much to waste...
With that thin opression of the air,
That rises from the asphalt, vomitted onto wet, old earth
And the journeys, in between the letters
Love the symbols, the screeching figurines, far more than they love the present.
Only with the night life, one can play the right lire,
When the tunes are so drunk, so ready to die
And far truer than bodies falling in love with art.
The noise spreads out through the eyelid;
The mount sleeps alone, no one dares write, or pound
As to distract fresh ironies that always come with illness,
For it is said that Socrates laughed once and never cried.
One's granted, be just this lonesome
From the urgent aquous abyss
That extends from one comma to the other,
And how little thrill here... but yet fearless there
One becomes, from hindering himself in the wait
And how happy and pure, cleaner than birth
Are the verses in days of hunger, of melancholy.
A certain vitality arrives home, if only from despair
O how much love, in the sad harmony of the far-aways;
They glee at me, yes, the lines...
When I remain so silent,
Not because the heart has died, it is just furious
From having so little to add, so much to waste...
With that thin opression of the air,
That rises from the asphalt, vomitted onto wet, old earth
And the journeys, in between the letters
Love the symbols, the screeching figurines, far more than they love the present.
Only with the night life, one can play the right lire,
When the tunes are so drunk, so ready to die
And far truer than bodies falling in love with art.
The noise spreads out through the eyelid;
The mount sleeps alone, no one dares write, or pound
As to distract fresh ironies that always come with illness,
For it is said that Socrates laughed once and never cried.
Monday, May 21, 2007
Another response to Yoav
Yoav's letter
I was touched that you thought that my tiny letter should get such a reply, and so I have no choice but braking down your post and explain why you'll keep failing and all because you are looking for the coin under the wrong streetlight.
1.MS is perhaps an important thinker in Germany, but us Israelis don't know a thing about her, from the information I could gather about her on the Internet (most of it in German), I see why she is an important critic, but if there is no true dialogue between her and Israeli writers - what's the point?
2.most of the Israeli poetry of the 20th century is not religious.
studying Hebrew from the dictionary or from linguistics is boring, not to say it should be banned, and I'm saying that after two years of studying editing. Hebrew as it should be, and as it taught is like making love with the help of a guidebook, like Amichai once wrote about traveling with a map.
3.I know that Nationalism's stocks are not very high right now, still, this is the middle east. you need both religion and nationalism to figure it out. you wrote"the tragedy of this state, is that before a culture was created a state was formed as an offspring of European ideology, perhaps the most bastard son of the German ideology." but it isn't true, the Israeli culture had poets and writers and a very important book called The Bible to draw from and a comment like this shows you lack historical prospective.
4.as always it's interesting to hear what you think about philosophers but the truth is, you are wrong about that point too. the ideological leaders of each party were the philosophers. perhaps they were not always very deep, but you must remember that the holocaust and the Israeli wars, and the Ethos of being a pioneer and not studying of one hand and the high-classes Ethos practically killed any chance of having major intellectuals. I guess that the future will bring major intellectuals who would not be educated in Israel.
Yoav
My reply:
Yoav,
For a change I think this is an important discussion to have, because in the more than four years we've known each other, apparently we never had them and I can hardly explain why. Let me turn to your letter now.
Margarete Susman: That 'you' Israelis don't know a thing about Susman is hardly surprising, it's seldom to find a literatus in Germany of our generation who can remember her name, but then again they aren't too acquainted with Goethe or Hölderlin, so it doesn't really give me much information. There was certainly a dialogue between Susman with Agnon and Amichai (both via Nelly Sachs), the letters attesting this are getting watered down by the dampness at the National Archives where I found them in recent months, not to mention the long accounts of the exchanges (that also include Jacob Taubes) that she beautifully describes to Scholem, the letters to Buber, etc. All of which belongs to Erwin Von Bendemann and he doesn't even know they exist. This attitude of 'but US Israelis don't know a thing about her, what's the point?' I find quite disregarding. In principle I've never agreed with this ethnocentric view at all, and I might even agree with Taubes when he says that for many Jews and certainly for Israelis, Christians don't exist yet.
Nationalism: Sure the stocks of 'nationalism' are not at the highest peak now, and I definitely agree that religion and nationalism are the key to figure out not the Middle East but the whole history of Modernity since its roots in the 17th century. At the same time the Middle East is as much part of European history as anything else, firstly because together with an old 'family rift' there're the remnants of collonialist and imperalist times all through the region and no less in Israel, in fact the Middle East does clarify many things in European society today. The Arab problem is not new, it has been pounding the doors of the formerly imperial Austria since the 13th century and each century comes closer and closer. That there were Hebrew writers before the creation of the state is certainly true and that the Bible is one of the key texts is beyond argument, the point made wasn't literary in the restricted sense... it is a point fingering at the whole of the realm of culture. The State in its current structure is undeniably somewhere in between British colonial law and German ideology of the imperial state. Sure it is the Middle East and one needs be realistic, and I think this realism can only be attached in a mixture of the most vexing despair and pessimism together with the most reckless hope.
Philosophers: The ideological leaders of each party were the philosophers? Well, that calls for a definition of what the difference between philosophy and ideology is, in fact a philosopher can never be an ideologist and this is something that puts Marx in the whole very long history of German letters as the only philosopher-ideologist and certainly a very failed one, who in fact overturned the Western tradition toward its most negative axe, a mistake that not even his spiritual father Hegel could have even thought of in his magic soothsaying called 'Phenomenology of the Spirit'. And the few people who were philosophers, they could never become party leaders, ideology is also a word not in the best position now and I refuse to label ideology (therefore progress and doom, both of them are not a source of faith of whichever kind it be, but plain superstition) as philosophy. I certainly remember the Holocaust, in fact much better than most of my Israeli contemporaries... and I entirely disagree on the role it plays on the life of the state now, I'm tired of their endless ranting... I'll never delegitimize the Holocaust as the most tragic hour of the Jewish people but at the same time I don't believe that being the stakes as they're in our generation, we might be able to continue doing politics out of pity for much longer. Politics, as the classical theories say, is certainly about enemies, about respect, about standing and the Machiavellian 'not being so good'... and weeping about the Holocaust is good for PR, but whenever I hear the speeches given to the very people who are citizens of the country and how they're educated about it, excuse me if I say this... but I can only laugh hysterically. The Israeli wars are a different matter altogether but yet part of the same story. Certainly there were no chances to have any major intellectuals, albeit... out of the Holocaust an innumerable bunch of poets, writers and philosopher did come out and spread all over the West. I don't want a future where the 'leading intellectuals' have to be educated abroad, because it's simply a repetition of the same failures but with reverse dialectics... if in fact the country can't produce at all a new generation of intellectuals that will not look at the immediate past as something neither erroneous/despisable or as the ultimate shrine of wisdom and glory, then we've really missed the train... not only as a state but also as a people. That the Jews remain prominent intellectuals is true... but that whatever sank in the abyss of Auschwitz is any similar to what there's today is an absolute lie. I wish one day you would come to Germany and visit those houses and hear the stories about the life that was, and even to experience the ammicability and open friendliness of that life today... then you could understand my claims slightly better, not without realizing as well that the political tragedies of Jewish society overall stand unchanged today for almost two hundred years.
Let's leave it at this point for now and we'll return to the Hebrew editing next week, I spent the whole day translating a text of Kästner into English and am thoroughly exhausted.
Best
Ari
I was touched that you thought that my tiny letter should get such a reply, and so I have no choice but braking down your post and explain why you'll keep failing and all because you are looking for the coin under the wrong streetlight.
1.MS is perhaps an important thinker in Germany, but us Israelis don't know a thing about her, from the information I could gather about her on the Internet (most of it in German), I see why she is an important critic, but if there is no true dialogue between her and Israeli writers - what's the point?
2.most of the Israeli poetry of the 20th century is not religious.
studying Hebrew from the dictionary or from linguistics is boring, not to say it should be banned, and I'm saying that after two years of studying editing. Hebrew as it should be, and as it taught is like making love with the help of a guidebook, like Amichai once wrote about traveling with a map.
3.I know that Nationalism's stocks are not very high right now, still, this is the middle east. you need both religion and nationalism to figure it out. you wrote"the tragedy of this state, is that before a culture was created a state was formed as an offspring of European ideology, perhaps the most bastard son of the German ideology." but it isn't true, the Israeli culture had poets and writers and a very important book called The Bible to draw from and a comment like this shows you lack historical prospective.
4.as always it's interesting to hear what you think about philosophers but the truth is, you are wrong about that point too. the ideological leaders of each party were the philosophers. perhaps they were not always very deep, but you must remember that the holocaust and the Israeli wars, and the Ethos of being a pioneer and not studying of one hand and the high-classes Ethos practically killed any chance of having major intellectuals. I guess that the future will bring major intellectuals who would not be educated in Israel.
Yoav
My reply:
Yoav,
For a change I think this is an important discussion to have, because in the more than four years we've known each other, apparently we never had them and I can hardly explain why. Let me turn to your letter now.
Margarete Susman: That 'you' Israelis don't know a thing about Susman is hardly surprising, it's seldom to find a literatus in Germany of our generation who can remember her name, but then again they aren't too acquainted with Goethe or Hölderlin, so it doesn't really give me much information. There was certainly a dialogue between Susman with Agnon and Amichai (both via Nelly Sachs), the letters attesting this are getting watered down by the dampness at the National Archives where I found them in recent months, not to mention the long accounts of the exchanges (that also include Jacob Taubes) that she beautifully describes to Scholem, the letters to Buber, etc. All of which belongs to Erwin Von Bendemann and he doesn't even know they exist. This attitude of 'but US Israelis don't know a thing about her, what's the point?' I find quite disregarding. In principle I've never agreed with this ethnocentric view at all, and I might even agree with Taubes when he says that for many Jews and certainly for Israelis, Christians don't exist yet.
Nationalism: Sure the stocks of 'nationalism' are not at the highest peak now, and I definitely agree that religion and nationalism are the key to figure out not the Middle East but the whole history of Modernity since its roots in the 17th century. At the same time the Middle East is as much part of European history as anything else, firstly because together with an old 'family rift' there're the remnants of collonialist and imperalist times all through the region and no less in Israel, in fact the Middle East does clarify many things in European society today. The Arab problem is not new, it has been pounding the doors of the formerly imperial Austria since the 13th century and each century comes closer and closer. That there were Hebrew writers before the creation of the state is certainly true and that the Bible is one of the key texts is beyond argument, the point made wasn't literary in the restricted sense... it is a point fingering at the whole of the realm of culture. The State in its current structure is undeniably somewhere in between British colonial law and German ideology of the imperial state. Sure it is the Middle East and one needs be realistic, and I think this realism can only be attached in a mixture of the most vexing despair and pessimism together with the most reckless hope.
Philosophers: The ideological leaders of each party were the philosophers? Well, that calls for a definition of what the difference between philosophy and ideology is, in fact a philosopher can never be an ideologist and this is something that puts Marx in the whole very long history of German letters as the only philosopher-ideologist and certainly a very failed one, who in fact overturned the Western tradition toward its most negative axe, a mistake that not even his spiritual father Hegel could have even thought of in his magic soothsaying called 'Phenomenology of the Spirit'. And the few people who were philosophers, they could never become party leaders, ideology is also a word not in the best position now and I refuse to label ideology (therefore progress and doom, both of them are not a source of faith of whichever kind it be, but plain superstition) as philosophy. I certainly remember the Holocaust, in fact much better than most of my Israeli contemporaries... and I entirely disagree on the role it plays on the life of the state now, I'm tired of their endless ranting... I'll never delegitimize the Holocaust as the most tragic hour of the Jewish people but at the same time I don't believe that being the stakes as they're in our generation, we might be able to continue doing politics out of pity for much longer. Politics, as the classical theories say, is certainly about enemies, about respect, about standing and the Machiavellian 'not being so good'... and weeping about the Holocaust is good for PR, but whenever I hear the speeches given to the very people who are citizens of the country and how they're educated about it, excuse me if I say this... but I can only laugh hysterically. The Israeli wars are a different matter altogether but yet part of the same story. Certainly there were no chances to have any major intellectuals, albeit... out of the Holocaust an innumerable bunch of poets, writers and philosopher did come out and spread all over the West. I don't want a future where the 'leading intellectuals' have to be educated abroad, because it's simply a repetition of the same failures but with reverse dialectics... if in fact the country can't produce at all a new generation of intellectuals that will not look at the immediate past as something neither erroneous/despisable or as the ultimate shrine of wisdom and glory, then we've really missed the train... not only as a state but also as a people. That the Jews remain prominent intellectuals is true... but that whatever sank in the abyss of Auschwitz is any similar to what there's today is an absolute lie. I wish one day you would come to Germany and visit those houses and hear the stories about the life that was, and even to experience the ammicability and open friendliness of that life today... then you could understand my claims slightly better, not without realizing as well that the political tragedies of Jewish society overall stand unchanged today for almost two hundred years.
Let's leave it at this point for now and we'll return to the Hebrew editing next week, I spent the whole day translating a text of Kästner into English and am thoroughly exhausted.
Best
Ari
Romanisches Café - Berlin
The 'Romanische Café' was a local spot for artists in Berlin, located in Kurfürstendam 238 in Berlin-Charlottenburg, in a nearby restaurant Hannah Arendt spent her last evening prior to her immediate and final departure from Germany following the rise of National Socialism, in order to board illegally a train to Prague, from there to Switzerland and finally to France... only in order to emigrate to the United States in 1941 after eight years of statelessness. Since the renovation of that part of Kurfürstendam in 1925, the café moved to Budapester St. 10.
The Romanische Café stood in a representative Romanian-style house built in between 1900 and 1901 designed by Franz Schwechten. The structure, composed of two towers, was located on the same spot with the Europa-Center stands today. In the beginning it was a bakery of the Kaiserhof Hotel and in 1916 the Romanische Café opened its doors. Since the closure of the 'Café des Westens' in 1915, the 'Romanische Café' positioned itself after the end of World War I as the most prominent artists' meeting point in Berlin.
In the Romanischen Café the local intelligentsia often gathered, and there ran in and out the most important writers, painters, actors, journalists, critics and and producers. It also become the most frequented place by artists in the make to establish contacts with the art world. There the most successful artists of the period tried to differentiate themselves from the large masses of talent and more talent. As the end of the Weimar Republic drew closer the political arguments turned into violence the Cafè lost gradually its roll (this not without saying that the crowds of artists around Breker and the other Nazi artists also had their own venues from about this time until the very end of the war). Already on the 20th March of 1927 the Nazis organized a riot in Kurfürstendam, whereby the Café was located and where their most hatred foes were to be found - the left intelligentsia. There Café of course was the target of Nazi violence.
The official rise of National Socialism and the imminent immigration of most of the guests at the Café constituted the definitive end of the Café as an artistic venue. The actual house was completely destroyed in 1943. Putting an end to a long line of 'salons' that existed since the Romantic period, starting with the respective salons of two prominent Jewesses, Rahel Varnhagen von Ense and Henriette Herz... followed by smaller literary venues during the Imperial Era (of which I know very little) and finally the 'Café des Westen' in the fin-de-siècle, then replaced by the 'Romanischen Café'; other important circles were those around the Von Humboldt in the Romantic era and that of Max Weber and his wife Marianne already in Weimar times. The last vestiges of the salon were taken by the emigrants with them, who constituted its very last heirs. Hannah Arendt to New York, Else Lasker-Schüler to Jerusalem (from the testimony of Yehuda Amichai), Margarete Susman (to Zürich), and even Stefan Zweig to Brasil. This whole period extending over a hundred years is beautifully phrased by Arendt:
"Most representative of these salons, and the genuinely mixed society they brought together in Germany, was that of Rahel Varnhagen. Her original, unspoiled and unconventional intelligence, combined with an absorbing interest in people and truly passionate nature, made her the most brilliant and the most interesting of these Jewish women. The modest but famous soirées in Rahel's 'garret' brought together 'enlightened' aristocrats, middle-class intellectuals, and actors - that is, all those who, like the Jews, did not belong to respectable society. Thus Rahel's salon by definition did not share any of its conventions or prejudices".
Some of the visitors of the 'Romanischen Café' included Bertolt Brecht, Hanns Eisler, George Grosz, Mascha Kaléko, Erich Kästner, Else Lasker-Schüler, Joachim Ringelnatz, Joseph Roth, Kurt Tucholsky and Franz Werfel. There was also a lively musical scene around the cabarets, like the famous El Dorado (where both Nazis and homosexuals - for a time a hardly distinguishable crowd, made their first appearances in the night life of Weimar Berlin) and of which Brecht remained one of the most cherished guests. I haven't done much research about these cabarets, although it only reminds me of having met the old woman from the Brecht archives on the train to Berlin last year, who confessed she's still waiting for anybody to come and do some little research on this glorious time of Berlin's night life to which so much popular theatre and poetry were consecrated. Perhaps one day, when I'm less tired, less urgent, less unspeakable. Like my painter would write me last week, 'I dedicate all parties in my life to you, as they are simple reminders of our real feasts'; in re-writing albeit so briefly the history behind so many life-stories there, one returns home for a passing moment and that's quite enough with things being as they're, to have some diremption.
'In the earlier years'
Another poem from Mascha Kaléko that I translated this morning for an old friend, this one is from 1947.
Exposed...
I sail away,
I sail to a shore...
In a boat of the night.
In a cloud
I lean against the rain
And in a mount of sand
Against the furious wind.
Nothing to rely on,
Only miracle.
I eat the ripe fruits of longing
And drink the waters of thirst,
The thirst of might.
A stranger... in slumber before unreachable places.
I freeze through the dark years,
And on the way home
I choose love for myself.
Exposed...
I sail away,
I sail to a shore...
In a boat of the night.
In a cloud
I lean against the rain
And in a mount of sand
Against the furious wind.
Nothing to rely on,
Only miracle.
I eat the ripe fruits of longing
And drink the waters of thirst,
The thirst of might.
A stranger... in slumber before unreachable places.
I freeze through the dark years,
And on the way home
I choose love for myself.
'In his house'
Now the rendered English of some really bad composette I wrote to someone in Hebrew last night.
In the waters of the mirror
The countenances of your youth
Are enlightened in the colours of the salt
And of the alleys
- With the fulfilling of your ways
The lust
The nausea
A low weeping
In the small corners
And on my notebook
Smoked in hyssop
And resting in his house
The fantastic, calm house
Were it not for your narrating eyes
That devour the silence
With a wet knife
Tired and quiet
Like a little goat
Like a soft and strange present
And in his house
He dreams with his father
Without falling asleep
And you
Awake on his walls
Even while in sleep
From your distant house.
In the waters of the mirror
The countenances of your youth
Are enlightened in the colours of the salt
And of the alleys
- With the fulfilling of your ways
The lust
The nausea
A low weeping
In the small corners
And on my notebook
Smoked in hyssop
And resting in his house
The fantastic, calm house
Were it not for your narrating eyes
That devour the silence
With a wet knife
Tired and quiet
Like a little goat
Like a soft and strange present
And in his house
He dreams with his father
Without falling asleep
And you
Awake on his walls
Even while in sleep
From your distant house.
Grandma's Birthday
My lips sleep drier than lust
In the suave of sea-faring
Fearing less the roaring than the beast
That sickens from the little living
Of the dancing tables, the merrier dust
Encroaching past the highway's driveling
In a fragile revel, of smoke, mist, a must
Whitening the teeth of a naked ring
That tinges the chiaroscuro in the coast
With a mint feast in yellower soothing
Diving the lines of streets that roost
Beneath the wet earth wherefrom they cling
Onto a plate of broken china, apples, oats
To be devoured by the clean lines of a string
Extending from one thread of laundry to the other's mast
So shy, in clenched palettes, pregnant from bathing
In the mud-like ailments of the serene and the just
Unmaking the world's tissue, the Lord's issueing
Essaying on the fringes the fever of hope and host
With less care than movement, than freeing, than wrestling
Coming to rest in a cinnamon box, with glass, with yeast, moist
Overflowing from noise, erring, harvesting, mumbling
With less lips than tongue, screaming from the chest.
In the suave of sea-faring
Fearing less the roaring than the beast
That sickens from the little living
Of the dancing tables, the merrier dust
Encroaching past the highway's driveling
In a fragile revel, of smoke, mist, a must
Whitening the teeth of a naked ring
That tinges the chiaroscuro in the coast
With a mint feast in yellower soothing
Diving the lines of streets that roost
Beneath the wet earth wherefrom they cling
Onto a plate of broken china, apples, oats
To be devoured by the clean lines of a string
Extending from one thread of laundry to the other's mast
So shy, in clenched palettes, pregnant from bathing
In the mud-like ailments of the serene and the just
Unmaking the world's tissue, the Lord's issueing
Essaying on the fringes the fever of hope and host
With less care than movement, than freeing, than wrestling
Coming to rest in a cinnamon box, with glass, with yeast, moist
Overflowing from noise, erring, harvesting, mumbling
With less lips than tongue, screaming from the chest.
Emigrants Monologue
'Ich habe keine Heimat gefunden' -Mascha Kaléko
(I haven't found any home)
Emigrants Monologue
Mascha Kaléko
1938
I have one, a beautiful fatherland!
So sang already the refugee Heine
That was his stand on the Rhine
That is my own, on yellowing sand.
We all had one once! (see above)
It was devoured by the plague, scattered in a storm.
O little rose of the heathland
The strength of love tore you like that.
The nightingales are turning numb,
They saw it in at the safest abode.
And only the vultures scream
Well above the gravelines.
It will never be the same, whatever was,
Whenever it will be different than it is.
Even if the tiny bell of love will ring,
Even if the swords cling no more.
I feel sometimes as though
That heart in me, is shattered into pieces.
Sometimes I'm so homesick,
I just don't know, after what....
(I haven't found any home)
Emigrants Monologue
Mascha Kaléko
1938
I have one, a beautiful fatherland!
So sang already the refugee Heine
That was his stand on the Rhine
That is my own, on yellowing sand.
We all had one once! (see above)
It was devoured by the plague, scattered in a storm.
O little rose of the heathland
The strength of love tore you like that.
The nightingales are turning numb,
They saw it in at the safest abode.
And only the vultures scream
Well above the gravelines.
It will never be the same, whatever was,
Whenever it will be different than it is.
Even if the tiny bell of love will ring,
Even if the swords cling no more.
I feel sometimes as though
That heart in me, is shattered into pieces.
Sometimes I'm so homesick,
I just don't know, after what....
A response to Yoav
Yoav's comment:
Ari, כה יעשה לי אלוהים וכה יוסיף I Wish I could have time to learn your culture In the way you study mine, but your point of view is still too narrow. by all means study hebrew, study it's literature and history, not to say nationality, but be ready to accsept that your blog is just a darft, pages in the notebook of a detective that is trying to solve a case. I don't know the german source but Zach and Amichai did translate LS poems into hebrew and it would be interesting to compare your translations.
I must say that I've heard about most of the people you've mentioned in this post but I must say that their affect on the israeli society only began in recent years.
While I was writing my thoughts I thought about things I've told you.
I think that atleast some of your inconvenience with Hebrew would be solved if you use Babylon more often, perhaps the most useful thing when you translate or write or loves or fights is self-doubt
My Reply:
Yoav,
I think there's an important point to be made in regard to this such 'study of culture'; I agree that my vantage point is fashionably narrow and even at that I am not trying to look at it from the lenses of the German language (in fact an impossible task) but through a 'mediator' that one could call "der jüdische Erbe Europas" (the Jewish heritage of Europe)... I believe this to be important because the 'culture' is so foreign yet so close home. For an example, Margarete Susman had an uncanny erudition of a great part of both the German, German-Jewish and Hebrew literature of her time, and remained after her own fashion one of the best and perhaps only serious critics of Hebrew literature and of Israeli "Judaism" in the 20th century... not without leaving the grandiose halls of the German language.
I certainly study Hebrew and its literature, although there's a great chunk of the contemporary authors that befind me as sympathetically boring, more than anything I've taken a certain interest in all kinds of religious poetry. The language itself is another matter, because more than often I found that things taken for the granted in Israeli Hebrew are actually rather complex constructions, altogether there's this claim going around among some linguists that modern Hebrew is a European language (and so does uphold my own advisor who is a theologian) that is in my opinion groundless... but it's neither a Semitic language to the degree of purity that a typological classification would demand. Ghilad Zuckermann is perhaps one of the few Israeli linguists to have studied seriously this phenomenon of the Semito-European character of Hebrew. You can see the great amount of phono-semantic matching done during the genesis of the language... there's just so much Greek flying around in the air, so that the morphology remains quite a mystery (you might perhaps want to see the work of Outi Bat-El on the prosodic morphology of Hebrew, she lectures at TAU on Optimality Theory). The syntax is entirely Western (and therefore the inner life of the language) with the exception of a certain morphological and therefore prosodic access to parataxis that the syntax does have. Just like in the German language I'm an advocate for linguistic purity, reason for which I indulge myself in such lack of fluidity in Hebrew, almost unconsciously refusing to use the state-of-the-art neologisms.
I don't think one should study a language's "nationality", in fact I find the cunning of the term very troubling and unbefitting to our age. And this is where my cultural criticism starts, not only that of Hebrew-speaking culture, but of the Zionist movement and of the State of Israel itself. Those of us speaking about the nation, are undoubtedly speaking the language of the 19th century and of the Romantic period... the tragedy of this state, is that before a culture was created a state was formed as an offspring of European ideology, perhaps the most bastard son of the German ideology. Therefore Israel can't stand on its own in the history of contemporary culture, it is the missing link in the understanding of the roots of Modernity... because out of this paradoxical national narrative "we" as Israelis have entirely become cultural parvenus. You see it in the book reviews being written, the movies made and especially the flavour of the recently published literature. Guilel agrees me with me that one should go back to Ahad Ha'am and to Judah Magnes, to some extent to Buber (whose philosophy I don't like very much), in order to understand that the possibilities of an authentic Hebrew culture (and not the culture of the State of Israel, for there has never been such a thing as the culture of the Federal Republic of Germany or of the Austrian Republic, just culture in the German language - with the exceptio of alas! the period between 1933 and 1945) are not in the love of the nation or in the lack of it, but rather in something more radically individual and universal such as the love of the world. Something makes me think that so much would be achieved if Israelis could see themselves as a phase in the history of Jewish culture, which is not the history of Zionism.... but rather eighteen centuries of contribution to European civilization and just as much to the near East. The Galut culture is definitely not what one needs today, but it can't be disregarded just so much.
I agree the blog is a draft of something that is not, but I've never aimed to be a Hebrew writer and after other than having studied Biblical Hebrew back in my heyday, I basically taught myself the language. Maybe I'll solve the puzzle one day, I don't know... but it's important for me to keep a great degree of this 'Occidental perspective', lest I want to lose myself in "authenticity", another term I believe to be outdated. Luckily the world of culture is one in which there's no such a thing as outsiders, unless one were to define it by nations. I know some of the translations of Amichai which are truly beautiful and want entirely something else from Lasker-Schüler than I do, notwithstanding I like him very much überhaupt. I also found not long ago a book with translations of Rilke, but I was very disappointed. When I introduced Margarete Susman and Mascha Kaléko at the Hebrew University no one had a clue, but it is so typical of that place... the last German imperial university. All those poets are certainly by no means Hebrew, but some of them did have a Hebrew mind actually, an almost Biblical touch for their own languages... and it is from the sources of this "hidden tradition" that one could look forward to a Hebrew culture that doesn't look at its predecessors as mistakes of other spiritual age. I'm by no means meaning to strip the value of 'your' Hebrew culture, nor pretending to cure its ailings with 'my' German culture, I'm simply saying that this Israeli culture is in fact suffering from ills no different from those of the whole Western world, to which it is undoubtedly indebted for so many misnomers. This isn't a literary or a cultural position, but a entirely diremptive and therefore philosophical perspective.
I don't think I can speak about other thinkers, because my opinion is that there're really no thinkers who were ever influential in Israeli society ever, to the degree that there was a Goethe cult in Germany or a whole full-fledged Derrida school in France. Israel has so far produced no philosophical schools and no philosophers of great renown, other than some Jew here and there who decided to make his home there, people like Yirmeyahu Yovel and Shlomo Avineri.. who belong still to the generation of the Holocaust and whose narrative has stopped being binding for just too many people. That there's a living culture here I will not deny it, but that there's a spiritual crisis in the country that neither religion or secularism can heal any longer... is something that doesn't need any proofs. It is the living reality of the street.
Ari, כה יעשה לי אלוהים וכה יוסיף I Wish I could have time to learn your culture In the way you study mine, but your point of view is still too narrow. by all means study hebrew, study it's literature and history, not to say nationality, but be ready to accsept that your blog is just a darft, pages in the notebook of a detective that is trying to solve a case. I don't know the german source but Zach and Amichai did translate LS poems into hebrew and it would be interesting to compare your translations.
I must say that I've heard about most of the people you've mentioned in this post but I must say that their affect on the israeli society only began in recent years.
While I was writing my thoughts I thought about things I've told you.
I think that atleast some of your inconvenience with Hebrew would be solved if you use Babylon more often, perhaps the most useful thing when you translate or write or loves or fights is self-doubt
My Reply:
Yoav,
I think there's an important point to be made in regard to this such 'study of culture'; I agree that my vantage point is fashionably narrow and even at that I am not trying to look at it from the lenses of the German language (in fact an impossible task) but through a 'mediator' that one could call "der jüdische Erbe Europas" (the Jewish heritage of Europe)... I believe this to be important because the 'culture' is so foreign yet so close home. For an example, Margarete Susman had an uncanny erudition of a great part of both the German, German-Jewish and Hebrew literature of her time, and remained after her own fashion one of the best and perhaps only serious critics of Hebrew literature and of Israeli "Judaism" in the 20th century... not without leaving the grandiose halls of the German language.
I certainly study Hebrew and its literature, although there's a great chunk of the contemporary authors that befind me as sympathetically boring, more than anything I've taken a certain interest in all kinds of religious poetry. The language itself is another matter, because more than often I found that things taken for the granted in Israeli Hebrew are actually rather complex constructions, altogether there's this claim going around among some linguists that modern Hebrew is a European language (and so does uphold my own advisor who is a theologian) that is in my opinion groundless... but it's neither a Semitic language to the degree of purity that a typological classification would demand. Ghilad Zuckermann is perhaps one of the few Israeli linguists to have studied seriously this phenomenon of the Semito-European character of Hebrew. You can see the great amount of phono-semantic matching done during the genesis of the language... there's just so much Greek flying around in the air, so that the morphology remains quite a mystery (you might perhaps want to see the work of Outi Bat-El on the prosodic morphology of Hebrew, she lectures at TAU on Optimality Theory). The syntax is entirely Western (and therefore the inner life of the language) with the exception of a certain morphological and therefore prosodic access to parataxis that the syntax does have. Just like in the German language I'm an advocate for linguistic purity, reason for which I indulge myself in such lack of fluidity in Hebrew, almost unconsciously refusing to use the state-of-the-art neologisms.
I don't think one should study a language's "nationality", in fact I find the cunning of the term very troubling and unbefitting to our age. And this is where my cultural criticism starts, not only that of Hebrew-speaking culture, but of the Zionist movement and of the State of Israel itself. Those of us speaking about the nation, are undoubtedly speaking the language of the 19th century and of the Romantic period... the tragedy of this state, is that before a culture was created a state was formed as an offspring of European ideology, perhaps the most bastard son of the German ideology. Therefore Israel can't stand on its own in the history of contemporary culture, it is the missing link in the understanding of the roots of Modernity... because out of this paradoxical national narrative "we" as Israelis have entirely become cultural parvenus. You see it in the book reviews being written, the movies made and especially the flavour of the recently published literature. Guilel agrees me with me that one should go back to Ahad Ha'am and to Judah Magnes, to some extent to Buber (whose philosophy I don't like very much), in order to understand that the possibilities of an authentic Hebrew culture (and not the culture of the State of Israel, for there has never been such a thing as the culture of the Federal Republic of Germany or of the Austrian Republic, just culture in the German language - with the exceptio of alas! the period between 1933 and 1945) are not in the love of the nation or in the lack of it, but rather in something more radically individual and universal such as the love of the world. Something makes me think that so much would be achieved if Israelis could see themselves as a phase in the history of Jewish culture, which is not the history of Zionism.... but rather eighteen centuries of contribution to European civilization and just as much to the near East. The Galut culture is definitely not what one needs today, but it can't be disregarded just so much.
I agree the blog is a draft of something that is not, but I've never aimed to be a Hebrew writer and after other than having studied Biblical Hebrew back in my heyday, I basically taught myself the language. Maybe I'll solve the puzzle one day, I don't know... but it's important for me to keep a great degree of this 'Occidental perspective', lest I want to lose myself in "authenticity", another term I believe to be outdated. Luckily the world of culture is one in which there's no such a thing as outsiders, unless one were to define it by nations. I know some of the translations of Amichai which are truly beautiful and want entirely something else from Lasker-Schüler than I do, notwithstanding I like him very much überhaupt. I also found not long ago a book with translations of Rilke, but I was very disappointed. When I introduced Margarete Susman and Mascha Kaléko at the Hebrew University no one had a clue, but it is so typical of that place... the last German imperial university. All those poets are certainly by no means Hebrew, but some of them did have a Hebrew mind actually, an almost Biblical touch for their own languages... and it is from the sources of this "hidden tradition" that one could look forward to a Hebrew culture that doesn't look at its predecessors as mistakes of other spiritual age. I'm by no means meaning to strip the value of 'your' Hebrew culture, nor pretending to cure its ailings with 'my' German culture, I'm simply saying that this Israeli culture is in fact suffering from ills no different from those of the whole Western world, to which it is undoubtedly indebted for so many misnomers. This isn't a literary or a cultural position, but a entirely diremptive and therefore philosophical perspective.
I don't think I can speak about other thinkers, because my opinion is that there're really no thinkers who were ever influential in Israeli society ever, to the degree that there was a Goethe cult in Germany or a whole full-fledged Derrida school in France. Israel has so far produced no philosophical schools and no philosophers of great renown, other than some Jew here and there who decided to make his home there, people like Yirmeyahu Yovel and Shlomo Avineri.. who belong still to the generation of the Holocaust and whose narrative has stopped being binding for just too many people. That there's a living culture here I will not deny it, but that there's a spiritual crisis in the country that neither religion or secularism can heal any longer... is something that doesn't need any proofs. It is the living reality of the street.
Sunday, May 20, 2007
Translating, Translators
Now for a change a switch to English after four exhausting days of Hebrew-izing myself, I don't think it's stupid to try your hand at a language which isn't natural to you - after all English is perhaps the only language that truly melts in my hands and allows me to do with it everything I want, but it was an exercise of several years. In a way reading back I notice a kind of ontological problem, that of having that Derridean grammatology quite overdeveloped - For Derrida the world is a text, and there's no 'other' text (unlike the 'alterite' of Levinas) therefore interpretation (hermeneutics) is not only the only possible language but also the only possible world; this in order to say that I use the grammar of anarchy in any language, certainly in English (long burdensome German sentences) and no less in German (with thematic mutilations, like the style of Celan)... but I guess there's something about developing one's particular style and insofar as it is understandable (meaning interpretable) then it should be OK. The writing in Hebrew and the attempt at translating is of course so much part of the philosophy as anything else, like the collecting pictures, letters, postcards, advertisements; or the orgiastic drinking and the religious diremption.
Like I wrote in a letter to K., I think there's a serious problem with aesthetics - the most fundamental concepts of the world are beyond doubt offsprings from aestheticizing, after all philosophy had its origins in a contemplative position that the modern age has overturned in every possible way, yet the principles are unmovable. Surrealism like in the case of Achim Von Armin ("the everyday world is the surreal world") opens the first possibilities for this overcoming of aesthetics by placing the surreal feature of private art in the public world (in German, the public world also connotates an 'open' world, like in Simmel's model of Modernity and alas! Heidegger's), therefore blurring and destroying the boundaries between thought or art and life. Yet this 'destruction' is a dangerous devise, for it opens the gates to the abyss of negative Gnosis (anti-epistemic knowledge but very much pistic) that one finds so easily cunning in religious fundamentalism and totalitarianism no less than in the imminent confusion between the religious and the secular in our times, the Death-of-God culture. Two artists come to mind when I try working out a solution - the poet Else Lasker-Schüler and the painter Charlotte Salomon, representatives of the modern Expressionist movement. For Else and Charlotte there are no boundaries between life and thought, between word and world.... and the misrecognition or rather non-recognition of these boundaries is where the anti-mythical thinking is at stake. At the same time the overcoming of the boundaries might lead as well (and in fact did) to the elimination of certain concepts that assure the place of man in the world; for example through overcoming the concepts of politics and education, therefore throwing man into the totalization of both secularity and religion but from a negative and upside-down angle.
Now we return to the language problem. Habermas was one of the few philosophers in our age who attempted to define the limits of our world from a perspective outside language and greatly failed, not by antinomies but rather by linguistic tautologies that belong in the sphere of logical semantics and not of philosophy. My disagreement with G. on this point is beyond argument, I'm unable to accept as diremption a philosophy whose main concern is self-explanation (this attitude is so very anti-philosophical) and that wants to tackle the 'basic questions'. As a remarkable problem of continental philosophy is the inability to address such questions, if anything, out of the collapse of the metaphysical language that the late modern age discovered. This collapse is thought to have been placed in the abyss of Auschwitz and I believe that it is as old as the rise of the Copernican world (with Kant as its philosophical ambassador); albeit I disagree with Löwith and Voegelin on placing it as early as the Gnostic movements of the middle ages. Their mistake is two-fold, first they damnate Modernity way before the rise of the typical modern consciousness (with Leibniz and Descartes, of whom there's no mention) and second they also fail to notice (like Jacob Taubes did in a rather negative way) that the source of the Gnosis is the Pauline theology, but consequentially speaking the ill doesn't start there... too many other elements have to collide as well. Metaphysics and Christianity are not guilty for Auschwitz, here I'm entirely secular: This was an act committed by men and they must be held responsible for it, it's not a philosophical mistake or a theological consequence. To think it to be so, is at beast naive. Philosophy should be made -using a Kantian cliche- within the limits of language alone! So that Heidegger might have been totally right in pointing out language as the house of Being. But I'm not too interested in 'Being', because finally the concept itself is a metaphysical antinomy.
That's why I cling onto the Hebrew, because what is at stake is the variegance of the line that divides philosophy from Hebrew (and I want to say Hebrew, not Jewish thinking)... and perhaps I might be likely to believe that the idea of 'Hebrew thinking' is feasible but altogether misunderstood in the modern age. I don't think it's possible to have a Jewish philosophy (and by this I don't mean a theological philosophy of Judaism) in a language other than Hebrew.... only thus, one could be able to conversate with the tradition. All other attempts are at best an apocalyptic momentum of Western thought with nicely quoted Biblical passages. That the language doesn't like me too much is certain, and I'm so grateful Yoav and Nimrod have pointed out to me how it works: It is not a matter of not knowing how to write at all but of recognizing there's much more to the grammar and the spelling that one would dare hear. I know this to be true from the letters of G. and K., notwithstanding the appalling beauty of their phrasings there's a certain touch of un-grammativity that makes the language unnatural. This by no means eliminates the beauty and is a very technical matter, but restrains the language so to speak from its natural potentiality to describe the world in its own terms.
Margarete Susman I've found to be one of the greatest writers to be translated into Hebrew, her poems are just made out of chunks of a kind of Bible of culture. Arendt is a different matter, her poems can hardly sound interesting no matter how hard one can rework the eliptic and paratactic phrasings. Else Lasker-Schüler was certainly invented just so that she could be translated into Hebrew, but the Hebrew necessary for this is not epic (like Susman's) but rather a strange mixture of Bible and everyday language - living up to the breach of boundaries in her whole artistic concept. My language experiences another problem... it has a certain synthetic plasticity that I suspect comes from the Greek ear, and I no longer experience it in English precisely because of my knowledge of Hebrew (in German it's impossible to think without this classical plasticity, unless one could be a genius experimenter like Lasker-Schüler and Celan, yet in some of the greatest moderns like Rilke it is overflowing as well... Brecht is an exemption, he's his own kind of poetry by himself but very German at the same time). This plasticity I think doesn't come willy-nilly, but belongs very well in the history of modern Hebrew and many of the early poets were not entirely bereft of it, except alas! the poets that had a good grounding in the religious texts of Judaism. Even the so-called Canaanite poets (a literary school) indulged in this plasticity (the Aristotelian separation between content and form foreign to most poetic experiences of the Near East) and the last traces are there already in the writers of the 'State of Israel' generation.
Some later authors did overcome this position but I find their literature myself quite uninteresting... in fact it strikes me as less Hebrew than I would like Hebrew to be. There're very many exceptions of course, and I truly admire the themes of the everyday world so typical of a great deal of contemporary Hebrew poetry (and prose), which nevertheless I can't drink from, because my concern with diremption is very unbecoming to that form of narration which I tried my hand at in English when I was younger. Literature becomes history in the Benjaminean sense, a path-finder in the dark of the chasm between receding concepts and the invisible institutions they left behind.
Like I wrote in a letter to K., I think there's a serious problem with aesthetics - the most fundamental concepts of the world are beyond doubt offsprings from aestheticizing, after all philosophy had its origins in a contemplative position that the modern age has overturned in every possible way, yet the principles are unmovable. Surrealism like in the case of Achim Von Armin ("the everyday world is the surreal world") opens the first possibilities for this overcoming of aesthetics by placing the surreal feature of private art in the public world (in German, the public world also connotates an 'open' world, like in Simmel's model of Modernity and alas! Heidegger's), therefore blurring and destroying the boundaries between thought or art and life. Yet this 'destruction' is a dangerous devise, for it opens the gates to the abyss of negative Gnosis (anti-epistemic knowledge but very much pistic) that one finds so easily cunning in religious fundamentalism and totalitarianism no less than in the imminent confusion between the religious and the secular in our times, the Death-of-God culture. Two artists come to mind when I try working out a solution - the poet Else Lasker-Schüler and the painter Charlotte Salomon, representatives of the modern Expressionist movement. For Else and Charlotte there are no boundaries between life and thought, between word and world.... and the misrecognition or rather non-recognition of these boundaries is where the anti-mythical thinking is at stake. At the same time the overcoming of the boundaries might lead as well (and in fact did) to the elimination of certain concepts that assure the place of man in the world; for example through overcoming the concepts of politics and education, therefore throwing man into the totalization of both secularity and religion but from a negative and upside-down angle.
Now we return to the language problem. Habermas was one of the few philosophers in our age who attempted to define the limits of our world from a perspective outside language and greatly failed, not by antinomies but rather by linguistic tautologies that belong in the sphere of logical semantics and not of philosophy. My disagreement with G. on this point is beyond argument, I'm unable to accept as diremption a philosophy whose main concern is self-explanation (this attitude is so very anti-philosophical) and that wants to tackle the 'basic questions'. As a remarkable problem of continental philosophy is the inability to address such questions, if anything, out of the collapse of the metaphysical language that the late modern age discovered. This collapse is thought to have been placed in the abyss of Auschwitz and I believe that it is as old as the rise of the Copernican world (with Kant as its philosophical ambassador); albeit I disagree with Löwith and Voegelin on placing it as early as the Gnostic movements of the middle ages. Their mistake is two-fold, first they damnate Modernity way before the rise of the typical modern consciousness (with Leibniz and Descartes, of whom there's no mention) and second they also fail to notice (like Jacob Taubes did in a rather negative way) that the source of the Gnosis is the Pauline theology, but consequentially speaking the ill doesn't start there... too many other elements have to collide as well. Metaphysics and Christianity are not guilty for Auschwitz, here I'm entirely secular: This was an act committed by men and they must be held responsible for it, it's not a philosophical mistake or a theological consequence. To think it to be so, is at beast naive. Philosophy should be made -using a Kantian cliche- within the limits of language alone! So that Heidegger might have been totally right in pointing out language as the house of Being. But I'm not too interested in 'Being', because finally the concept itself is a metaphysical antinomy.
That's why I cling onto the Hebrew, because what is at stake is the variegance of the line that divides philosophy from Hebrew (and I want to say Hebrew, not Jewish thinking)... and perhaps I might be likely to believe that the idea of 'Hebrew thinking' is feasible but altogether misunderstood in the modern age. I don't think it's possible to have a Jewish philosophy (and by this I don't mean a theological philosophy of Judaism) in a language other than Hebrew.... only thus, one could be able to conversate with the tradition. All other attempts are at best an apocalyptic momentum of Western thought with nicely quoted Biblical passages. That the language doesn't like me too much is certain, and I'm so grateful Yoav and Nimrod have pointed out to me how it works: It is not a matter of not knowing how to write at all but of recognizing there's much more to the grammar and the spelling that one would dare hear. I know this to be true from the letters of G. and K., notwithstanding the appalling beauty of their phrasings there's a certain touch of un-grammativity that makes the language unnatural. This by no means eliminates the beauty and is a very technical matter, but restrains the language so to speak from its natural potentiality to describe the world in its own terms.
Margarete Susman I've found to be one of the greatest writers to be translated into Hebrew, her poems are just made out of chunks of a kind of Bible of culture. Arendt is a different matter, her poems can hardly sound interesting no matter how hard one can rework the eliptic and paratactic phrasings. Else Lasker-Schüler was certainly invented just so that she could be translated into Hebrew, but the Hebrew necessary for this is not epic (like Susman's) but rather a strange mixture of Bible and everyday language - living up to the breach of boundaries in her whole artistic concept. My language experiences another problem... it has a certain synthetic plasticity that I suspect comes from the Greek ear, and I no longer experience it in English precisely because of my knowledge of Hebrew (in German it's impossible to think without this classical plasticity, unless one could be a genius experimenter like Lasker-Schüler and Celan, yet in some of the greatest moderns like Rilke it is overflowing as well... Brecht is an exemption, he's his own kind of poetry by himself but very German at the same time). This plasticity I think doesn't come willy-nilly, but belongs very well in the history of modern Hebrew and many of the early poets were not entirely bereft of it, except alas! the poets that had a good grounding in the religious texts of Judaism. Even the so-called Canaanite poets (a literary school) indulged in this plasticity (the Aristotelian separation between content and form foreign to most poetic experiences of the Near East) and the last traces are there already in the writers of the 'State of Israel' generation.
Some later authors did overcome this position but I find their literature myself quite uninteresting... in fact it strikes me as less Hebrew than I would like Hebrew to be. There're very many exceptions of course, and I truly admire the themes of the everyday world so typical of a great deal of contemporary Hebrew poetry (and prose), which nevertheless I can't drink from, because my concern with diremption is very unbecoming to that form of narration which I tried my hand at in English when I was younger. Literature becomes history in the Benjaminean sense, a path-finder in the dark of the chasm between receding concepts and the invisible institutions they left behind.
A letter
I received this beautiful, beautiful letter from my beloved Lara... one of those strange beings that comes so close to my world and yet is so far in every respect... almost five years our friendship still going on, two poems I dedicated to her once... the first one I loved very much, the second was perhaps too much pained by other people and didn't quite 'arrive' there where I wanted. It's perhaps one of the most beautiful letters I've received in a long time, with the exception of the Passagen from the two despot rulers of my kingdom, of which I might be able to speak only in the axe of living.
Ari
I apologize for the length of time that has passed.
The prologue you sent to me, was perhaps my favourite thing you've written in a while. I have always loved best the times when you write and I can hear your voice speaking in my head as I read. I've always loved the times when I could feel your heart through what you write. I suppose I rely on your heart voice mainly because I can't keep up with your brain voice... I'm not tuna blathering either. You do write with two very distinct voices. It takes me great concentration to keep up the more intellectual bits of you, but your heart I can follow with ease.
Like I said in the text, I was deeply touched by the kind of things you said. I think that the true times of friendship occur when we are just being ourselves, without prefaced thought to what the other person might be thinking of our words.( I say words, because what else has there ever been?) You have given alot to me, without knowing I suspect, I really should tell you sometime, because I'm sure you won't have the fun of reading about it in the front of a book, like I have.
My thoughts are with you, tuna though I am.
Fondly,
Lara
Ari
I apologize for the length of time that has passed.
The prologue you sent to me, was perhaps my favourite thing you've written in a while. I have always loved best the times when you write and I can hear your voice speaking in my head as I read. I've always loved the times when I could feel your heart through what you write. I suppose I rely on your heart voice mainly because I can't keep up with your brain voice... I'm not tuna blathering either. You do write with two very distinct voices. It takes me great concentration to keep up the more intellectual bits of you, but your heart I can follow with ease.
Like I said in the text, I was deeply touched by the kind of things you said. I think that the true times of friendship occur when we are just being ourselves, without prefaced thought to what the other person might be thinking of our words.( I say words, because what else has there ever been?) You have given alot to me, without knowing I suspect, I really should tell you sometime, because I'm sure you won't have the fun of reading about it in the front of a book, like I have.
My thoughts are with you, tuna though I am.
Fondly,
Lara
Thursday, May 17, 2007
K. on E.
'It was so amazing as it is always... to meet Eveline, and especially to meet her in Vienna! She is the diva and all the others are so poor, because they are just trabanten of others... And she is the sun and moon in persona, and who else can understand this unheimlichkeit?
And who else understands what this Dringlichkeit means? The Dringlichkeit of gelebt zu haben (having lived)...
Die anderen - sie kennen schöne Wörte, aber sie kennen nicht die abgründe die zwischen ihnen liegen (the others - they know beautiful words, but they don't know the abysses that lie in between them).'
And who else understands what this Dringlichkeit means? The Dringlichkeit of gelebt zu haben (having lived)...
Die anderen - sie kennen schöne Wörte, aber sie kennen nicht die abgründe die zwischen ihnen liegen (the others - they know beautiful words, but they don't know the abysses that lie in between them).'
Wednesday, May 02, 2007
Meeting
It is always the same recurrent feeling, one strip of all capabilities to convey any message, the most incredible spiritual numbness and dampness confused in a mist of jaded hazel and green, but altogether so glittering and rainy. In a way I feel it is the screaming voice of the present hunting me and soaking me in impossibilities, so that I can only lower my eyes and forget the rest of the world, just sink and swing without leaving my drunken boat, so entirely unaware of the consequences. A number of voices clash inside myself and demand more from me but I'm unable to move in the mud, to sooth myself at all... I imagine the mornings and their paintings, the day-dreaming of living under the spell of conventionality, the light of worldliness and endless conversations, struggles, titanic undertakings... but past the mild smells of compassion with myself and with that glowing shadow, at best I can find myself gathering the pieces from a broken conversation and filtering it for long enough so as to save myself from the ends that come with every time I stare into the lake of condemnation... the sulfur pours from my veins into a Stygia-like landscape of streets and noises, but in utmost loneliness.
The flights of the imagination cannot contain my exasperating silence, the abyss before me unfolding in the shape of encounters, in the shape of togetherness my mind feels ill-headed toward a dark alley that has become the only refugee, the shelter not from reality but of reality. I keep weaving my thread from one chance to the next, as though I weren't made for higher enterprises... but before the thick mist of geniality and God-questioning humour hides a certain longing that infringes me with questions asked by children, with a cunning desire almost revealing of a different logic, a passage of antinomies at the end of which I still can't gather myself on my own, so that I cite myself, repeat, spit, re-tell... as to discover some essence behind those frail curtains of daylight. I'm not becoming, simply awakening... everyday, to this newfound bitterness that slows the time to the point of turning into lullabies of formerly known creatureliness. I'm unable to speak, even about my own. Behind all the masks a certain voice showers me, it is identical with none of the acts but undoubtedly can be idenfitied with all of them.
Perhaps she's right after all, I'm wasting all my vital energy in one port... out of which I can only sink, but it is not altogether bad because I might sink in the togetherness of the world, of duality, of antinomy, of deflection, of un-pastness, of a shared obscurity... but even this is not for sure. My expectations about the world as are futile as my relentless trust in it, so that every negation is a deliberate channel of belief, the desire to undo the broken chain and fade away. But this disappearance is not at all objectable, while at the same time it remains impossible... because the overarching presence of those shadows glitters through the broad day light in order to remind me of myself, of that self I have ceased to trust for so long, indulging in simpler calculations that despite my good intentions always end with the same lack of interest, the same lack of remembrance, that skillful but murderous immanence of the mirror, the inescapable rationale of unreligiosity, of doubt, of uncomfort.
Maybe my luck will change another time, when I step out of myself... when I cease from this givenness, from this melody, from these sensibilities... but something tells me I rather be undone with everything than forfeiting the gifts of outsiderness, of melancholy, of thinking... but the thinking can no longer be set apart from the endless nights craving for the same distant object, from the letters I write, from the speculative jealousy, from the frustrated un-desire of the morning. I want to be so far away from it, I want to betray, to falsify... but this is impossible in theology, certainly in a theology that only has two elements, both loosen and forlorn. Both elements are free, and therefore, nauseating... sickly, nightly... unimportant without their context. These days will wane away one day, I don't know when, and it'll be perhaps the loss of the most beautiful broken mornings of my whole life, I want to look at it as necessary, albeit I'm unable to. Perhaps I'll quit before they end, but I know it's just too late, I can't. I'm in foul and I know it, no longer playing with fire but burning under it with the most resignated look in my face, I've given all what can be given, nothing was demanded... this isn't a surrender statement, rather an embracing to my failure. Some days my imagination runs free, even more than life.... I dream with those conversations, but eventually I end up being monological until a surprise comes from heaven, and the absolute joy they stir in me is only a knowing sign of my most absolute unhappiness and recognition of the impossibility, already a miscognition.
The silence breaks the walls, they fall upon me but I don't die. I mumble to myself, yellower than hay, trying to find that Western star, but it is more elusive than what I would like to say, because our age has stripped my message off any possible connotation. It can at best make a good phone conversation, half an hour in a cafe, sometimes even a long letter... then I return and fall back upon myself and feel so lonely that it's difficult to describe. The worst part is when the companionship and the theological theodicy to it all, can at best only accentuate how lonesome you're, in the company of the other. Everything blurs, disappears, loses form.... like myself. I expect with dread the next time, being so completely sure of my error, so convinced of it that the time is no longer important, it is like death... the most delightful of all expectations. But when it comes, I can never speak, I can at best tell a story and hope that I'll be understood, even if a little bit... and if that bit is enough, I can already leave.
The flights of the imagination cannot contain my exasperating silence, the abyss before me unfolding in the shape of encounters, in the shape of togetherness my mind feels ill-headed toward a dark alley that has become the only refugee, the shelter not from reality but of reality. I keep weaving my thread from one chance to the next, as though I weren't made for higher enterprises... but before the thick mist of geniality and God-questioning humour hides a certain longing that infringes me with questions asked by children, with a cunning desire almost revealing of a different logic, a passage of antinomies at the end of which I still can't gather myself on my own, so that I cite myself, repeat, spit, re-tell... as to discover some essence behind those frail curtains of daylight. I'm not becoming, simply awakening... everyday, to this newfound bitterness that slows the time to the point of turning into lullabies of formerly known creatureliness. I'm unable to speak, even about my own. Behind all the masks a certain voice showers me, it is identical with none of the acts but undoubtedly can be idenfitied with all of them.
Perhaps she's right after all, I'm wasting all my vital energy in one port... out of which I can only sink, but it is not altogether bad because I might sink in the togetherness of the world, of duality, of antinomy, of deflection, of un-pastness, of a shared obscurity... but even this is not for sure. My expectations about the world as are futile as my relentless trust in it, so that every negation is a deliberate channel of belief, the desire to undo the broken chain and fade away. But this disappearance is not at all objectable, while at the same time it remains impossible... because the overarching presence of those shadows glitters through the broad day light in order to remind me of myself, of that self I have ceased to trust for so long, indulging in simpler calculations that despite my good intentions always end with the same lack of interest, the same lack of remembrance, that skillful but murderous immanence of the mirror, the inescapable rationale of unreligiosity, of doubt, of uncomfort.
Maybe my luck will change another time, when I step out of myself... when I cease from this givenness, from this melody, from these sensibilities... but something tells me I rather be undone with everything than forfeiting the gifts of outsiderness, of melancholy, of thinking... but the thinking can no longer be set apart from the endless nights craving for the same distant object, from the letters I write, from the speculative jealousy, from the frustrated un-desire of the morning. I want to be so far away from it, I want to betray, to falsify... but this is impossible in theology, certainly in a theology that only has two elements, both loosen and forlorn. Both elements are free, and therefore, nauseating... sickly, nightly... unimportant without their context. These days will wane away one day, I don't know when, and it'll be perhaps the loss of the most beautiful broken mornings of my whole life, I want to look at it as necessary, albeit I'm unable to. Perhaps I'll quit before they end, but I know it's just too late, I can't. I'm in foul and I know it, no longer playing with fire but burning under it with the most resignated look in my face, I've given all what can be given, nothing was demanded... this isn't a surrender statement, rather an embracing to my failure. Some days my imagination runs free, even more than life.... I dream with those conversations, but eventually I end up being monological until a surprise comes from heaven, and the absolute joy they stir in me is only a knowing sign of my most absolute unhappiness and recognition of the impossibility, already a miscognition.
The silence breaks the walls, they fall upon me but I don't die. I mumble to myself, yellower than hay, trying to find that Western star, but it is more elusive than what I would like to say, because our age has stripped my message off any possible connotation. It can at best make a good phone conversation, half an hour in a cafe, sometimes even a long letter... then I return and fall back upon myself and feel so lonely that it's difficult to describe. The worst part is when the companionship and the theological theodicy to it all, can at best only accentuate how lonesome you're, in the company of the other. Everything blurs, disappears, loses form.... like myself. I expect with dread the next time, being so completely sure of my error, so convinced of it that the time is no longer important, it is like death... the most delightful of all expectations. But when it comes, I can never speak, I can at best tell a story and hope that I'll be understood, even if a little bit... and if that bit is enough, I can already leave.
Tuesday, May 01, 2007
Manfred Henningsen's response to my letter to Ben-David
Dear Ari:
I forgot to answer a question concerning Taubes. You are right about his troubled life, though I don't think it was troubled in the normal sense of the word. One authentic voice was his wife, Susan Taubes, who actually published in 1970 a Schluesselroman about him. When it got a bad review in the New York Times, she committed suicide. The novel presents the portrait of an egomaniacal intellectual who is focused on nothing but the promotion of his own reputation. There was something to this image, though there were also a lot of envious people who couldn't stand his brilliance. I liked him personally, even if there was one detail about him, which I couldn't figure out. Taubes was the son of a Zurich rabbi but had also very close relations with a prominent conservative, if not right-wing, intellectual in Munich, Armin Mohler (I mention him in the introduction to the Hitler lectures). Mohler was a Swiss volunteer to the SS who, after being rejected for service for health reasons, received >from the SS a scholarship to study art. He became after the war the private secretary of Ernst Juenger and, then, Carl Schmitt, and finally for many years the leader of the Siemens-Stiftung in Munich. I couldn't stand that man and attacked him frequently. He once called me in an article a "Nationalmasochist". I never understood why Taubes always insisted on meeting him when he was in Munich.
I found your letter in response to the review of the Arendt book terrific. This is the Arendt I experienced many times in the 1960s in public discussions in Munich. It is the Arendt that comes across in Young-Bruehl's biography and, especially, in the correspondence with Karl Jaspers, one of the most exciting books I have read. Your treatment of her German background is exactly right.
I have written about that in a piece that I gave as a paper in Florence in 1997, " Politics and Catastrophe: Why is the World so obsessed with German History?" (in: Witoszek/Traegaardh, eds., Culture and Crisis. The Case of Germany and Sweden, New York:Berghahn 2002). One of these days I will have to come back to this theme. I have partly dealt with it in a paper on "The Varieties of Memory: Germany and the Rest of the World", which will be published this year.
In March of this year I was invited by the Juedisches Museum in Berlin to give a talk about Darfur. They knew about my interest in the Anti-African racism in German philosophy and my critical arguments about the uniqueness thesis concerning the Holocaust. German intellectuals have completely accepted that thesis and they become very agitated when one confronts them with the consequence of its internalization, namely the inability and unwillingness to see comparable, not identical, scenarios of terror in front of their eyes. When I raised that issue in my keynote talk I encountered some sounds of shocked disbelief in the audience. The director of the Museum, Michael Blumenthal, was not shoscked.
Well, I hope you are not shocked.
All the best,
Manfred Henningsen
P.S. By the way, I asked Miguel Vatter whether he got his PhD at the New School, and he confirmed it. He is an interesting and very lively character who speaks at least 5 languages fluently: Italian, Spanish, German, English and French.
Manfred Henningsen
I forgot to answer a question concerning Taubes. You are right about his troubled life, though I don't think it was troubled in the normal sense of the word. One authentic voice was his wife, Susan Taubes, who actually published in 1970 a Schluesselroman about him. When it got a bad review in the New York Times, she committed suicide. The novel presents the portrait of an egomaniacal intellectual who is focused on nothing but the promotion of his own reputation. There was something to this image, though there were also a lot of envious people who couldn't stand his brilliance. I liked him personally, even if there was one detail about him, which I couldn't figure out. Taubes was the son of a Zurich rabbi but had also very close relations with a prominent conservative, if not right-wing, intellectual in Munich, Armin Mohler (I mention him in the introduction to the Hitler lectures). Mohler was a Swiss volunteer to the SS who, after being rejected for service for health reasons, received >from the SS a scholarship to study art. He became after the war the private secretary of Ernst Juenger and, then, Carl Schmitt, and finally for many years the leader of the Siemens-Stiftung in Munich. I couldn't stand that man and attacked him frequently. He once called me in an article a "Nationalmasochist". I never understood why Taubes always insisted on meeting him when he was in Munich.
I found your letter in response to the review of the Arendt book terrific. This is the Arendt I experienced many times in the 1960s in public discussions in Munich. It is the Arendt that comes across in Young-Bruehl's biography and, especially, in the correspondence with Karl Jaspers, one of the most exciting books I have read. Your treatment of her German background is exactly right.
I have written about that in a piece that I gave as a paper in Florence in 1997, " Politics and Catastrophe: Why is the World so obsessed with German History?" (in: Witoszek/Traegaardh, eds., Culture and Crisis. The Case of Germany and Sweden, New York:Berghahn 2002). One of these days I will have to come back to this theme. I have partly dealt with it in a paper on "The Varieties of Memory: Germany and the Rest of the World", which will be published this year.
In March of this year I was invited by the Juedisches Museum in Berlin to give a talk about Darfur. They knew about my interest in the Anti-African racism in German philosophy and my critical arguments about the uniqueness thesis concerning the Holocaust. German intellectuals have completely accepted that thesis and they become very agitated when one confronts them with the consequence of its internalization, namely the inability and unwillingness to see comparable, not identical, scenarios of terror in front of their eyes. When I raised that issue in my keynote talk I encountered some sounds of shocked disbelief in the audience. The director of the Museum, Michael Blumenthal, was not shoscked.
Well, I hope you are not shocked.
All the best,
Manfred Henningsen
P.S. By the way, I asked Miguel Vatter whether he got his PhD at the New School, and he confirmed it. He is an interesting and very lively character who speaks at least 5 languages fluently: Italian, Spanish, German, English and French.
Manfred Henningsen
Sunday, April 29, 2007
Christian Love?
The following invitation was sent to me by a 'friend of Israel'
Have You Ever Wondered…
For Answers, Come To…
A multi-media presentation by André Villeneuve
Where? Rama 18 (Nachlaot)
Have You Ever Wondered…
How is the life of Messiah reflected in the history of the Jewish people?
Is there a connection between the conflict in the
How should Christians relate to
How will Israel and the Church one day be united?
For Answers, Come To…
The Final Marriage
The Dramatic Love Story of
Israel
The Final Marriage
The Dramatic Love Story of
A multi-media presentation by André Villeneuve
Where? Rama 18 (Nachlaot)
(off Shilo st, near the shuk)
When? Thursday, May 10, 2007, 7:00 PM
For more info, call 0547-261439 or write to andreville@juno.com
Response of Mr. Ben-David to my letter
Ari:
Thanks for you very thoughtful (and thorough!) response. I think I make it clear in my review the high regard in which I hold some of Arendt’s work, although we clearly disagree when it comes to her role as a specifically Jewish thinker.
I referred to The Origins of Totalitarianism as a work of political philosophy only in the broadest sense; it is indeed a difficult work to define (not quite history, not quite theory), and I’m not sure you have done so any better than me.
The reference to Chaplin as “Jewish” is meant in the same sense that Arendt uses in her essay on the Jew as pariah, not obviously in the literal sense (actually though, Chaplin clearly wasn’t a halachic Jew, his Jewish familial connections are still a matter of dispute).
Re: “It is entirely mistaken to assert that she lost all interest in what you term 'parochial Jewish affairs'; it is worthwhile remembering her involvement in the Committee for Jewish Cultural Reconstruction in Germany from the 1950's until her death, and her undeniable role as a 'Jew' during her public life in Germany.”
I only wrote that it “appeared” she lost interest in parochial Jewish affairs during the 1950s, because she published no work relating to it during that period.
Finally, re your remark that “Once the 19th century nationalism narrative ceased to have enough strength to be a secular political theology, there was nothing left in this country to be named a stronghold... ”; I think your report of the death of the “nationalism narrative” is exaggerated. Plenty of people still believe in it as a secular political theology, both here and elsewhere – not least the Palestinians and supporters of Palestinian statehood!
All the best,
Calev Ben-David
Saturday, April 28, 2007
Sandra's remarks on my letter to Ben-David
Lieber Ari,
ich möchte Dir zu Deiner sehr scharfsinnigen und richtigen Antwort an Herrn Ben-David gratulieren. Natürlich, ich tue das von "außen", also ohne das "Jüdischsein" selbst erfahren zu haben. Aber Deine Argumentation inkl. der Hinweise auf Arendts Engagement für die jüdische Kultur ab den 50er Jahren scheint mir ungemein überzeugend. Auch: die Liebe muss eine andere sein als die Vaterlands-Liebe. Dass Israel diese andere, soz. "offene" Liebe braucht, um bestehen zu können, hast Du sehr klar gezeigt. Mir scheint das ein überaus entscheidender Punkt hinsichtlich der Zukunft des israelischen Staates.
Wird Ben-David das verstehen? Da habe ich Zweifel. Zu offensichtlich hält er sich an die Kalküle der Identität. An ihnen gemessen ist der Pariah-Status fast wünschenswert. Es geht hier übrigens wohl um ein anderes Pariahtum als das klassische, das Zugehörigkeit ohne Anerkennung bedeutet. Das übersieht auch Ben-David: der Pariah vom Typ Arendts (= die/der intellektuelle Pariah) erkennt selbst nicht an, er verweigert sich der Logik der Zugehörigkeit. Daher stört er, aber ohne Verachtung auf sich ziehen zu können, er stört aus einer starken Position.
Ich hoffe, Du kriegst eine Antwort von Ben-David. Wenn ja, schick sie mir bitte. Ich würde eure Diskussion gerne weiter verfolgen - so sie denn entsteht.
Herzlich,
Sandra
ich möchte Dir zu Deiner sehr scharfsinnigen und richtigen Antwort an Herrn Ben-David gratulieren. Natürlich, ich tue das von "außen", also ohne das "Jüdischsein" selbst erfahren zu haben. Aber Deine Argumentation inkl. der Hinweise auf Arendts Engagement für die jüdische Kultur ab den 50er Jahren scheint mir ungemein überzeugend. Auch: die Liebe muss eine andere sein als die Vaterlands-Liebe. Dass Israel diese andere, soz. "offene" Liebe braucht, um bestehen zu können, hast Du sehr klar gezeigt. Mir scheint das ein überaus entscheidender Punkt hinsichtlich der Zukunft des israelischen Staates.
Wird Ben-David das verstehen? Da habe ich Zweifel. Zu offensichtlich hält er sich an die Kalküle der Identität. An ihnen gemessen ist der Pariah-Status fast wünschenswert. Es geht hier übrigens wohl um ein anderes Pariahtum als das klassische, das Zugehörigkeit ohne Anerkennung bedeutet. Das übersieht auch Ben-David: der Pariah vom Typ Arendts (= die/der intellektuelle Pariah) erkennt selbst nicht an, er verweigert sich der Logik der Zugehörigkeit. Daher stört er, aber ohne Verachtung auf sich ziehen zu können, er stört aus einer starken Position.
Ich hoffe, Du kriegst eine Antwort von Ben-David. Wenn ja, schick sie mir bitte. Ich würde eure Diskussion gerne weiter verfolgen - so sie denn entsteht.
Herzlich,
Sandra
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