Mark Payne

On Being Vatic: Pindar, Pragmatism, and Historicism

In this paper I argue that the large truth claims made in Pindars gnomic language have a correspondingly large cultural function since they instantiate the capacity for unprecedented conceptual invention within a culture that lacks any master discourse in which its own self-understanding is embedded. I discuss the famous Nomos basileus fragment and its handling by Callicles in Platos Gorgias, and by Hölderlin in his Pindar Fragments. I argue that, by using Pindars claim as a starting point for reflections of their own, these thinkers recognize its contingency, and future orientation, as vatic speech.

Ideas in Lyric Communication: Pindar and Paul Celan

ç 2008 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0026-8232/2008/10501-0001

Michael Eskin, Poetic Affairs: Celan, Grünbein, Brodsky

10.00 On March 22, 1962, Paul Celan wrote to René Char: “We remember your first visit, René Char, we remember the words you wrote in your book. The grasses arise. The heart of the Second Olympian is in them, as is its bow.” 1 Celan was in the midst of what has come to be known as the “Goll affair”; he had been accused of plagiarizing her late husband’s work by the widow of Yvan Goll, and his letter to Char is not a justification or explanation of his position vis-à-vis any particular poems of his own, but a gesture of solidarity that invokes the ineradicable presence of the poet in his own poems: “Poetry, as you well know, does not exist without the poet, without his person—without the self.” He counsels Char to beware of those who would ape him, for genuine understanding takes the form not of imitation but of response: “As for that which in your work would not open to my understanding—or not yet anyway— I have responded with respect and waiting: one can never pretend to grasp entirely—that would be lack of respect towards the Unknown which inhabits—or comes to inhabit—the poet.” He ends the letter (which was never sent) by recalling Char’s first visit to his house and the dedication that Char had written in the copy of A la santé du serpent that he had presented to Char and his wife at this time: “For Gisèle and for Paul Celan in trusting friendship and through the grasses which bend then arise again happy.” Celan’s letter recalls the bending grasses of Char’s dedication, but it is Celan who adds the reference to Pindar’s Second Olympian . What

Theocritus and the Invention of Fiction

Michael Eskin’s study of Paul Celan, Dors Grünbein, and Joseph Brodsky is a bold experiment in biographical criticism. Eskin identifies real-life events in the lives of each of these poets that, he argues, are ‘‘literary facts’’ for readers of their work: external realities to which we look in order to understand their poems as forms of fidelity to existential commitments. It is only by studying life and work together, Eskin suggests, that we can properly appreciate the fashioning of ethical subjectivity that goes on in their poems, and so grasp how lyric poetry is emblematic of ethical agency as such. Eskin acknowledges that the life events he views as ‘‘literary facts’’ are ‘‘not biographically homologous’’ (5); the accusation of plagiarism leveled at Celan by the wife of Ivan Goll was an act of unexpected malice that befell the poet against his will, whereas the traumatic obsession with the artist Marianna Basmanova that lay at the heart of ‘‘the Brodsky affair’’ involved a love object of the poet’s choosing. And Dors Grünbein’s use of Seneca’s exile to the island of Corsica, following accusations of sexual misconduct with the niece of Emperor Claudius, as a means to investigate his own feelings about present-day Germany, belongs to a different order of self-fashioning altogether. As a result, Eskin must look to very different kinds of poetic invention to substantiate his overarching claim that the blurring of the line between life and art has ‘‘poetological significance’’ (2) for our understanding of lyric poetry as an ethical practice. In chapter 2, Eskin argues that Celan’s translations of Shakespeare’s sonnets best allow us to gauge his response to the Goll affair. The claim rests on a suggestion about the temporality of trauma—Celan’s work of