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Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Selected Poems,
translated by HM Enzensberger and
Michael Hamburger
Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1994

Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Kiosk
translated by Michael Hamburger with
additional translations by HM Enzensberger
Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1997

The Doctrine of Agility: On HM Enzensberger’s English Poems

There is something faintly ridiculous about endeavouring to review
Enzensberger. It is not just that his more than 40-year career has an
exemplary trajectory; nor that so many critics have already had their say; but that his work is too diverse – each project a new departure – to admit of generalisation. One is also uncomfortably aware that the author himself has always mistrusted interpretation: his 1955 investigation into that key proto-modernist Clemens Brentano repeatedly accentuates ‘mystery’ and ‘inexhaustibility’; and in the introduction to the Museum of Modern Poetry (1960), a consciously postmodern attempt to taxonomise what he felt to be the already distant modernist phase (1910-45), we come up against a warning against all ‘isms’, an insistence on the inherent obscurity of all poetic utterance, and the following stern verdict ‘The poem always proves right vis-à-vis its interpreters.’ All the same, there are currently two reasons why one should not evade the challenge of coming to some sort of terms with Enzensberger’s oeuvre: the author celebrated his 70th birthday some seven weeks before the end of the last century, and a genuinely representative selection of his poems is at last available in English.

     I
There can be little doubt that Enzensberger is best known for his political work, both in poetic and essay form. As he has acknowledged, this was biologically inevitable, a product of the ‘awareness of catastrophe’ which comes of being 15 in 1945. Such an awareness dictates his resolve to remember the dismembered past (one of his most haunting poems, dedicated to Nelly Sachs, is called Those who have vanished), and to seek – surrounded by what he perceived to be a conspiracy of silence – to prevent ‘the Final Solution of tomorrow’ (1) It also explains why he continues to believe in the ‘necessity’ (pragmatically lower-case rather than blindly Hegelian) of the ‘political awakening’ which made the FRG
‘inhabitable’ in the Sixties (Die Zeit, 20.1.1995). Enzensberger has
repeatedly advocated the necessity of change, of ‘getting history moving’, as he put it in a 1969 interview with a Cuban magazine (2)What he does not mention is how necessary he himself has been for Germany: his first collection came out in the year (1957) in which Adenauer won an election with the slogan ‘No experiments’, and his work – in both thematic and formal terms – has been one long refusal to accept such negative authority.

On the level of lifestyle, he was arguably the first ‘cool’ German: titles like Call it love (1957), or the way he systematically threw in such irreverent interpolations as ‘warum nicht’ (‘why not’) and ‘meinetwegen’ (‘for all I care’) to wrongfoot readers with Prussian monocles, helped to define an alternative republic. On the level of political awareness, he was Germany’s only discernible ‘angry young man’, or rather the only poet who still seemed to be cognizant of Juvenal’s dictum Si natura negat, facit indignatio versum. Even though he emerged with a whole panoply of voices, it was undoubtedly the satiric decibels which made the Fifties turn in their centrally-heated grave: ‘here let us build tabernacles,/on this Aryan dump of scrap [. . .] this is the frozen-up waste,/this is successful madness, this dances/in needy mink, on broken knees,/in amnesia’s eternal springtime’(Language of the Country). Typically, it is not from some remote romantic perspective that Enzensberger attacked
the all-too-free market economics of the time. His philippics presuppose intimate knowledge of the economic base: ‘Where a profit margin away from the poor rich the rich poor/smash their cinema seats for sheer joy’ an early tirade runs, and the way he forcibly yokes together ‘Qui la sua voce soave’, ‘Zu Befehl’ and ‘LIBOR’ in a 1991 poem shows that he has never tired of unravelling the complicated dialectic of capitalism. Even Pound’s (or rather Bunting’s) famous false etymology DICHTEN = CONDENSARE is mercilessly dragged down into the marketplace in Telegram Counter 12.12 am: ‘messenger paid, all that’s valid here is/the hard poetics of binding charges:/condensare! On the soiled wall/Keep it brief Death, squandered heart,/Keep it brief, use plain text please:/mi dulce amor’(1957).

So what is Enzensberger’s exact political position? This is a question
which has exercised people, not only in Germany, for decades. He has certainly employed Marxist techniques of analysis, but his eminently practical streak precludes any millenarian illusions: ’Shortly before the millenium dawns,/they’re boiling nappies’(On the Problems of Reeducation). Not least through his editorship of Kursbuch (1965-), he was effectively the godfather of the student revolution, the obvious exponent of Willy Brandt’s imperative ‘Dare more democracy’, but the 1965-66 altercation with Peter Weiß demonstates that, for Enzensberger, ‘positions’ are provocative makeshifts to be abandoned when they have served their purpose or proved to be wrong-headed. Experience, etymologically related to experiment, is the biggest abstraction he is prepared to countenance, and there are abundant signs that he has little time for theories, whether Platonic or poststructuralist (3) Maybe this is because he has such a sharp eye for contradictions, less in a Marxist than in a strictly ocular sense: ‘[. . .] if you are walking in a demonstration through Neukölln, for example, and someone calls out ‘A socialist West Berlin!’, as people did in those days, and you see the women up at the windows looking down, leaning on cushions and not believing their ears, then – if you’ve not lost all your marbles – you will have an arrière-pensée, in other words it will dawn on you that there must be a further thought behind the thought being expressed by the demonstration. There is, after all, an arrière-pensée behind every thought, and it is often the more interesting of the two’(Die Zeit, 20.1.1995).

Over and above his commitment to the progress of democracy in
Germany and further afield, it is this unerring sense of detail which
makes Enzensberger’s political poems distinctive. In the Old Days, a 1980 text which gives short shrift to the nostalgic expectations set up by the title, contains the highly concrete confession: ’In the age of fascism/I’d no idea I was/living in the age of fascism./The place was teeming with piano-teachers.’ A more monumental instance is Karl Heinrich Marx, whose purpose is intimated by the inclusion of the unfamiliar second given name: five compulsively symmetrical stanzas bring out the facticity underlying a legend. Enzensberger works with the evidence of brown daguerrotypes and fading letters to reconstruct the shabby dialect of matter, including a dejected excerpt from a letter to Engels of February 1866 on Das Kapital (‘economic shit’), which lies behind the dialectical materialism. At a time (1964) when Marxism elicited blind faith in many quarters, Enzensberger’s sarcastically sympathetic study flies in the face of political correctness by relying exclusively on the evidence of the eyes: the pillars holding up this poem are the six applications of ‘I see . . .’ (4) The last stanza reads:

[. . .] Gigantic zaddik
I see you betrayed
by your disciples:
only your enemies
remained what they were:
I see your face
on the last picture
of April eighty-two:
an iron mask:
the iron mask of freedom

The moribund Marx as a kind of philosophical descendant of the Man in the Iron Mask? One is free to deploy rhetorical terms, starting with paradox or oxymoron, to try to come to grips with that final image; but its jagged complexity refuses to be glossed over, and can stick in the memory for a quarter of a century or more like a distorted question mark.

Another reason why Enzensberger’s political texts have the impact
they do may be connected with the fact that a consistent standpoint is impossible to identify. At times one fancies one hears the well-starched tones of the political scientist: ‘There’s only a difference of degree/ between murderers and victims’ (Didactic Poem on Murder). At others one stumbles across a cynic pointing a cosmopolitan lamp at the murk: ‘False consciousness, say the philosophers./If only that was all that was wrong [. . .]’(What is false). But often there is a kind of spin which seems to owe most to Jarry’s pataphysics or to Dada: ‘Even our sighs/went on credit cards’(Short History of the Bourgeoisie). Or maybe even to Monty Python, as in the following dig at the Leviathan State, written at a time when Old Labour was in office in the UK: ‘Man’s struggle against man,/ according to reliable sources/close to the Home Office,/will be nationalised in due course,/down to the last bloodstain./Kind regards from Thomas Hobbes’(Cold Comfort). The austere, Dantesque Purgatorio (1964) is made more disquieting by the surreal changes rung on the disembodied refrain: ‘Will [st.1 Herr Albert Schweitzer; st.2 Herr Adolf Eichmann; st.3 Monsieur Godot]/ please go to Transit Information’. Genre specialists can debate whether this is in fact surreal, grotesque, or whatever, but the effect is not lost on the lecteur moyen sensuel because of its very resistance to pigeon-holing; it is an instance of ‘the resistance of the specific and concrete’ which Enzensberger values (5) The point is that one never knows where one is with this author: as in the case of an underground fighter, ‘personal style’ of the kind which turns the ‘property’ of a writer’s early work into the ‘symbol’ of his later work (6) is a liability, and surprise the ultimate weapon. One rhetorical device which he uses like a hand-grenade on a whole host of occasions is the asyndeton, as in the last three lines of the third stanza of Old Revolution (1991), a poem in which Cuba functions as an allegory of the process first diagnosed in the 1974 essay On the Ageing of the Revolution:

[. . .] A sleepwalker in front of ten microphones
is preaching to his tired island:
After me nothing will follow.
It is finished.
The machine-guns glisten with oil.
The shirts are sticky with cane-juice.
The prostate has had it. [. . .]

One of Enzensberger’s most uncanny talents is his ability to catch the
spirit of a particular historical moment in a handful of lines or a single
image. An example which springs to mind is Memory (the German title Andenken appears to allude to Hölderlin’s elevated late meditation on love and heroic deeds): ‘Well, as far as the 70s go,/I can be brief./ ‘Enquiries’ was engaged the whole time./The feeding of the five thousand/took place in the Düsseldorf region only.’ Another example from the same collection, At Thirty-Three, the psychogram of a disillusioned Trotskyist, may well come to be the last word on the depressed Seventies: ‘When she weeps she looks like nineteen’(1980). He crystallises the post-prandial melancholy of the Economic Miracle in a single barbarously objectless sentence in Middle Class Blues: ‘We have nothing to conceal./We have nothing to miss./We have nothing to say./ We have.’ And the gist of Glucksmann’s polemic Les maîtres penseurs seems to be foreshadowed in nineteen scarily infantile words uttered by a chorus of Philosophy Department members in The Sinking of the Titanic: ‘Hegel is smiling,/filled with schadenfreude. We daub his face/with an inky moustache. He now looks like Stalin’(Dept. of Philosophy).

There is no way either that the homo politicus retreats into the background in the later work (one reviewer resorted to a slick play on prefixes in 1989 – ‘aufgeklärt’/‘abgeklärt’ –to insinuate that Enzensberger had abandoned the via activa in favour of the via contemplativa). If he writes that the headache of the subject in The Employee (1980) is ‘unpolitical’, the context makes it clear that this is far from approbation. And the opening section of the most recent collection, Kiosk, bristles with politics. Privileged Instructions, for instance, appears – inter alia – to be responding to the right-wing attacks on asylum-seekers’ hostels in the early Nineties: ‘It is forbidden to set fire to persons./It is forbidden to set fire to persons in possession of a valid residence permit [. . .]’. Although every two steps forward entail at least one lurch backwards, progress is not something Enzensberger ever appears to be indifferent about for long. His shot-up metaphors betray as much: ‘. . . in the bomb craters of progress’(The Frogs of Bikini). If one did require an abstract statement of his political position, one would probably have to be content with the following dialectical, not to say Heraclitean utterance: ‘Short-term hopes are futile, long-term resignation is suicidal’(Kursbuch 11, 1968,169).

What other aspects are there to his achievement? For one thing, he is a kind of phenomenologist of what – in a 1988 essay – he calls the ‘average exoticism’ of contemporary life. A random example is Asphodels (1995), which casually reflects (‘Funny . . .’) about a gnostic on the fourth floor who is still awake, knocking incessantly on a heating pipe in an unidentified tenement block in an unidentified city where it is beginning to snow, where no shoe-laces are to be had, and where the machine-gun fire in the banking district has subsided; then comes an outlandish peripetia which reveals a perspective only superficially reminiscent of WC Williams: ‘But in the fridge there are/a couple of asphodels,/just in case.’ In this mood or mode, Enzensberger (like Lautréamont before him) seems exclusively interested in the adventitious conjunction of disiecta membra, but the title quietly insists that there is an intenser, symbolic charge: asphodels, it dawns on one at some point, are flowers that bloom eternally in the fields of the dead (cf Odyssey XI, 538ff). There is more involvement than meets the eye in other of Enzensberger’s anatomies too: whether of the infantile suicides circling the wet square on their howling Hondas in some unnamed German neighbourhood (Residual Light); the ecstasies in the no-stopping zone in Munich (Leopoldstraße); the new dawn, rosy-fingered because of the agonistic interplay of gases, in Berlin just after the wall came down (‘Throngs of pilgrims/in the pedestrian precinct,/searching for identity/and tropical fruit’; The New Dawn); or indeed of the ‘Nirvanas at prices to suit every pocket’ (Some Advantages of Civilisation). This is because the speaker’s characteristic distance is essentially strategic: ‘I talk about what is to be said, what is a ‘burning issue’, as though it were any old thing which didn’t concern me.’(7) It is a strategy which can make his poems sound Martian avant la lettre: the man who wrote ‘and they build you boxes/in which you drive, live, die’ in 1991, described lichen in the following terms nearly thirty years before: ‘It is the earth’s/slowest telegram,/a telegram that never arrives’ (Lichenology). And it certainly allows him to
look dispassionately through the eyes of such heterogeneous things as the chattering classes with their sanctimonious bad faith (Song for those who Know), the ‘ancient owls of the earth’ (The End of the Owls), and the apparatus in a bathroom staring coldly at twentieth-century anthropos: ‘Suicide too/doesn’t cause the porcelain/to frown’ (Bathroom). Whether he is drawing on the Simultanstil of the Expressionists or the synoptic style of the later Benn, it is patently one of Enzensberger’s aims to provide an unflustered and – as it were – classical chronicle of the eminently unclassical Reizüberflutung (‘deluge of stimuli’) of modern life:

The reasons for the massacre must be looked for in the 13th century.
That’s what I read this morning at breakfast.

That bees are not deaf but hear with their antennae,
was made known in Stanford, California.

Neckties are now worn again a little wider;
this was proved

Time is not a parameter but an operator,
my friend the philosopher confided to me.

Information learnt on a single Tuesday [. . .]

Which is not to say that the sudden sharp swerve in the middle of thisparticular poem (An Encounter of the Other Kind) does not bring us out onto a very different road – the information in question is recited to the neighbour’s cat, and two alien metaphysics ‘graze’ one another while they share a kipper. Such ‘unmotivated’ swerves are typical of a writer who has never been a friend of consistency, at least not for its own sake, as his 1981 essay Goodbye to Single-Mindedness makes plain. Readers are advised to fasten their seat-belts before setting out on a ride in one of these verbal machines.

So far, the emphasis has fallen on Enzensberger’s role as a critical
analyst and annalist. But if he is a satirist, he is also (in George Steiner’s phrase) a friend. His Demosthenesian anger often obscures the fact that he is unsparing of praise where praise is warranted, even though panegyrics such as St John Perse’s Eloges and Rilke’s Sonette an Orpheus have been a rarity in the 20th century (8) This is not merely a formal feat: although it might make academic sense to argue that the ‘friendly poems’ which open his début collection (experiments with pastoral styles in the tradition of Theocritus, Huchel, Eich, and others) are merely an idyllic foil for the ‘sad’ and ‘angry’ sections that follow, there is an incontestably warm – which is not to say uncool – tone in a great many of this poet’s texts. Not least when he is speaking up for unsung phenomena, such as the ‘mysterious/and commonplace’ comb which adorns a commonplace, mysterious woman (The Comb):

[. . .] Blazing tortoiseshell. True enough, it too
lacks a few teeth. Oh, admire –
anyone can say that. – Forgive me,
I mean only that which nobody needs,
that about you which makes no impression at all [. . .]

Or stupidity, ‘you the often maligned, who in your slyness/often
pretend to be stupider than you are, protector of all the frail,//only to
the elect do you grant the rarest of your gifts,/the blessed simplicity of the simple’(Ode to Stupidity). Or survivors, like the hare incarcerated in a deserted data-processing centre in a 1991 poem (‘Soft coward,/ fifty million years/ older than we are!’), which hobbles past man ‘into a future/rich in enemies/but nourishing and rank/like dandelion’(A Hare in the Data Processing Centre). It may be typical of Enzensberger’s complexity that he should filter an almost Leibnizian vision of a future of unlimited opportunities through the large eyes of a hare, but it is also typical that he should look beyond man’s self-inflicted nihilism and detect something which seems to vindicate Celan’s legacy: ‘there are/ still songs to be sung on the other side/of mankind.’(9) Like his main translator Michael Hamburger, Enzensberger is himself a survivor. And ultimately it is perhaps in such biographical terms that one must read his guarded refusal to give up on experience: ‘There are bits of landscape
left/if you look for them . . .’(Residual Light). Or his defence of the
syllable ‘schön’: ‘trampled underfoot in the evening,/beauty rises bright and early,/new and sturdy, a fearless witness’(Why I say ‘schön’). Or his declaration that lyric poetry is as indestructible – if superfluous – as weeds growing by the wayside (FAZ, 14.3.1989). Indeed, the close of the poem Old Couples (1991) sounds almost like a programme: ‘There is much to be seen/when the lights go out’. Enzensberger knows more than many writers about darkness, but one senses that he finds something hopelessly inappropriate – whether incongruous or downright ungrateful – about grand abstractions like le Néant. It is a rather less valetudinarian descendant of Chamfort who declares: ‘As long as someone has not
cancelled his standing orders at the bank, he shouldn’t talk to me about Resignation’(Die Zeit, 20.1.1995). He has also gone out of his way – it should be noted – to eulogise such actively calumniated phenomena as excrement: ‘Soft by nature,/non-violent in character,/it is most likely, of all man’s works,/ the most peaceable’ (Shit). Or the anal sphincter, whose functioning is appreciated in terms of Psalm 90: ’And lastly the sphincter,/it often occurs to him, doing its work/without any hitches, by reason of strength/for four times four times five long years’ (Admiration). It would certainly be hard to accuse this man of onesidedness.(10)

If Enzensberger is at times unrepentantly scatalogical, he has also
engaged point-blank with eschatological themes, scarely common
currency in post-war German poetry. In an early satire, God is a kind of Social Darwinist, made in the image of Fifties materialism (‘God/who eats like a dog on weekdays, gets eaten on Sunday’; Whimpering and Firmament). But quite a few poems written in the past two decades seem intent on mediating in a rather more supralunary sense between the fallen and the celestial. Grace begins: ‘Another of those foreign words, rarely to be heard/on the telephone. The exhausted vicar/with those syringes and condoms in his front garden/would be embarrassed to mention it.’ And Nimbus reclaims another word that has fallen into desuetude, finishing up with the speaker contemplating the haloes of saints in a church: ‘ungläubig’, the adverb employed here, is tantalisingly equivocal, implying both the inability to believe of an atheist and a believer’s admiring incredulity. The references to Mörike’s poem Denk es, o Seele (‘Remember, o soul’) can admittedly be construed as straight
memento mori (as in Persuasive Talk) or as entertaining whimsy (‘sole’ replaces ‘soul’ in All the Best). Yet it is not so easy to shrug off as secular the appearance of an angel, rarely sighted in German poetry since the days of George and Rilke. The angel in question actually invades the work-room of the ‘lyric I’ – a ‘rather commonplace angel,/presumably of lower rank’ – and endeavours to pick a quarrel by stressing the degree to which his obstinately silent vis-à-vis is dispensable: ‘Of the fifteen thousand hues of blue,/he said, each one makes more of a difference/ /than anything you may do/or refrain from doing,//not to mention the felspar/or the Great Magellanic Cloud [. . .]’(The Visit). But the real surprise resides in the ethereal manner in which the encounter is handled: the touch is so heavenly that the piece almost floats away. The discreet sarcasm meted out in the poem addressed directly to God, Addressee Unknown – Retour à l’expéditeur, consolingly recalls the Enzensberger we thought we knew; but he has moved on, writing at
least half of this epistle which will not arrive with a well-tempered
fervour that runs counter to the public doctrine more than one hundred years after Nietzsche’s proclamation of God’s death:

[. . .] Many thanks for the four seasons,
for the number e, for my dose of caffeine,
and, of course, for the strawberry dish
painted by Chardin [. . .]

A recent comment demonstrates the pragmatic openness of his position: ‘As to religion, it is I think – quite apart from belief or unbelief – an anthropological fact. Not apparently something which can be made to disappear! And it has an evolution all of its own. Why poets should turn a blind eye to that, I cannot see.’(11)

The predominantly religious poems in the last section of Kiosk are
gathered under the rubric In der Schwebe (In Suspense, as the official translation has it, but with overtones of ‘leaving things open’).
Accordingly, one looks in vain for indications of a dogmatic parti pris. The penultimate poem, with the mock-authoritative title Of Life After Death, sedulously recounts the way non-human life will run riot on earth after man’s disappearance, brutally revealing how little our delicate rococo conceits are a match for the dense Transcambodian jungle: ‘an extraordinarily sublime spectacle,/but far and wide there is no Piranesi/ to people this Angkor Wat/with shepherds and courtiers on horseback.’ On the other hand, the final text – although it is entitled The Entombment and starts by looking down at a corpse – has an unmistakable upward momentum: depending on one’s viewpoint, the mortal frame in question houses the psyche (psychologists), the soul (priests), the personality (personality managers), the anima, the imago, the Ego, Id and Super- Ego, and so on, and therefore ‘The butterfly which is to rise/from this very mixed lot/belongs to a species/about which nothing is known.’ Enzensberger would not be Enzensberger if he did not hedge his bets: ‘which is to rise’ is an impartial-sounding reference to the age-old belief in resurrection rather than a personal profession of faith, and the last words are customarily sceptical. Yet the reader (such is the effect of literature) is left with the indelible mental image of a symbolic butterfly rising – a polyvalent image which leaves open the question of whether lepidopterists have already got the whole of their subject taped.(12) It is as though miracles can happen if one keeps one’s eyes or mind open; Inconspicuous Miracle reflects on the odds stacked against a seventyyear-old man at a traffic light, who has survived:

[. . .] heavy barrage near Kursk, a stroke
in Mallorca, and yet a thousand times
that deadly roadway crossed
to buy milk – improbable,
let’s say: ten squared minus nineteen,
for him to have got through
as far as today,
stumbling, but with dry feet
on his long, long foot journey
across Lake Gennessaret, of which he knows
no more than his little dog.

Another anthropological fact which evidently fascinates this author
is thought processes – consciousness, and not least its limits. The poem Homage to Gödel, first collected in 1971, adapts the distinguished mathematician’s theorem to human systems: ‘You can investigate your own brain/by means of your own brain:/but not quite./Etc.’ And the vertigo brought on by thinking about the thinking which is going on behind the subject’s back is a recurrent motif. One recent meditation turns out, aptly enough, to be a circular argument concerning all things that put out twigs and branches, ‘not to be grasped,/too variously rich/ for this sparrow brain,/this fortuitous link/in an infinite series/which, behind the back/of the one who instead of thinking/is thought, puts out/its twigs and branches’ (Bifurcations). Richness and intractability to interpretation: this is Enzensberger’s slant on existence in general as on poetry and other particulars. His practical response to such impenetrability is to probe in a provisional spirit, armed only with the precision which also distinguishes his political poems. In Taxonomy someone out walking harangues a companion who cannot distinguish between a sedge and a sweet vernal grass or the fescue and the slender brome grass: ‘what do you mean by grass?’ On the Algebra of Feelings breaks through to the specific gravity of emotions – ‘embarrassment/ with its pervasive taste of lead’. The Frogs of Bikini extrapolates Spinoza’s equation ‘substantia sive natura sive Deus’ to suit our nuclear times: ‘Nn sive deus’. And it is strictly in character that Enzensberger should explode the cliché of ‘the blank page’ in the 1991 poem with that title: ‘What you’re holding now in your hand is almost white,/but not quite; there is no such thing as a pure white thing [. . .]’. He has proved again and again that scientific precision and lyrical intensity are not strange bedfellows: ‘Manuel García,/singing teacher by profession,/was the first (1855)/to see his own vocal chords/vibrate, in a mirror’ (What the Doctors Say). And it is this dry-eyed precision which makes it possible for even a variation on the ubi sunt topos to remain thoroughly composed:
‘What has happened to the bridoons,/the hames and the terrets?/
The cartwright has passed away./Only his name survives,/like an
insect congealed in amber,/in the telephone book’(Vanished Work). In Thundery Disturbances on Higher Ground (1991) Enzensberger comes uncharacteristically close to an explicit credo: ‘facts’, or rather ‘givens’ (‘Gegebenheiten’), even if unfathomable, are all that one needs. Apparently repudiating the Heidegger tradition, his narrator professes: ‘I bathe in a storm/of uncertainty. Now that’s refreshing./One hardly can say that/ about the existence of That Which Exists.’

Enzensberger’s ‘cerebral’ precision does not militate against
sensuousness either: poems like Obsession and Fetish live up to their titles. And A Sort of Revelation (1995), which charts the chemical processes underlying someone’s reaction to a woman undressing, is briefly in the same league as Herrick and the Keats of The Eve of St Agnes before moving on to disarming expressions of gratitude and bafflement:

[. . .] Fleeting, not to be grasped,
a sudden gift,
a sign of returned love
that none of us deserves.

It passes understanding
what’s so sublime
about a woman’s bare backside.

He can also write love poetry of a kind that would be more intelligible to the troubadours, as in Pillow Poem (1991):

Given that you’re present right to your
fingertips, that you’re seized with desire,
and given the way you bend your knees
and show me your hair,
and given your temperature
and your darkness;
as well as your subordinate clauses,
the insubstantial weight of your elbows,
and also the material soul
that’s gleaming in the little hollow
up above your collar-bone;
given that you’ve gone
and come, and given all
the things that I don’t know about you,
my monosyllabic syllables
are not enough, or too much.

Since the Seventies in particular, a different Enzensberger has written
so many poems on one specific process – the artistic process as revealed in paintings – that new readers could be forgiven for thinking him a basically pictorial poet. For example, Gillis van Conninxloo, Landscape. Panel, 65 x 119cm explores the tension between the reality of life (‘Hagar repudiated,/Genesis 20,21,/an abominable divorce story’) and the reality of art (thanks to a pinch of powder dissolved in oil, ‘I see foaming/white lead, malachite, verdigris,/fresher than water.’). And the imaginary visit to Ingres’ atelier again yields admiration for the higher mimesis which art enables: ‘the flesh colour smooth/and narcotic, better than Kodak’(Visiting Ingres). Perspective is frequently a preoccupation, as in Enzensberger’s other work (‘Each one thinks/himself the centre./All but the painter’, as the poem on Uccello has it). And so too, as in Enzensberger’s writings on literature, is the pleasure principle: Last Supper. Venetian. Sixteenth Century delves into the delight the artist experiences even when carrying out commissions relating to endless Crucifixions, Deluges and Massacres of the Innocent.(13) While offering thoughtful recreations of both celebrated and obscure paintings, there is also a sense in which these pictorial poems contribute towards the ars poetica Enzensberger has never written.

Why has this poet always been so loth to make overt poetological
statements? Maybe because there is something ludicrous about them so far into what Hegel already dubbed the Age of Prose; the self-ironic ‘Enzensberger constant’ holds that books of poetry, no matter where they are published, have a readership of only /- 1,354 (FAZ, 14.3.1989). At any rate, when he talks about poetry in the abstract it is normally in terms of Tertullian’s paradox credo, quia absurdum. The Poem for people who don’t read poems (1960), which gave its name to the 1968 Secker and Warburg bilingual edition translated by Michael Hamburger, Jerome Rothenberg and Enzensberger himself, is about stubbornly scratching words into the sand for someone who – even though his liver too is being consumed by a reach-me-down Promethean eagle – will never get to decipher them. And although a more recent ad hoc definition of poetry
– ‘a way of speaking about things about which one cannot really speak’ (Die Zeit, 20.1.1995) – may at first sight seem reminiscent of Wittgenstein’s epistemological rigorism at the end of the Tractatus, it is surely informed by a survivor’s determination not to take no for an answer. As he replied to Adorno’s anathema to the effect that it is barbaric to write a poem after Auschwitz: ‘If we want to continue living, this sentence has got to be disproved’(Merkur, 1959, 772).

      II
Is there any common ground between these – and other – Enzensbergers? Quite a number of critics have had grave problems living with his ‘contradictions’ – with the alleged gap between the public and private poet or between the revolutionary and the artist, for example. Peter Demetz’s characterisation ‘Bucharin and Lord Byron’(14) is charmingly alliterative, but disregards the fact that Enzensberger (unlike Bucharin) did not need to break with Marx because he has always regarded Marxism as a means of social analysis rather than a means to a utopian end, and (unlike Byron) has never been sold on heroes, romantic or otherwise. Questing for contradictions may be a condign occupation in the ivory tower, but it is a simple fact that many major poets have contained multitudes: the ‘vituperative’ Horace of the Sermones and the ‘amiable’ Horace of the Epistolae are just different personae, adopted in the interests of different intentions or conventions. If one does require a common denominator for Enzensberger, it is maybe the 20:20 vision
which has habitually seen through ideological simplifications; as the
narrator in the distantly autobiographical text The Frogs of Bikini puts it: ‘His favourite drug, he maintains,/is alertness. The daily dose/of ideological cocaine/he’d just as well do without’.

The structural equivalent of such alertness is Enzensberger’s
predilection for montage. In an 1979 interview he observed that the
author’s head is invariably full of voices and echoes, that literature is
thus a collective enterprise, and that he is not interested in monologue but in the opportunity to work on a part-song basis, especially when dealing with historical processes.(15) An early example is Remote House (1964), which contains the strophe: “Caribbean crisis . . . washes whiter/ and whiter and whiter . . . troops ready to fly out . . . /phase three . . . that’s the way I love you . . . /amalgamated steel stocks are back to par . . .” Pasolini accordingly inferred that Enzensberger had taught professional historians a lesson and initiated a new type of historiography with his documentary novel The Brief Summer of Anarchy (1972). The obiter dictum in The Unhappy Ear (1991) – ‘Truth, a montage’ – is more than just a boutade.

If one needed an abstract term to epitomise his method, to the extent
that it is made manifest in his poems, it would probably be necessary to home in on his agility – his readiness to be surprised by history and to respond flexibly to whatever comes. This brings to mind Friedrich Schlegel’s definition of irony: a ‘clear awareness of perennial agility [ie, in terms of the intellect], and of infinitely full chaos [ie, plenitude of being]’. If Enzensberger’s poems need instructions for use, this definition of irony – rather than the romantic irony of Tieck, the cosmic irony of Hardy and Housman, or the knee-jerk stylistic irony of much recent British poetry(16) – might be a helpful thread to take hold of. Such agility implies a lightness which enables Enzensberger, like Heine before him, to land on his feet whatever the theme. Although his earlier work appeared when confessional poetry was near its apogee, there is a remarkable absence of subjective ‘turmoil’ (Robert Lowell: Eye and Tooth) in this writer. Probably the nearest he ever allows himself to come
to self-pity is the bitterly witty Sixties piece called Compensation, which numbly reflects on the opportunism of those who keep a close eye on the vacancies column while reading Adorno’s Negative Dialectics before concluding: ‘I’d imagine it was a strain/to be that two-eyed//At times I think, in all modesty,/I must be a cyclops//Then I let the telephone ring out/for days on end.’ Not for nothing does Enzensberger repeatedly return to acrobats – to acrobats, moreover, who are decidedly more debonair than the Schopenhauerian figures that people Rilke’s fifth Duino elegy. Bird’s Eye View opens: ‘Immune to dizziness/like an old roofer,/agile, not noticed much/by those who have their feet/on the ground of facts’, and Balancing Act speaks of the ‘gyrocompass’ deep inside the skull, without which it would not be possible to defy gravity. On reading and rereading these poems, one has to conclude that their author’s poise is such that he does not noticeably lose his balance in the course of nearly half a century of walking the poetic tightrope. One could speak of sprezzatura here, but if so it would need to be in Castiglione’s original sense: elegance as inner equilibrium.

     III
Agility is writ large in Enzensberger’s formal probings too. A critic has spoken of his ‘journalism poetry’ (PNR 123, 1998, 2), but this is only valid in an etymological, and hence tautological sense: ‘Where can we live but days?’, as Larkin once put it. True, there is no way that the artistry in his poems calls undue attention to itself. He is not the sort of poet (unlike, say, his near-contemporary Karl Krolow) who is most at home in manifestly virtuoso forms like the sonnet. His one formal (indeed fundamentally Petrarchan) sonnet, from 1991, has been savagely truncated: the acatalectic first and last lines seem to embody the poem’s obsessions – silence and transience – and certainly obviate the kind of declamatory quality which Pound believed had already crept into the Italian sonnet by 1300, ‘first because of its having all its lines the same length’ (ABC of Reading, p157). Enzensberger’s typical approach is to stretch existing forms, sometimes to the limit and beyond.

One case in point are his neniae from 1960, somewhere in the mocktragic tradition of Catullus (Lesbia’s dead sparrow) and Ovid (Corinna’s dead parrot), but with a decided difference:

Elegy on Love

This hairy sign
on the toilet wall
who could divine from it
all the songs tears
the storms of desire
the thousand and one nights
in which humankind
like a phosphorescent patch in the ocean
consumed itself
preserved
and forgotten

Nothing here testifies
to those testicled ovaried creatures
born and not born
except for this hairy sign
scratched into
the charred toilet wall

Another instance involves the poems which distantly but distinctly
echo classical terza rima. Enzensberger possesses all the equipment to be a formalist in the narrower sense, as his technically flawless use of the terzina form in a parodistic piece on Brecht – not published in an official collection – makes apparent.(17) But it is simply not his style pedantically to seek to turn the clocks back. It is enough to nonchalantly recast strictly endstopped terza rima (For the Grave of a Peace-loving Man is one example), and on occasion to add in the verso di clausola that rounds off Dante’s cantos. Dante, for his part, has clearly been a touchstone for this author at various times. One patiently exasperated 1957 text asks: ‘but who can still/wrap up so much hatred in terza rima?’ And two long poems from his 1960 collection, Foam and Whimpering and Firmament, read most like
two cantos from a latter-day Inferno (the hypocrites ‘who say Hölderlin and mean Himmler’ seem closeish relatives of those who inhabit Dante’s eighth circle). It is an atrophied, almost slapstick version of the great Florentine’s form which features in the Sixties poem The Paper Turkey, but the turbulent descent from the sublime to the banal is obviously part of the message: ‘The truly genuine revolutionary/is to be found today on page 30/of the colour supplement [. . .]’ Something similar may be true of Enzensberger’s epic poem The Sinking of the Titanic (1978), which begins in unrhymed terza rima and has the historical Dante ghosting right through it. The fact that it consists of 33 cantos (rather than 34, like
the Inferno) supports the impression gained from a purely semantic
reading: we are being offered a kind of reverse journey, from a sublunary Paradiso (‘the rare light days of euphoria’ in Cuba in 1969) to a Purgatorio which, although fitted out with all mod cons, offers little prospect of improvement (the snow-bound Berlin of the disenchanted late Seventies). Hell may have been abolished; but so has salvation.

In Kiosk, Enzensberger even writes what is, to all intents and purposes, a concrete poem in unrhymed terza rima: Audiosignal of April 14th 1912, a mightily condensed version of The Sinking of the Titanic, if one likes. Each of the five capitoli consists of 12 discrete infinitives, while the verso di clausola contains just one verb, ‘Rauschen’ (the sound of the empty ocean as well as of radio silence), repeated three times. The text is crammed with human activity. At first there are the noises of social intercourse:

Lisping mumbling babbling whispering
snuffling fluting soughing munching
muttering jabbering cooing puffing [. . .]

Later there is a sense of panic. But only on encountering the roar of the engines and the verbs which imply that water is seeping in (in the
antepenultimate strophe) does one begin to suspect that it might be the Titanic, or the end of the world itself, which is at issue.(18)Enzensberger insists in The Watermark of Poetry that all poems, including legasthenic ones, are distinguished by an ‘enigmatic residue’, and it would be a bold interpreter who tried to pin down Audiosignal to a clear message; what is unquestionable is the intensity – or rather the relentless rise in intensity – in the course of these lines.

Strophic forms are also handled with ingenuity in all periods: one could point to the updating of the sapphic ode in the early poem for a Macedonian shepherd, or to the rhymeless stanzaic structures often employed in later collections. Enzensberger’s treatment of one old French form, in Rondeau (1971), is particularly instructive: the fastidious refrains of the likes of Deschamps, Marot and Voiture are unsentimentally stripped down to render the vicious circle in which the intellectual was – or felt – trapped during an era of street-fighting men:

[. . .] But you can’t build a house on a mountain.
So move the mountain.
It’s hard to move mountains.
So become a prophet.

But you can’t hear thoughts.
So talk.
It’s hard to talk.
So become what you are

and keep on muttering to yourself,
useless creature.

In The Watermark of Poetry Enzensberger comments on the ‘hypnotic’ effect which can emanate from repetition of particular words or passages, as well as on the ‘type of poetic whispering gallery’ which German Baroque poets devised in their echo sonnets. In his own work too, unorthodox variations on the rondeau form are conspicuous by their recurrence, perhaps because they cause – often contradictory – refrains to resonate in the memory. Enzensberger does have certain precursors in this field: Goethe’s Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt is essentially a free variation on the rondeau form, and there is also Trakl’s Rondel.(19) But his tone is unprecedented. The 21 lines of Historical Process are held together by three irreconcilable refrains: ’So what’, ‘That’s possible’ and ‘It
doesn’t matter about your name’; the poem does come full circle as
roundelays traditionally do (the trawlers, ice-bound at the outset, will
again be ice-bound when the channel cut by the ice-breaker freezes up), but at a higher level of insight: the subject, whose subjectivity is
immaterial, comes to appreciate that he is free, and free to view history as a pageant of incremental progress. The daunting effect in Manhattan Island, by contrast, is due to the disparity between the mood of residual hope at the start of each strophe (‘When . . . When . . . When . . .’) and the – in retrospect, inevitable – outcomes (‘bitter ocean . . . bitter bridges . . . bitter sky’). A cursory glance might urge that the following piece is a species of ‘journalism poetry’, occasioned as it is by reports in some kind of media; but repeated readings again set up echoes which listeners, regardless of their political stance, will not necessarily find easy to suppress:

The Usual Thing

After the Boxer Rising the dowager empress of China
is said to have driven through Peking’s streets
in a yellow limousine. On spotting a foreigner
she’d draw back the curtain, make a slight bow
and smile at him. That doesn’t matter.

Last week they took away Abdel, my friend.
They kept him locked up for 10 days in a basement. Screamed at him:
You are a CIA agent. Before they let him go
(an error, comrade) they asked him what
his wife was like in bed. That is heavy.

Yarini was the most famous pimp in all Habana.
He was so handsome that they shot him
out in the street. That was 1906.
Halley’s comet put in an appearance in 1910.
It’s down to return in ‘86. That doesn’t matter.

I found all this out today, the 10th of May ‘69.
An informative day. And in addition
the day my shoelaces gave up the ghost.
That is heavy, for socialism here in Cuba
cannot replace these laces until ‘85.

That doesn’t matter. That is heavy. That doesn’t matter.

In Ländler (1980) Enzensberger contrives more cavernous and mournful echoes. With the help of rondeauesque refrains (‘Say again’, ‘When all is said and done’, ‘the spider in the amber’), the piece reproduces in words the Alpine round-dance which was the precursor of the waltz, this time enacting a view of history as eternal recurrence: ‘[. . .] Paleontology, the sole science/on which we can count,/consoling and fruitless./It goes round in circles/like that ländler/ which, ‘when all is said and done’,/ doesn’t move from the spot.’(20) In the 1995 collection, distant cousins of the rondeau are used to generate different effects again: to capture the anxious reiterations of an ‘old whiskered gentleman’ sitting knitting in
the morning sun (Nice Sunday), and to investigate a consciousness
apparently striken with Alzheimer’s (Et Ego).

Enzensberger has also broken ground with more ‘open’ forms,
natural correlatives for the open society for which he has always stood up. The locus classicus here is probably Summer Poem (1964), a projective text that casts a net across the global village (including the huts where the exploited live), with the effect that ‘all distances are the same’. Where Benn, with his regressive proclivities, was a champion of ‘absolute’ monologues, Enzensberger’s texts generally aspire to the condition of dialogue, or polyvocalism (‘Vielstimmigkeit’): contradictory voices are admitted to prevent the author from waxing dogmatic or lapsing into isolation.(21) Lachesis lapponica, a poem which unfolds at around midnight in a Northern summer, is an illustration of his determination to accommodate incompatible opinions:

[. . .] I’ll cut off your head, bird. (It’s your own.
!Viva Fidel! Better dead than red. Have a break! Ban the bomb!
Über alles in der welt!) Don’t say that. (You are all that,
says the bird, imagine, you have been that, you are that.) [.. .]

Other experiments seem bent on unmasking the rhetoric which poses as truth. From his first collection onwards, Enzensberger has frequently set in motion the grammatical perpetuum mobile, which ultimately derives from Corbière and which, as in the case of Heissenbüttel, conveys ‘moral judgement that could not be conveyed as tellingly in any other way.’(22) One example is Introduction to Commercial Correspondence, which begins: ‘With very best wishes/With slight sullen coughs/With Christian shivers/With beastly wry faces/With lecherous ruses [. . .]’ before spiralling back, thirteen lines later, to the familiar insincere startingpoint. More chilling is the technique in Morphology, a text which systematically – albeit quite untranslatably – breaks down what in German are matter-of-fact compounds into a combination of noun and deadly adjective: ‘In the dead shirts (shrouds)/Rest the blind dogs (guide-dogs)/Round the sick cash desks (health insurance schemes)/ Walk the sore washers (those who wash wounds) [. . .]’ There is an affinity with concrete poetry, but the political charge tends to be higher: Proposal for Penal Reform is a discomfiting potpourri of items from the German Criminal Code, and Berlin Model – also published for the first time in 1967 – goes as far as to reproduce a newspaper article on a new class of industrial electronics with integrated circuits, exploiting the ambiguity latent in language to suggest what such ‘totalitarian’ systems lead to on a human level (‘Fortunately there is no need with this technology to make allowances either for tolerances or parasitic elements’). Enzensberger’s search for new avenues of expression even throws up a neo-Aztec text, The Festival of Flowers. And one of the last poems in Music of the Future is a eulogy of Aeolian forms – such as shifting seif dunes, ‘Pure art, which is in no need of an artist’. Such poésie pure, written and then at once erased by the wind, is doubtless at some considerable remove from what Parisian neo-Platonists like Valéry had in mind. Be that as it may, while German theorists have been deliberating on the merits of the long ‘emancipatory’ poem (W Höllerer) vis-à-vis the short ‘hermetic’ lyric (K Krolow), Enzensberger has quietly been getting on with the task of putting both these and other forms (such as the ballad:
Mausoleum. Thirty Seven Ballads from the History of Progress, Frankfurt am Main, 1975) to the test.

     IV
In the examples given to date, the English texts have been taken for
granted. In fact, they spring from an ongoing collaboration between two master craftsmen which goes back to the start of the Sixties: Bloodaxe has brought out a total of 141 texts, mostly by Michael Hamburger but as many as 30% by Enzensberger himself. The quality of these translations is such that one could spend pages listing special felicities, such as Hamburger’s choice of adverb in the first strophe of The Midwives (‘In buzzing clusters out they swarm/in the grey light of daybreak clamber/ limberly over hedges and bridges . . .’) and the way he makes a specifically British poem out of Short History of the Bourgeoisie by substituting ‘Tudor fireplaces’ for ‘Renaissancekamine’, or Enzensberger’s cummingsesque play ‘Man manhandled’ in his version Limbic System.(23) Particularly suggestive are the cases where the two poets’ preoccupations coincide exactly: Norwegian Timber would strike most Anglo-Saxon readers as a Hamburger poem in its own right.

If one has to express any disappointment, it is that the collaborators
decided – presumably in the interests of consistency – not to print
parallel versions in those cases where both had produced translations. For these would have permitted greater insight into their particular translation technique, and – without question – into poetic translation technique in general. Let us look, for example, at Hamburger’s version of Abtrift, a poem which supplies the title for the last section of Music of the Future, alongside Enzensberger’s previously unpublished counterpart:

Leeway                                   Drift

The brain on its descent,          The brain in descent,
lower and lower.                     sinking by the minute.
Against the tension wires         The downdraught tearing away
the down-draught tugs.            at the bracing-wires,
The rudder flutters,                  the rudder fluttering,
veers                                       swerving,
‘by itself’.                                all on its own.
A music too:                            Another kind of music:
rushing air,                               the rush of air,
creaking timbers.                     the wood creaking.
There’s a crack in the spar,      A crackle in the cross-beams,
in the ear, in the head.              in the ear, in the skull.
Painless suction,                       Painless suction,
self-oblivious,                           oblivion,
solemnly weightless                  solemn, easy glide
gliding towards                         into the dark.
the darker place.

[MH]                                          [HME]

The severely reined-in rhythm of the German original makes it distantly resemble the Parzenlied in Goethe’s Iphigenie. But where the latter harps on the sombre fate of mankind, Enzensberger’s text – a product of the same century as Saint-Exupéry’s Vol de Nuit – has a more reckless, existential tonality. Both translations accurately render the overall gesture, but Hamburger’s is undoubtedly the more faithful. This translator characteristically holds the highly individual creative writer in himself in check in order to do justice to the quiddity of the foreign text: the ironising inverted commas in line 7 are preserved, as are the ‘falling’ dactylic rhythms in extremis in the final lines, and the fact that the version has the same number of lines as the original is a small but significant detail. Enzensberger for his part is freer, bringing out the drama of tension and release by opting for frenetic present participles in the opening lines and stupefying trochees for the final passage into night.24 The unobtrusive skill of these experienced fabbri comes out most obviously in their response to the narcotic assonance pervading the final sentence of the German text (‘SchmerzlOser SOg,/selbstvergessen,/ fEIerlich lEIchtes/GlEIten, dem/DUnkleren zU.’). Hamburger fashions
an equivalent by means of hypnotic repetition (painLESS, oblivIOUS, weightLESS) and by the solemnly weightless gliding inherent in his curtailed dactylic hexameters; Enzensberger does so by virtue of vocalic rhyme (suction/oblivion) and through the alluring pattern of vowels in the last two lines, swallowing up the world in a Baudelairean yawn.

Let us also take a look at Hamburger’s version of Das Gift, another
poem from the final section of Music of the Future, and at Enzensberger’s unpublished parallel version:

The Poison                                   The Poison

Not as it used to be, round,           Not the way it used to be, round,
little, a grain, sealed             &n