A Very Particular Voice
Georgina Paul reflects on why Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973) should be so neglected by English readers.
Of all the most significant German-language writers of the post-1945 period, Ingeborg Bachmann is probably the least read and talked about among English-language readers. She is beginning to make an impact in the United States, where her works have gradually been appearing in English translation for a little over ten years now. In the UK, by contrast, her name is barely known outside university German departments. This state of affairs is mystifying to anyone acquainted with the German book market, where the apparently inexhaustible fascination of this most charismatic woman intellectual is still fuelling major, often controversial, publications year in year out, nearly three decades after her death.
Bachmann shot to fame in Germany after her first reading at a meeting of the Gruppe 47 in 1952. Hailed as one of the great lyric talents of the postwar years for her collections Die gestundete Zeit (Borrowed Time, 1953) and Anrufung des Großen Bären (Invocation of the Great Bear, 1956), her poetic voice remains very distinctive amongst the work of her literary generation. In part, this has to do with her Austrian cadences, and her origins in the borderlands of Carinthia where German, Italian and Slavonic languages and mindsets intersect. But where her friend and great contemporary Paul Celan (with whose poetry Bachmann's has many subterranean connections) works more obviously with modernist traditions, paring away every superfluity to arrive at the poem as an absolute distillation, Bachmann's lyric of the 1950s comes across rather as Romantic, though with a troubled distortion. It takes a while to work out that one is hearing not just echoes of Hölderlin and Rilke, but also Brecht's tough political edge, and to grasp why it is that Bachmann's poems, once read, follow one about, persisting in the blood like the melody of a sonata:
Wherever we turn in the storm of roses,Her poems are the poems of an absolutely archaic human innocence that has been smashed by unspeakable historical experience.
thorns illuminate the night. And the thunder
of a thousand leaves, once so quiet on the bushes,
is right at our heels.
('Im Gewitter der Rosen', Tr. Mark Anderson).
Famously, Bachmann turned away from lyric in the 1960s, finally renouncing it altogether in the late poem 'Keine Delikatessen' ('No Delicacies', 1967), whose force of despair - the poet's loss of hope in poetry - puts it among the indelible German poems of the century. Meanwhile, she irritated the critics who had her pigeon-holed as a poet by publishing in 1961 a collection of short prose pieces, Das dreißigste Jahr (The Thirtieth Year, Tr. Michael Bullock, Holmes & Meier, NY, 1987) - philosophical essays in fictional form as much as stories, written in a lyrical poet's prose and circling round a theme from Wittgenstein's Tractatus: 'The borders of my language are the borders of my world'. The title story should be compulsory reading for every imaginative person who has managed to reach the age of thirty.
Her last decade was consumed with what she gradually conceived of as a cycle of novels called Todesarten (Manners of Death). Only one novel, Malina (1971) (Tr. Philip Boehm, Holmes & Meier, NY, 1990), was ever completed and published, together with a sequence of short stories generated out of the world of the Todesarten, entitled Simultan (1972) (Three Paths to the Lake, Tr. Mary Fran Gilbert, Holmes & Meier, NY,1989). At her death in 1973 (from burns sustained in a fire in her apartment in Rome), substantial fragments remained of two further novels, generally known as Der Fall Franza and Requiem für Fanny Goldmann (The Book of Franza & Requiem for Fanny Goldmann, Tr. Peter Filkins, Northwestern U.P. 1999). A critical edition of all the extant manuscripts was published in Germany in 1995.
Initially misread as a kind of hysterical autobiography by critics unable to make anything of the experimental form, from the early 1980s Malina was taken up by theoretically informed feminists who saw in its plot - of a woman destroyed by a triumvirate of her rather too detached lover, the father figure who haunts her nightmares, and the mysterious Malina with whom she lives - an acute account of the eradication of the 'feminine' in patriarchal culture. Sigrid Weigel, one of Germany's foremost literary scholars and among Bachmann's cleverest readers, adjusts this interpretation in her richly thoughtful non-biography of 1999, in which she places Bachmann's work within the general historical and philosophical trauma of the post-Holocaust era. However interpreted, for the reader open to the adventure, the tautly-strung narration of the novel's traumatised central character, 'I', and the enigmas of the experimental form, make Malina one of the most exciting literary experiences since Proust or Musil.
So: why is Bachmann so little read in English? It is tempting to find an answer in her philosophical abstractness, deeply rooted in continental thought in a way alien to most English readers, unless assisted by explanations. In this sense the Holmes & Meier Malina is excellently conceived, with its finely judged afterword by Mark Anderson. The most recent volume of collected poems, translated by Peter Filkins (Songs in Flight, Marsilio, NY, 1994) also helps, with Charles Simic's foreword and Filkins' introduction.
But the real problem with reading Bachmann in English is - the English. It is striking how many commentators on Bachmann write of her 'voice' as the mark of her work, and as anyone knows who lives between languages, the particularities of voice in one language are very difficult to carry across to another. Too often, Bachmann's translators get stuck on rendering her meanings only, and the magic, the music is lost.
Georgina Paul is Lecturer in German Studies at the University of Warwick
