Poetic Affairs: Celan, Grünbein, Brodsky (review)

At the present juncture of new possibilities for critical strategies, Poetic Affairs: Celan, Grünbein, Brodsky sheds, at times, its paradigmatic weight and achieves, beyond boundaries set by codified procedures of discourse, a fidelity to its exploration borne by succinctness of style and the confident subjectivity of informed insight. Indeed, interlocutionary subjectivity is the focus of Michael Eskin’s comparative study of Paul Celan, Durs Grünbein, and Joseph Brodsky.

Eskin summarizes his “three interlocking goals” as “staging inventive readings” of the three poets’ “lives and works,” sounding in a new key, through these readings, the relationship between literature and life, and “elaborating on the basis of the three poets’ translations of life into poetry (and vice versa) new ways of thinking about literature as an ethical practice” (129). Eskin’s goals are rooted in Osip Mandelstam’s belief in “literature as an ethical practice.” And by way of Mandelstam’s essay “Conversation about Dante,” Dante, as a central interlocutor, informs Eskin’s enquiry.

Eskin’s conceptual grid introduces existential “affairs” for each poet’s engagement with aesthetic subjectivity, examining forms of agency, as each poet finds himself in a context of assault on “the I and the mode of experiencing oneself as and being (perceived as) ‘I’” (59): for Celan, his being “wrongfully accused of plagiarizing the work of poet Yvan Goll” (5), intensifying Celan’s acute sensitivity to antisemitism; for Grünbein, born in Dresden, his life in the GDR, his personal adoption, or adaptation, of Seneca’s exile stemming from an affair with the niece of Claudius, Julia Livilla (the question arising whether “the Livilla affair” is “a convenient mask [for Grünbein] for a ‘real’ affair” [85]); and for Brodsky, his Soviet trial for parasitism and subsequent exile in Siberia and the “betrayal” by Marina Basmanova, the mother of his son. Overlapping the existential affairs are the affairs—“the interlocutor’s embrace” (30)—that each poet shares with literary interlocutors: Celan’s interlocution with Shakespeare, Grünbein’s with Seneca and Descartes, and Brodsky’s with Dante and Byron.

The “ethical realism” of Mandelstam, “a clearly delineated social, ethical-political dimension” (139), informs the lives and work of the three poets in both the existential and literary modes of “affair.” By way of Mandelstam’s “Conversations About Dante,” Dante’s life-long “affair” with Beatrice becomes analogue for the passionate engagement each poet has for his art, as in Celan’s being “‘in search of reality’ . . . in the name of the ‘existence of the singular human being,’ who ‘remains given to it’”; in Brodsky’s “belief that you cannot ‘separate people and writing’” and that “poetry ‘offers its writer an extension of himself ” and is “‘an act of love’ testifying to the ‘ethical possibilities of man,’ whereby love is to be understood as ‘an attitude toward reality’”; and in “Grünbein’s practice of poetry as ‘anthropological realism’ with an explicitly ethical bent” (141).

The “affairistic” schema is applied first to Celan’s German-language translation, Einundzwanzig Sonnette (Twenty-one Sonnets), from Shakespeare, then to Grünbein’s poem “Julia Livilla,” and finally to Brodsky’s sequences “New Stanzas to Augusta” and “Twenty Sonnets to Mary Stuart.” Eskin’s reading of Celan’s translations is a valuable and remarkable study of subjectivity in the existential “translation” of life into poetry, the intense pressures of Celan’s existence brought to bear on his literary translation of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Eskin argues that Claire Goll’s accusation that Celan plagiarized her husband’s poems was an attack on agency, both the literal agency of Celan as author and his belief in the ethical agency of poetry. Losing his parents in the Holocaust, Celan survived Romanian concentration-labor camps and settled finally in Paris in 1948, where he took his own life in 1970 at the age of forty-nine. His deeply existential poetry becomes progressively more complex and concise, deepening its fusion of subjectivity with “ethical agency” (90). Though we do...