Globalizing Good and Evil in the Poetry of Jorge Urrutia and Jorge Riechmann

"Auschwitz," a poem included in León Felipe's ¡Oh, este viejo y roto violín! (1965), includes the following verse: "Éste es un lugar donde no se puede tocar el violín" (51, v. 40). Rather than a fleeting reference to the Holocaust, this poem is firmly embedded in the collection to which it belongs, as the allusion to the image of the broken violin in the collection's title indicates. The poem is dominated by an admonishment of three "poetas infernales"—Dante, Blake, and Rimbaud—that deems their work unfit to face the new circumstances engendered by the hellish conditions of Auschwitz. Although the speaker's critique seems to be limited to the three poets mentioned above, two brief references to the broken violin of the collection's title suggest at the very least the difficulty of future poetic expression:

Aquí se rompen las cuerdas de todoslos violines del mundo[…]Yo también soy un gran violinista …y he tocado en el infierno muchas veces …Pero ahora, aquí …rompo mi violín … y me callo

(51–52, vv. 41–42, 48–51)

In particular, the poem questions the privileged position traditionally granted to the figure of the poet:

Hoycualquier habitante de la tierrasabe mucho más del infiernoque esos tres poetas juntos.

(50, vv. 6–9)

It also critiques the use of formally polished poetry to comment on the sort of suffering characteristic of Auschwitz:

Ya sé que Dante toca muy bien el violín …¡Oh, el gran virtuoso! …Pero que no pretenda ahoracon sus tercetos maravillososy sus endecasílabos perfectos¹asustar a este niño judíoque está ahí, desgajado de sus padres …

(50, vv. 10–16)

This general sort of critique of polished poetry is by no means unique in the post-war era; a brief review of the work of poets like Gabriel Celaya (1911–1991), Blas de Otero (1916–1979), José Hierro (1922–2002), or Eugenio de Nora (1923–) will yield many examples of similar critiques. What is unique, though, is the specific treatment of the Holocaust, while simultaneously situating its representation in the larger context of Western literary production. This study will examine the work of Jorge Urrutia (1945–) and Jorge Riechman (1962–), two Spanish poets whose work also discusses the Holocaust within larger contexts. The poems in question span a wide range of time, beginning with a poem published not long after Felipe's and ending with one published over four decades later.

Felipe, Urrutia, and Riechmann, then, write poetry—both after and about Auschwitz, in the wake of Theodor Adorno's famous establishment of Auschwitz as a sort of line in the sand after which writing poetry is "barbaric" ("Cultural Criticism" 34). Although Adorno later revisited and amended his words regarding post-Auschwitz poetry in Negative Dialectics (1966), changing his focus from writing poetry to living, the critical-theoretical dye, so to speak, had already been cast (362–63). One of the effects of Adorno's statement, in conjunction with other writers and Holocaust scholars, has been the discursive imposition of the Holocaust as a unique event, the pinnacle of insurmountable and unrepeatable evil.²

In her discussion of the teaching of the Holocaust, Doris L. Bergen warns of the risks of a focus that centers exclusively on its horrors, arguing that such a focus obscures the conditions leading to genocide:

Students in courses on the Holocaust are often alarmingly eager to get to the gas chambers, to bypass the processes of persecution, isolation, expropriation, and experimentation that led up to and made possible Nazi efforts to annihilate the Jews of Europe. That rush to plunge straight into the deepest circle of hell maximizes the shock value and emphasizes the mystery and unknowability of the Holocaust, but playing up the unimaginable horror detracts from what is perhaps a more important goal of teaching in this area: helping students and ourselves recognize the familiarity of genocidal situations and behaviors.

(39)

Failing to examine the elements that contribute to genocide as a general phenomenon...