much flakier than Glantschnig,
or, knocking the Great Plains flat:
Tony Frazer and a Chicago anthology of poetry in German
Other people will be writing about the achievements of Shearsman Books in transforming the poetry publishing landscape and offering a new model for the extent of the “bandwidth” which it was possible for cognoscenti to take on. I am going, instead, to dwell on memories of the anthology of German poetry in translation which Tony devised and edited in about 1999 and which eventually became a special issue of Chicago Review – some 350 pages, by then including a prose component which was edited by other people. My memories of the project are remarkably vague. I am afraid that translating involves going blank to a great extent. That would explain why I can’t remember much about it. Another factor was constant anxiety about whether my stuff was going to be included – the editors in Chicago took a tough view of this, not making any promises and indicating that they might get a local poet in to do a rewrite. It was Heather McHugh, I believe. I wasn’t sure until the last minute that I was going to feature.
It began in about 1998 with me reading files of Manuskripte (from Graz) in the library of the Goethe-Institut in Kensington and realising that here was an amazing resource of far-out German-language poetry and, after a while, that I could do an entire anthology of this work and the sources were right there, at the end of the 31 bus route. I translated a few dozen poems and contacted Tony.
If you are going to be partners there has to be some kind of symmetry. If you want to play at the high stake tables you have to come up with assets and ambition. Tony began looking for publishers and funding bodies, and rapidly scaled it up to a coherent, a really wrapping-covering, selection of poets over the whole modern German language realm. I hadn’t a clue who would make the selection, but Tony turned out to have that knowledge of the field and the ability to list the poets who should be included. Let’s contemplate that (since it is the kernel of my narrative) as a project where you start with anthologies, pick out the interesting poets, acquire volumes by them, absorb the volumes, throw away the bad ones, rebuild your conceptual model, move your observation points, acquire more anthologies, pick out the interesting poets, acquire their books, assimilate the most complex of modern writing ¼ All one logical process! But how unusual to find someone who had actually carried it out!
It’s the easiest thing in the world to stroll into a bookshop in Wiesbaden or somewhere (Munster, even) and scarf up some young poets who on closer examination are the Franconian equivalent of Glyn Maxwell and Carol Ann Duffy, but you don’t notice that, because you’re stuck on the one you’ve already bought and taken home. And you produce an anthology as wretched as one stuffed with Rambling Syd Leavis, Loretta Screenflaw, T Mothman Cringe, and Derek Luton. And present it as the New German Poetry. While the real picture is something you can’t even distort because you haven’t ever seen it. But in 1998 Tony knew all about figures like Kling, Mayrocker, Eisinger, Papenfuss, Seiler, Donhauser, Czernin, Schmatz. He understood what could be translated and what couldn’t. What I find really overwhelming is that Tony does not confine himself to German but also has an extensive knowledge of Spanish-language literatures, including the poets of Mexico, where he lived at one time.
He also had the business skills to find a publisher (and I really don’t know how many different ones he tried to make a match with). Chicago Review were enthusiastic, but it turned at that point into a bid for highly competitive arts funding, with us and CR almost as a consortium framing a bid. We had to do so much work to get together a halfway complete picture of truly contemporary poets. Because when it comes to another country you tend to be 30 years out of date, a problem which goes right back to university days. So if you’re doing a showing you’ve always got to have that stretch. However much you love Peter Huchel you owe it to the locally prevailing deities to move on and face what you don’t understand but which one day you might. Rip away from the attachments. Chicago Review had done a previous anthology of German language work, edited by Christopher Middleton, in 1978, and we had to eschew overlaps with that. But there are so many places where they speak German. After all a Transylvanian Saxon won the Nobel prize recently. The Swiss, for example. They’re weird, you can’t understand what they’re saying, and they hide behind mountains. I don’t know any anthologies of Swiss poetry in translation. From Hinterstoisser to Caviezel. Beyond the Toblerone. But I don’t doubt if I mentioned it to Tony he would rapidly outline the status of 1st rate Swiss poets, 2nd rank Swiss poets, 3rd rank Swiss poets, and Swiss poets who were frankly trying it on. When bingenhaftig poetry god Thomas Kling put together a radically revisionist anthology of German poetry, Sprachspeicher, in 2001, all the alert 20th C poets he chose were in Tony’s anthology. All of them. Full house. At that point you have poets with no reputation in America, no prestige - but ones who might have a reputation and whose market rating you can radically change just with one project.
I got a co-editor credit, but the reason I got so wide-eyed and excited about those poets in Manuskripte (and Kolleritsch is a god) is that I’d never been exposed to any of them, and while encountering all that made me weak at the knees, this was partly because I was a novice and certainly unable to give a career sketch of any of them. Whereas Tony could see the landscape. He marshalled all those poets and all those translators and it came together.
Getting the poetry together was an epic. By some chance a pile of emails from 2000 has survived. much flakier than Glantschnig. As usual, I would be fascinated to see more of her poems. […] We have done the hard part, which was reading bad poems in a search pattern. We didn’t include Paul Wuhr. I’m not sure I hold with all this Wuhr talk you hear. I think we have absolutely a red light for XXX. We both find him boring. He is a big star, will charge lots of money, and is guaranteed to cause trouble in some way or another. He’s just not worth the effort. I think he swallowed the East German state belief in scale and completeness. Anthologising a few poems from someone whose only value is monumentality (and vulgarity?) is unworkable anyway. […] [as for …] right, let’s X him from the project. I translated the whole of Athene in the Reichstag and didn’t find one bit I liked. it doesn’t work out exerting yourself to polish a translation of something that wasn’t very good in the first place; fatigue sets in. the syndrome of over-production is familiar from [English High Street poet]; he writes books so long that nobody wants to read them and acquires a reputation among people who haven’t read him. Let’s just say no before we get any further. he thinks that writing about sex and physiology is strong because it’s unambiguous.
When poets hate their own work in translation they are likely to blame the translator. And treat him like some part of their body which they don’t like very much and which can’t get away easily. As the alternative would be to think that their work is actually not very good, and defended by a kind of rigid projective narcissism typical of 1920s film divas and certain management consultants. Getting the texts together was the kind of long-drawn-out struggle more typical of three-volume East German novels about monster engineering projects in bad geology. The depletion of a Mabuse-like phantom of the will is not something to be shared with strangers. Because we selected the poems, you got one person who wanted the selection to be much more monumental: you haven’t represented my entire career, you have left out vital facts of my magnetic and chromatically shifting personality, you haven’t understood properly. Meaning, take more of my poems. If you think five pages of your poetry is a disaster it doesn’t follow that ten pages would be fabulous. It means you don’t like your poetry.
I translated one long poem about a Slovenian cave salamander (Proteus anguinus) called the olm. It was about syntactic ambiguity and multiple options, a kind of cavern-catacomb. This cave salamander acquires sexual characteristics late, under the influence of hormones (but not quite also sex-changing, like the waters of the Fountain of Salmacis, in a masque by Davenant, set in the Thracian lands). Ten years later somebody told me that the poet had, in fact, changed sex. The introduction of the Adriatic Sweetwater Salamander was autobiographical. The elaborate syntax was in fact related to an exit from the conventional life, a doubling-back to erase categorical distinctions. Of all the proud heritage of poems about metamorphic Dalmatian salamanders, this is surely one of the very finest. It didn’t make it into the anthology, it’s still on my hard disc.
I think we had someone who claimed to be able to translate Priessnitz but couldn’t in the end, giving rise to a new noun prisnishchina, the collective for a gang of people who pretend to be able to translate Priessnitz. Franz Czernin wrote an entire book about one poem by Priessnitz, ‘Die Schreibhand’ (which was published in 44 Poems, Priessnitz’s only volume published in his lifetime).
To get Chicago interested we actually had to show an initial mass of translations, mainly by me at this point, as some kind of scale model of what the final, opulent and monumental, product was going to be. I always had a cold water feeling that they would look at the project, muse on its peculiar merits, and hire some other editors and translators to do the business. At a late stage, we had to deal with the poets and persuade them (they all thought they knew English) that the poems we had chosen were the only ones we were going with and that our English versions had utterly captured their wonderfulness in its true latitude and exaltitude. And lo, it was so.
So the Chicago boys raised the stakes by doubling the project to include prose as well and by applying to the NEA for funding to pay the authors’ rights and the translators. Wow. They wrote up an application that put great emphasis on including ethnic minorities resident in Central Europe as a part of the selection. I was a bit taken aback by the thought that some virtuous Apfelwein-reeking Swabian would be excluded because they were too German. There is a Pact of Steel between Federal Arts Funding (gulp) and ethnic minority representation. The boys from Chicago put on the front to deal with the NEA but there was no way you could hype them even for a minute. They ate avant-garde poets for breakfast. But that’s when complete consistency, realism, due diligence, mastery of artistic asset values, win the day. I mean, one way of not having a Mid-Western culture Tsar not think you’re full of shit is not to be full of shit. Tony was selling something he could accurately describe. So that’s how we ended up with the 2002 Chicago Review anthology. 200 pages of poetry. It was astonishing. We cleared the plains.
When I was living in Germany, one of the other artists in the same Kunstlerhaus was from Leipzig and she told me an anecdote about a huge exhibition of modern German art in Berlin which had had not one single East German artist in it. Obviously you had the transfuges, the ones like Penck and Richter who had mainly worked in the West. This was a huge problem. By defining it all as such a victory you produced a defeated nation. She was still hurting about it years later. I think we managed to give a fair showing to Those [Commies] from Over There. I don’t think the National Endowment for the Arts would regard East Germans as an ethnic minority, but they obviously are. Seiler writing about how his grandfather used to come home from the uranium mine and shove his hand in front of the radio and you could hear the crackle of the radioactivity coming through the radio speaker. That’s what I call transmission. Things aren’t like that in the Erewash Valley.
I will just mention States of Independence, a compelling 1998 anthology where Tony selected 18 poets from the penumbra of English inattention and stated the case for something quite striking. How few people are interested in locating good English poetry (as opposed to collecting evidence for some crackpot poetological idea). Modern poetry yields to connoisseurship and knowledge and does not need some illuminist key. This was a book Stride took on – the Exeter connection, seemingly. Tony was at Essex University when things were really happening there, around Dorn, Raworth and so on. I know he planned an anthology of the Essex School, but it wasn’t to be. This is a vital area on the map of modern poetry. Things even went wrong in a pace-making way.
My guess is that really deep knowledge of another literature, that is a modern one and one of major dimensions, produces a frame of mind in which recent English literature truly reveals itself: a question of rapid dismissal of the mediocre, and boundlessly patient exploration of the complete extent of what is excellent – all the labyrinths and all the archipelagos. It is relatively easy when faced with a foreign culture to escape polarisation – the liberatory act which is the basis, I am increasingly sure, for deep knowledge of one’s own generation and so of where one is standing. On return to the native culture, the endless lines of barbed wire seem ridiculous and intellectually unworthy. I feel sure that this background as a modern linguist was significant to Tony in building the historically significant depolarisation which structured the Shearsman list. But that’s another story.
or, knocking the Great Plains flat:
Tony Frazer and a Chicago anthology of poetry in German
Other people will be writing about the achievements of Shearsman Books in transforming the poetry publishing landscape and offering a new model for the extent of the “bandwidth” which it was possible for cognoscenti to take on. I am going, instead, to dwell on memories of the anthology of German poetry in translation which Tony devised and edited in about 1999 and which eventually became a special issue of Chicago Review – some 350 pages, by then including a prose component which was edited by other people. My memories of the project are remarkably vague. I am afraid that translating involves going blank to a great extent. That would explain why I can’t remember much about it. Another factor was constant anxiety about whether my stuff was going to be included – the editors in Chicago took a tough view of this, not making any promises and indicating that they might get a local poet in to do a rewrite. It was Heather McHugh, I believe. I wasn’t sure until the last minute that I was going to feature.
It began in about 1998 with me reading files of Manuskripte (from Graz) in the library of the Goethe-Institut in Kensington and realising that here was an amazing resource of far-out German-language poetry and, after a while, that I could do an entire anthology of this work and the sources were right there, at the end of the 31 bus route. I translated a few dozen poems and contacted Tony.
If you are going to be partners there has to be some kind of symmetry. If you want to play at the high stake tables you have to come up with assets and ambition. Tony began looking for publishers and funding bodies, and rapidly scaled it up to a coherent, a really wrapping-covering, selection of poets over the whole modern German language realm. I hadn’t a clue who would make the selection, but Tony turned out to have that knowledge of the field and the ability to list the poets who should be included. Let’s contemplate that (since it is the kernel of my narrative) as a project where you start with anthologies, pick out the interesting poets, acquire volumes by them, absorb the volumes, throw away the bad ones, rebuild your conceptual model, move your observation points, acquire more anthologies, pick out the interesting poets, acquire their books, assimilate the most complex of modern writing ¼ All one logical process! But how unusual to find someone who had actually carried it out!
It’s the easiest thing in the world to stroll into a bookshop in Wiesbaden or somewhere (Munster, even) and scarf up some young poets who on closer examination are the Franconian equivalent of Glyn Maxwell and Carol Ann Duffy, but you don’t notice that, because you’re stuck on the one you’ve already bought and taken home. And you produce an anthology as wretched as one stuffed with Rambling Syd Leavis, Loretta Screenflaw, T Mothman Cringe, and Derek Luton. And present it as the New German Poetry. While the real picture is something you can’t even distort because you haven’t ever seen it. But in 1998 Tony knew all about figures like Kling, Mayrocker, Eisinger, Papenfuss, Seiler, Donhauser, Czernin, Schmatz. He understood what could be translated and what couldn’t. What I find really overwhelming is that Tony does not confine himself to German but also has an extensive knowledge of Spanish-language literatures, including the poets of Mexico, where he lived at one time.
He also had the business skills to find a publisher (and I really don’t know how many different ones he tried to make a match with). Chicago Review were enthusiastic, but it turned at that point into a bid for highly competitive arts funding, with us and CR almost as a consortium framing a bid. We had to do so much work to get together a halfway complete picture of truly contemporary poets. Because when it comes to another country you tend to be 30 years out of date, a problem which goes right back to university days. So if you’re doing a showing you’ve always got to have that stretch. However much you love Peter Huchel you owe it to the locally prevailing deities to move on and face what you don’t understand but which one day you might. Rip away from the attachments. Chicago Review had done a previous anthology of German language work, edited by Christopher Middleton, in 1978, and we had to eschew overlaps with that. But there are so many places where they speak German. After all a Transylvanian Saxon won the Nobel prize recently. The Swiss, for example. They’re weird, you can’t understand what they’re saying, and they hide behind mountains. I don’t know any anthologies of Swiss poetry in translation. From Hinterstoisser to Caviezel. Beyond the Toblerone. But I don’t doubt if I mentioned it to Tony he would rapidly outline the status of 1st rate Swiss poets, 2nd rank Swiss poets, 3rd rank Swiss poets, and Swiss poets who were frankly trying it on. When bingenhaftig poetry god Thomas Kling put together a radically revisionist anthology of German poetry, Sprachspeicher, in 2001, all the alert 20th C poets he chose were in Tony’s anthology. All of them. Full house. At that point you have poets with no reputation in America, no prestige - but ones who might have a reputation and whose market rating you can radically change just with one project.
I got a co-editor credit, but the reason I got so wide-eyed and excited about those poets in Manuskripte (and Kolleritsch is a god) is that I’d never been exposed to any of them, and while encountering all that made me weak at the knees, this was partly because I was a novice and certainly unable to give a career sketch of any of them. Whereas Tony could see the landscape. He marshalled all those poets and all those translators and it came together.
Getting the poetry together was an epic. By some chance a pile of emails from 2000 has survived. much flakier than Glantschnig. As usual, I would be fascinated to see more of her poems. […] We have done the hard part, which was reading bad poems in a search pattern. We didn’t include Paul Wuhr. I’m not sure I hold with all this Wuhr talk you hear. I think we have absolutely a red light for XXX. We both find him boring. He is a big star, will charge lots of money, and is guaranteed to cause trouble in some way or another. He’s just not worth the effort. I think he swallowed the East German state belief in scale and completeness. Anthologising a few poems from someone whose only value is monumentality (and vulgarity?) is unworkable anyway. […] [as for …] right, let’s X him from the project. I translated the whole of Athene in the Reichstag and didn’t find one bit I liked. it doesn’t work out exerting yourself to polish a translation of something that wasn’t very good in the first place; fatigue sets in. the syndrome of over-production is familiar from [English High Street poet]; he writes books so long that nobody wants to read them and acquires a reputation among people who haven’t read him. Let’s just say no before we get any further. he thinks that writing about sex and physiology is strong because it’s unambiguous.
When poets hate their own work in translation they are likely to blame the translator. And treat him like some part of their body which they don’t like very much and which can’t get away easily. As the alternative would be to think that their work is actually not very good, and defended by a kind of rigid projective narcissism typical of 1920s film divas and certain management consultants. Getting the texts together was the kind of long-drawn-out struggle more typical of three-volume East German novels about monster engineering projects in bad geology. The depletion of a Mabuse-like phantom of the will is not something to be shared with strangers. Because we selected the poems, you got one person who wanted the selection to be much more monumental: you haven’t represented my entire career, you have left out vital facts of my magnetic and chromatically shifting personality, you haven’t understood properly. Meaning, take more of my poems. If you think five pages of your poetry is a disaster it doesn’t follow that ten pages would be fabulous. It means you don’t like your poetry.
I translated one long poem about a Slovenian cave salamander (Proteus anguinus) called the olm. It was about syntactic ambiguity and multiple options, a kind of cavern-catacomb. This cave salamander acquires sexual characteristics late, under the influence of hormones (but not quite also sex-changing, like the waters of the Fountain of Salmacis, in a masque by Davenant, set in the Thracian lands). Ten years later somebody told me that the poet had, in fact, changed sex. The introduction of the Adriatic Sweetwater Salamander was autobiographical. The elaborate syntax was in fact related to an exit from the conventional life, a doubling-back to erase categorical distinctions. Of all the proud heritage of poems about metamorphic Dalmatian salamanders, this is surely one of the very finest. It didn’t make it into the anthology, it’s still on my hard disc.
I think we had someone who claimed to be able to translate Priessnitz but couldn’t in the end, giving rise to a new noun prisnishchina, the collective for a gang of people who pretend to be able to translate Priessnitz. Franz Czernin wrote an entire book about one poem by Priessnitz, ‘Die Schreibhand’ (which was published in 44 Poems, Priessnitz’s only volume published in his lifetime).
To get Chicago interested we actually had to show an initial mass of translations, mainly by me at this point, as some kind of scale model of what the final, opulent and monumental, product was going to be. I always had a cold water feeling that they would look at the project, muse on its peculiar merits, and hire some other editors and translators to do the business. At a late stage, we had to deal with the poets and persuade them (they all thought they knew English) that the poems we had chosen were the only ones we were going with and that our English versions had utterly captured their wonderfulness in its true latitude and exaltitude. And lo, it was so.
So the Chicago boys raised the stakes by doubling the project to include prose as well and by applying to the NEA for funding to pay the authors’ rights and the translators. Wow. They wrote up an application that put great emphasis on including ethnic minorities resident in Central Europe as a part of the selection. I was a bit taken aback by the thought that some virtuous Apfelwein-reeking Swabian would be excluded because they were too German. There is a Pact of Steel between Federal Arts Funding (gulp) and ethnic minority representation. The boys from Chicago put on the front to deal with the NEA but there was no way you could hype them even for a minute. They ate avant-garde poets for breakfast. But that’s when complete consistency, realism, due diligence, mastery of artistic asset values, win the day. I mean, one way of not having a Mid-Western culture Tsar not think you’re full of shit is not to be full of shit. Tony was selling something he could accurately describe. So that’s how we ended up with the 2002 Chicago Review anthology. 200 pages of poetry. It was astonishing. We cleared the plains.
When I was living in Germany, one of the other artists in the same Kunstlerhaus was from Leipzig and she told me an anecdote about a huge exhibition of modern German art in Berlin which had had not one single East German artist in it. Obviously you had the transfuges, the ones like Penck and Richter who had mainly worked in the West. This was a huge problem. By defining it all as such a victory you produced a defeated nation. She was still hurting about it years later. I think we managed to give a fair showing to Those [Commies] from Over There. I don’t think the National Endowment for the Arts would regard East Germans as an ethnic minority, but they obviously are. Seiler writing about how his grandfather used to come home from the uranium mine and shove his hand in front of the radio and you could hear the crackle of the radioactivity coming through the radio speaker. That’s what I call transmission. Things aren’t like that in the Erewash Valley.
I will just mention States of Independence, a compelling 1998 anthology where Tony selected 18 poets from the penumbra of English inattention and stated the case for something quite striking. How few people are interested in locating good English poetry (as opposed to collecting evidence for some crackpot poetological idea). Modern poetry yields to connoisseurship and knowledge and does not need some illuminist key. This was a book Stride took on – the Exeter connection, seemingly. Tony was at Essex University when things were really happening there, around Dorn, Raworth and so on. I know he planned an anthology of the Essex School, but it wasn’t to be. This is a vital area on the map of modern poetry. Things even went wrong in a pace-making way.
My guess is that really deep knowledge of another literature, that is a modern one and one of major dimensions, produces a frame of mind in which recent English literature truly reveals itself: a question of rapid dismissal of the mediocre, and boundlessly patient exploration of the complete extent of what is excellent – all the labyrinths and all the archipelagos. It is relatively easy when faced with a foreign culture to escape polarisation – the liberatory act which is the basis, I am increasingly sure, for deep knowledge of one’s own generation and so of where one is standing. On return to the native culture, the endless lines of barbed wire seem ridiculous and intellectually unworthy. I feel sure that this background as a modern linguist was significant to Tony in building the historically significant depolarisation which structured the Shearsman list. But that’s another story.