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Abstract
The German poet Barbara Köhler's 2007 poem-cycle Niemands Frau [Nobody's Wife] is more than a feminist response to Homer's Odyssey. In shifting the focus from the escapades of the hero Odysseus to the web of women characters that populates Homer's epic poem – Nausicaa, Circe, the Sirens, Helen, Ino Leucothea, the shades of the dead women whom Odysseus meets in Hades, and “Nobody’s wife” Penelope – Köhler also undertakes a grammatical shift: from the masculine singular pronoun “er” to the polyvalent pronoun “sie” that denotes the feminine singular, the gender-unmarked plural and the formal “you.” “Sie” acts as the “quantum linguistic particle” that transports the reader from a world analogous to that conceived by Newtonian physics into a quantum universe of plural probabilities. Köhler's work explores the difference in power dynamics that results from this transformation, generating intriguing ways of reconceiving subjectivity, relationality, rationality, and authorship. Taken at their word, the poems open up a prospect of no longer insisting on the sovereign individual subject and his linear modes of narration, inheritance, calculation and grammatical proposition.
disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Barbara Köhler, Niemands Frau. Gesänge (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 2007). Page references will be given in parentheses following quotations, preceded by the poem or section title where relevant. Quotation of poems from Barbara Köhler's Niemands Frau is by permission of Suhrkamp Verlag AG Berlin.
2 “Cyclops, you asked my name, and I will tell it: give me afterwards a guest gift as you promised. My name is Nobody. Nobody, my father, mother, and friends call me” (Odyssey IX, ll.364–67, trans. A.S. Kline, available <http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Greek/Odyssey9.htm> (accessed 16 Apr. 2016)).
3 The first modern author to argue that the Odyssey was written by a woman was Samuel Butler in The Authoress of the Odyssey (New York and Bombay: Longmans, 1897). Andrew Dalby argues the case for both the Iliad and the Odyssey having been written by a female rather than a male author in Rediscovering Homer: Inside the Origins of the Epic (New York and London: Norton, 2006). Nineteenth-century Homeric scholars were divided on the question of Homer's authorship. While the Unitarians argued that the epic poems display such artistry and unity that they must have been the work of a single poet, the Analysts (including Johann Gottfried Jakob Hermann and Karl Lachmann, who elaborated upon Friedrich August Wolf's hypotheses in his Prolegomena of 1795) argued that the texts handed down were a compilation of multiple poems by many authors.
4 On “oculocentrism” and the gaze, see Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1985) 47–48. On woman's preference for touch, see Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1985) 26ff. On “scopophilia” in Freud and the substitution of touch by the male possessive gaze, see also Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1992) 102.
5 Rebecca May Johnson, “Niemands Frau as a ‘Minor Translation’ of the Odyssey from ‘er’ to ‘sie’” in An Odyssey for Our Time: Barbara Köhler's Niemands Frau, ed. Georgina Paul (Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 2013) 71–87 (81).
6 See “Excursus I: Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment” in Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr; trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002) 35–62.
7 Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word [1982] (London and New York: Routledge, 2002) 45.
8 See Helmut Schmitz, “The ‘nachtseite des abendlands’. Barbara Köhler's Niemands Frau and the Dialectic of Enlightenment” in Paul, An Odyssey for Our Time 139–61 (142):
Western philosophy and Western science are marked by the exclusion of the feminine and the exclusion of the body in the positing of the scientist as distanced observer. Feminist critiques of the order of knowledge have pointed towards the gendered codification of this order from its inception.
9 Christos C. Tsagalis, The Oral Palimpsest: Exploring Intertextuality in the Homeric Epics (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard UP, 2008) xii.
10 Ong, Orality and Literacy 45.
11 See my essay “Different Voices: Other Poets in Barbara Köhler's Niemands Frau, with a Special Study of the Significance of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land” in Paul, An Odyssey for Our Time 185–210 (esp. 189–90).
12 The English translation of the “Sirens” poem cited here was prepared (partly in dialogue between poet and translator) for a reading by Barbara Köhler in Cambridge in 2001, when we read the German and the English consecutively, as is the custom with bilingual readings. In 2011, at a reading in Oxford, we prepared an orchestrated version, with some short segments read consecutively in one language then the other, but the greater part of the poem read simultaneously: as a “duality duetting,” as one phrase in the translation has it. The experience was electrifying, both for the audience and for us as readers. In this way the content of the poem became a performance of different subjectivities – and different languages – bodied forth as two selves in something that both was and wasn’t unison, with the German and English overlapping in a fascinating revelation of the differences between the languages, and occasionally a word and its translation directly coinciding. We found ourselves being what the words were saying.
13 Margaret Littler, “Strange Loops and Quantum Turns in Barbara Köhler's Niemands Frau” in Paul, An Odyssey for Our Time 163–84 (172).
14 Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing; intro. Sandra M. Gilbert (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1986) 85.
15 Georgina Paul, Perspectives on Gender in Post-1945 German Literature (Rochester, NY: Camden, 2009) 53.