Politics, Context and The Constellation

Abstract

This essay explores a triple silence in and around one of the most canonical of visual poems. Eugen Gomringer’s ‘Silencio’, a poem that has been misread in almost all its critical commentaries. Such commentaries, which concentrate exclusively on the poem’s formalist ramifications, ignore the poem’s historical and political context. By taking into account the fact that this poem was written within a decade of the discovery of the concentration camps, and discussing its various translinguistic manifestations, the text’s central silence is shown to evoke matters far more sombre than the discourse of aesthetics can account for.

Keywords:

• constellation
• concrete poetry
• Shoah
• translation

Notes

1. See Sadler (1998) who offers an informative overview of the ludic played out in Situationist urban planning and Sussman’s thoughtful (1989) collection that provides a useful history of the Situationist International from 1957–1972.

2. See Thaïs E. Morgan’s ‘Invitation to Cratylusland’ that introduces Genette’s book Mimologics (1995), especially page xlvii. The Cratylic tradition derives from Plato’s dialogue Cratylus in which Cratylus argues against Hermogenes’ theory that the relationship of words to things is arbitrary and conventional, proposing instead a natural relation.

3. Gomringer, born in Bolivia but with Swiss citizenship, has spent much of his life in Bamberg, Germany and currently lives in the Bavarian town of Rehau.

4. In a 2010 conversation with W. Mark Sutherland, Gomringer admits to the similarities between the sonnet and the constellation (Sutherland, 2012). A footnote to the conversation translated a part of Gomringer’s 2009 Introduction to der sonette gezeiten (Edition Signathur, Rehau, Germany): ‘indeed, beginning to write sonnets again is an experiment for me, a very personal one. It needs a concentrated “cover” of inner and outer facts in a predetermined structure, whose transparency I accept and whose bisection in quatrains and triplets does not mean a restraint but a reversible decision for a variation. A problem of all art since modernism is how to render reality (if it should not be negated) in an aesthetically acceptable form’ (Sutherland, 2012: 14).

5. Playful perhaps, but ‘ping pong’ is redolently political, evoking both the political rhythm of the cold war years in general and more specifically the to and fro, east and west of a divided Germany.

6. Fry frames his analysis as a ‘responsible’ answer ‘to the grave charges concerning the potential correlation of silence, misappropriated language, and “the temptations of the inhuman” that are leveled by historical witnesses like George Steiner’ (1995: 20). As Fry’s related footnote makes clear, the charges addressed are those found on page xi in George Steiner’s Language and Silence (1967).

7. Lyotard broadens the scope of this indictment beyond the boundaries of Germany. In his explanation of the graphic form of the phrase ‘the jews’ (without capital and in quotations), he refers to its specific reference ‘to all those who, wherever they are, seek to remember and to bear witness to something that is constitutively forgotten, not only in each individual mind, but in the very thought of the West’ (1990: 141). On Heidegger’s Nazism and silence around the matter of the camps see Farias (1989) and Lyotard (1990).

8. Concrete poetry in general, as well as the constellation, hopes to relate literature as art less to “literature” and more to earlier developments in the field of architecture, painting, sculpture, industrial development – in other words to developments whose basis is critical but positively-defined thinking’ (in Solt, 1968: 70).

9. The Openings Press was founded by two concrete poets: John Furnival and Dom Sylvester Houédard in 1964.

10. The signed poem appears as item 35 in the September 2001 Miscellany Catalogue of Alan Halsey Books.

11. In Hebrew all letters are feminine.