It is interesting to conceive of art as a way of practicing certain qualities that make us more compassionate and intelligent human beings. When you read, you allow someone else’s thoughts to run through you. If you never read, you never practice that.

And since we use concepts to recognize and understand our world, the impoverishment of our “word hoard” can have disastrous effects. Imagine a world of very few concepts. Then imagine that the concepts we hold in us are of such a character as to encourage oversimplification and the stunting of our sensibilities.

Imagine that there were either Heroes or Terrorists. Writers, artists, protesters, critics, freedom- fighters, polemicists, debaters would all have to be placed into one of the two categories, if we imagined that the finer nuances of language did not exist…

If you imagine such a world,you are not far from the world that many actually reside in today. Nor are you far from the language of totalitarianism or even the Third Reich, or of the Tertii Imperii as Victor Klemperer called his book. LTI, Lingua Tertii Imperii, the language of the Third Reich.

Klemperer was a philologist, Jewish, German, a distinguished representative of the great German tradition of cultural personages like Goethe, Moses Mendelssohn and later Jakob Burckhardt, Werner Jaeger, Eric Auerbach who wrote his great work Mimesis, in a library in wartime Istanbul, largely from memory. They were members of what Georg Henrik von Wright called “den fornemme tyske lærdomstradition, som blev afbrudt af nazismen af 2. verdenskrig, og hvis fremtid er hyllet I mørke.” [the venerable German tradition of great learning that was broken off by Nazism and WWII and whose future is wrapped in obscurity. eds]. The man of learning, whose scope was broad and whose loving knowledge was deep.

Klemperer was a philologist, an aficionado of language. And as he was Jewish, he was, of course, personally affected by the depredations of Hitler’s insane fantasy. His interest in how words were used, or wielded, lead him to notice how concepts were being introduced into the public sphere by clever, manipulative word-experts who would have a population begin to practice certain ways of being, novel to it.

People were to be “steeled” of course and they were to be convinced that there was something called “purity”, something called a “pure race” and that there were elements that were “IM-pure”. In fact, the introduction of a number of words containing the prefix IM or, in German, UN, proliferated as did that of the prefix ENT (de) which designated the concept of doing-away-with. Thus the world was to be “entjudet” (de-jewified) and many other things. Sensitivity and candor were to be made ridiculous, attributes of “the weak.” Thus an SS officer was trained to do terrible things, things perhaps against his young nature, for the greater cause of the Reich. Those considered weak were to be starkly contrasted to the “men of steel.” (The extreme example of this conceptual fashioning found its personification in Stalin who assumed the name, Steel.)

Both Stalin’s and Hitler’s regimes drew their inspiration, in creating new words and projecting them, from- get this – American advertising, with its enthusiasm for strident proclamation or declamatory shrillness, something new in the world. That large masses of people could be encouraged to purchase products by the bold repetition of suggestions, was new. Of course, advertising itself, the announcing of products with the attendant propaganda of purchase, goes back to at least Elizabethan times. But the Elizabethans, as far as we know, had no radios. And radio was something absolutely revolutionary in its ability to affect millions of persons simultaneously. Newsreels were also new and used to great effect.

All of this is history. Everyone knows it. But what is perhaps new is the idea that the freedom we all assumed was won is in peril. Freedom of thought is under assault today.

So LTI, published first in 1990 (in many languages), completed in 1946, is relevant to our time. It appears for the first time, now, in Danish. Hooray for that. The efforts of an idealistic person, a Mr. Henning Vangsgaard has translated all three hundred or so pages, written extensive notes and produced a superb book, a labor of love, perfectly done.

LTI is not merely a philologist’s notebook. Which is good. It is more a philologist’s diary, or at least, an account that draws from personal experience. And that is what is so painful to the reader. The immense modesty of Klemperer, who carefully describes the insidious introduction of this word or that into a language he absolutely adored, witnessing the destruction of the culture of Goethe and Beethoven and both Mendelssohns (the composer and the philosopher). So the book is really the biography of an intelligent and cultivated man, born into a culture he loved and the witnessing (by us) of how that man, day by day, was to be stripped of the gratifications of a full life and the right to be human in this world. He describes the process almost peripherally to the greater subject of the book (that of language), like someone who talks about flowers in a garden his family had been murdered in. (He survived only because his wife was “arian” and thus he was delegated the status of  a “Mischling” (a mongrel). Horrible. It is his modest discretion about his own suffering that works so powerfully on us.

Notes on Gränsglaset (Border-glass) by Anna Mattsson

a chronicle of emotions, guided as best she can by thoughts that would insure survival and insight… the implicit pain that lies behind these poems… the courage required to chronicle it… she is precise in her lyricism, the tone reminds one of (which is not to say they are like them ) northern verses, the eddas, voluspa, the kalavala… none of the swedish critics we read picked up on this.

She begins with the rhythm of the old songs. From the nordic past of struggle and ascent. Of the curse and its overcoming. And she begins with a glass.

border-glass that she falls through
falls is crushed chrysalis fallen

the girl the fright against the earth

maiden who has oily fists
come and be my sister-in-arms

Who? the reader asks, who is to be her sister-in-arms?

come and be the crackling branches
leaves that burn along the wayside

breathing air quicksilvery white
just as grating just as vivid

you will breathe me in your blood now
now you are the girl-of-fright you have told everyone

The girl-of-fright. A kind of double. She who is the creation of something that has happened to the narrator in the past.. The experiences of the narrator personified now by a figure who follows her inexorably through her life.

and you have scraped on every thing beaten now on every thing
now the colors get to loosen

every day you learn a new thing
new names for the birds and places
edges blue and spots of green

I saw you dancing I let you be
You said you were the girl-of-fright I let you be

She accepts the existence of the girl-of-fright…the consequences of what the narrator has experienced is a kind of strange isolation..yet she has personified that experience in the girl-of-fright…

I let you be you brightened darkness
singing underneath the earth I left you there

and down below the asphalt of you your hands were reddening
clutching at me through the windows of the earth

**

were clutching towards me like voices and plagues
invitations parties the dancing herd

there you will be you sent the letter
sending grains to your new antarctica

**

your arteries harbor fright
your womb of woman radiates fright

suddenly you were a child in a cape
it fell away and bared you as a statue

a mix of grass marble flesh
glances that shot your fright into stoneness

**

pelted by the cries of near ones
they weighed you out with their brutal ways

no sooner do they hold your hand dear
you bound from them towards the rail

**

and the rail becomes a sea and a sky
and the sky becomes a box of blue

and somewhere back there it begins to burn
it burns in the factories’ bins and houses it burns in the hands

**

you cannot bear a beaver now
nor can you bear a heron or a crane

you might be able to bear it as words in your mouth
bearing them across vast reaches holding them above the water

with leaves that are small and glisten
we make a trip into the new names

and fright will be buried within the wind
across the roots that are exploding

a grain for each day
your sorrow has known

your entire life lies there in the woods

in the underworld no one needs to breathe
they dance without rest

for a time this is the girl-of-fright’s home
mirror worlds of the drowning time
but fright led her again toward fright

…..

I am raised from the dead
and the words are what they stand for
tree ball game oblivion

again and again she says these words
and the stones turn to expose
the solitary row of living promises
insects journeying from one war to the next

a letter that was burning

….

as part of her Passion she considers whether she will have children

you shall not bear a child you said

you were once a child yourself
who came into a world of thunder
magnets and nameless plants

it is called a nettle, I answered
stinging nettle even
you didn’t know

she turns pale with fright
and shame, the girl-of-fright

I don’t ask her for an excuse
I let her stand there and whiten

……

the sun has come
the girl-of-fright is jubilant

no song is more powerful
than the rays of the sun

I now have prayed for the lonely ones
and sent them rays of the sun

soon I too will be alone
animals are the loneliest of all…

Gränsglaset turns out to be immensely courageous. Every violation the author has experienced becomes a calibrated journey through anguish and agony into a kind of illuminated clearing where self-knowledge can take place.

The girl of fright shadows the poet as does the poetry of the north, one a being of shadow and shame and self-knowledge, the other, the pulsing beat of verse, the tradition of verse, that will get her through all this.

Each page (there can be a full poem or only a line or two) represents the unfolding of leaves in this plant of torment.

The process represents a confrontation with this phantom, the girl-of-fright. A form of exorcism but also of reconciliation.

All of this is brought about by her transformative angel,who gives her thoughts and then fades away towards the end of the book so that the author “has nothing more to say” to the girl-of-fright.The angel’s task is done. The girl-of-fright is allowed to vanish.

Thus we arrive at the point where the girl-of-fright is banished or simply leaves, we are not sure which.

And the metrical sounds of nordic verse reappear to bear the narrator on in her journey:

through the glass they heard the current
border’s glass’s hushed despair
do you hear the border scratching
voice that scratches glass and songs

GRÄNSGLASET
Anna Mattsson
Wahlström & Widstrand

Saul Bellow’s letters (well two fifths of them) have appeared in a large volume. But only HIS letters, not those of the people with whom he corresponded. That can be frustrating, of course. Yet it is interesting to read his letters to Owen Barfield, whom poets may know from his book Poetic Diction. It was precisely that book Howard Nemerov regarded as a kind of bible: “Among the few poets and teachers of my acquaintance who know Poetic Diction,” Mr. Nemerov has written in his introduction to Barfield’s work, “it has been valued not only as a secret book, but nearly as a sacred one; with a certain sense that its teaching was quite properly esoteric, not as the possession of a few snobs, but as something that would easily fail of being understood by even the most learned of those jugheads whose mouths continually pour forth but whose ears will serve only for carrying purposes”. So there! Bellow’s letters are brought within a Viking edition of some five-hundred pages and selected by a Mr. Benjamin Taylor. Know that though the volume is incomplete, Bellow’s incessant striving is present in every letter. Saul Bellow always took up the big questions, something he encouraged younger writers to do (but alas, who listened?). In his own novels his true philosophical and metaphysical feelings were often condensed into a mere paragraph or, perhaps, one page. It is informative to read his letters to Barfield and others as a way of illuminating the sources of this greatest of novelists own strivings. He deserved the Nobel Prize he got and deserves to be read and read again.

Aleksandar Sajin with his latest endeavor, Valters Notater (Walther’s Notes) establishes himself as an exceptional voice in today’s panorama of Danish literature. The novel is an exploration of the mind of a febrile writer caught in the limbo of the present, between clairvoyant visions of the future and (often) dark memories of the past. The structure of the book is non-lineal, non-narrative. We view Valter through the eyes of his psychiatrist who is rummaging through his patient’s notes…The prose is borne by an intensely inquisitive soul-mining operation that leaves the reader, well, breathless. We were so enthusiastic about this book that we decided to acquire ten copies which we send, free of charge, to the first ten readers who inform of us of their desire to have one. If you are interested, and read Danish, send us your address and we shall send you a copy of Valters Notater, free of charge, posthaste. This is the least we can do to express our thanks to our many readers of Danish.

Valters Notater
by Aleksandar Sajin
Forlaget tab og nar

Louise C. Callaghan is not a stylist and there is always the danger of lapsing into the proclivity for domestic narrative which characterizes much Irish verse of today. But she resists this sentimental tendency and sticks to her own sober discernings. Hers is a chronology of a life bent on liberation. Thus her poems always have the character of daring, of courage, standing fast and going forward.

In The Ninth House
by Louise C. Callaghan
Salmon Poetry (Ireland)
www.salmonpoetry.com