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Heute Hat Ein Gedicht Mich Wieder Erschaffen: Origins of Poetic Identity

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Heute Hat Ein Gedicht Mich Wieder Erschaffen: Origins of Poetic Identity Heute hat ein Gedicht mich wieder erschaffen: Origins of Poetic Identity in Rose Ausländer By Aurora Belle Romero Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Vanderbilt University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in German May 2016 Nashville, Tennessee Approved: Dr. Christoph M. Zeller, Ph. D. Dr. P. James McFarland, Ph. D. Dr. William P. Franke, Ph. D. Copyright © 2016 by Aurora Belle Romero All Rights Reserved TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page Beginnings .......................................................................................................................................1 Die Vergangenheit hat mich gedichtet ........................................................................................9 The Topography of Identity ......................................................................................................11 Aquatic Mythology....................................................................................................................13 The Tapestry of Identity ............................................................................................................15 I. Die Vergangenheit hat mich gedichtet .....................................................................................18 Life and Language .....................................................................................................................18 Alfred Margul-Sperber: Literary Beginnings ............................................................................30 Publication and Literary Recognition........................................................................................32 Selected Scholarly Works .........................................................................................................34 II. The Topography of Identity: Landscape Poems of Rose Ausländer .........................................50 Homeland Bukovina ..................................................................................................................51 Childhood Paradise....................................................................................................................71 The World in the Word .............................................................................................................82 III. Aquatic Mythology: Lorelei, Heine, and Droste-Hülshoff ..................................................100 The Loreley and Heine ............................................................................................................102 Origins .....................................................................................................................................112 The Siren Annette Droste-Hülshoff ........................................................................................122 Death and the Fisherman .........................................................................................................135 IV. The Tapestry of Identity: Else Lasker-Schüler and the Self in the Poetry of Rose Ausländer ..........................................................................................152 Poetic Agency..........................................................................................................................153 Language and Exile .................................................................................................................159 The Myth of Self – The Self as Myth ......................................................................................167 The Storyteller Else Lasker-Schüler ........................................................................................171 Death and the Narrative ...........................................................................................................183 Home ............................................................................................................................................192 REFERENCES ............................................................................................................................197 iii Beginnings Poetry, in a very narrow sense, can never be completely removed from all worldly systems of influence as close-reading may at first suggest. The poem exists neither in a vacuum of its own making, completely severed from the world of the critic, nor pressed between the pages of the era in which it was written. This should not mean that the poem may be read only within literary confines of the milieu that created it. The reader of a poem must always start from the outside in. Language already exists as a communicative system and it is the primary scaffolding of almost all thought. The poet’s task and remedy is to remake language as she writes in order to suit her unique requisites.1 Language exists independently outside of the poem but once it becomes part of a poem, it attains new dimensions and contexts: “But for the word, as the poet uses it, has to be conceived of, not as a discrete particle of meaning, but as a potential of meaning, a nexus or cluster of meanings.”2 Any word used by the poet diverges from its accepted meaning and may acquire one or more new meanings within its new context. The new potentiality emerges from the structure and logic of a particular poem, which has sprung from the experiences that the poet has translated. Her translation becomes an experience unto itself: [The poet’s] task is finally to unify experience. He must return to us the unity of experience itself as man knows it in his own experience. The poem, if it be a true poem is a simulacrum of reality—in this sense, at least, it is an “imitation”—by being an experience rather than any mere statement about experience or any mere abstraction from experience.3 1 Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World, Inc., 1947), 74. 2 Ibid., 210. 3 Ibid., 212-213. 1 The lived experience becomes, as closely as possible, unified with a linguistic experience. Although the poet may reimagine her language each time she writes, it remains at least superficially related to a dominant communicative system. For this reason, the poem can never truly stand alone. It is trapped in a web that connects it to other texts and the experience those texts communicate. During the twentieth century, it also remains vulnerable to the effects of the communicative crisis that followed World War II, and modernity generally, when the nature of experience and community were radically altered. Although the poem may not stand alone in terms of language and literature, it nevertheless achieves a rareness not reached by most other texts. The poem is a unity of content and form. The content is derived from the experiences of the poet, although in an indirect manner as Cleanth Brooks suggests: [The poet] explores, consolidates, and “forms” the total experience that is the poem. I do not mean that he fashions a replica of his particular experience of a certain May morning like a detective making a moulage of a footprint in wet clay. But rather, out of the experiences of many May mornings…and possibly out of a hundred other experiences, he fashions, probably through a process akin to exploration, the total experience which is the poem.4 The experience that the poet fashions in this sense is both one of self-exploration and that of an “ideal” experience, as she often has the benefit of hindsight. She stiches together a multitude of experiences to produce a singularly penetrating one. As William Wordsworth so famously remarked: “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.”5 The poem is both passionate and reflective; it has been 4 Ibid., 75. 5 William Wordsworth, “Preface to Lyrical Ballads,” in Prefaces and Prologues: To Famous Books, ed. Charles W. Eliot (New York: P.F. Collier & Son, 1909–14), np. 2 cultivated over time. The form that the poem ultimately takes is dictated by the content of the experience. Form is not limited to traditional metrics but is expanded to mean the flow of the overall poem, an internal structure: “The structure meant is a structure of meanings, evaluations, and interpretations; and the principle of unity which informs it seems to be one of balancing and harmonizing connotations, attitudes, and meanings.”6 The form informs the meaning by helping to structure the content in a meaningful way, highlighting, juxtaposing, and offsetting key terms to determine a novel meaning. Because the form is so integral to the content of the poem, it becomes an ineffective gesture to attempt to separate the two through paraphrasing. Paraphrasing is an attempt to isolate the “content” of a poem that frequently occurs when trying to interpret a poem solely according to historical, biographical, and even religious conditions of the time in which the poem was written. It severs the poem from the present and alienates contemporary readers as well as prohibiting modern critique. Deriving the meaning from a text where form and content are so closely related to one another becomes a precise art form and a challenging endeavor. Form is not simply the shape the content chooses to take but one of its defining features: “It is as though poetry above all discloses the secret truth of all literary writing: that form is constitutive of content and not just a reflection of it. Tone, rhythm, rhyme, syntax, assonance, grammar, punctuation and so on are actually generators
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