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KARL SIEGLER / Rummaging Through the Lost and Found of Kerrisdale Elegies

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KARL SIEGLER / Rummaging Through the Lost and Found of Kerrisdale Elegies KARL SIEGLER / Rummaging Through the Lost and Found of Kerrisdale Elegies George Bowering tells us in How I Wrote Certain of My Books (itself a hint about all that French in them) what motivated him to write the Kerrisdal e Elegies: "In the Seventies and early Eighties, it seemed as if everyone I knew in Vancouver was interested in Rainer Maria Rilke." He also tells us how he managed to translate Rilke's Duino Elegies for his project without being fluent in German: he translated the first page on a trip to Dallas without ny lexicographical assistance; crossed off every word he'd written on his subsequent flight out of town; then got himself several other English translations he used to help him create his own. In composing Kerrisdale Elegies, which Bowering maintains "resembles Duino Elegies in overall structure," he was heeding Ezra Pound 's dictum on the kultural obligation of translators: to "make [whatever is being translated] new," and by "new" Pound meant both in the translator's language and time-what Rilke himself referred to as the "Zeitgeist." Of course, while executing Pound's dictum, Bowering also followed the dicta of his mentors Gertrude Stein who had observed that the only authentic task for a writer is to write writing; T.S. Eliot who had pronounced on Tradition and the Individual Talent 1; and William Carlos Williams (who had admonished poets to have "no ideas but in things")- but he certainly didn't mean abstract things-like angels, for example. Lost The first and by far the most important things that get lost in Kerrisdale Elegies are angels ["Engel"] and the intensity of the ideas that these beings evoke in Rilke's German diction. In Bowering's defense, this loss occurs primarily because in German, the infinitive "Sein" is a noun, whereas in English it is a verb or an action of a subject or an agent: "[to] be." That's why Prince Hamlet could have such fun with his wordplay on "to be" at the expense of his friend poor Yorick. 1 "Let us go then, I heart and eye," Kerrisdale Elegies (Va ncouver: Talonbooks, 2008), 99. 165 What this means is that, linguistically, in German, "Sein" is a concrete thing, whereas in English, "being" is an abstract idea. Now in Plato's theory of forms, ideas of things rather than the things themselves, are the true measures of the world. The opposite is true in Dr. Williams' philosophical materialism. With this in mind, one can begin to see rather clearly how things (and the ideas they engender) get lost in translation. The Duino Elegies are "about" three interrelated states or orders of being ("Sein") and how we experience them within time ("Zeit"). The first of these is "Hiersein" of which we partake in the here-and-now of the (ever) present moment-a state of being that Rilke characterizes as animal. The second is "Dasein" of which we partake because we are able to imagine things other than the self both within and outside of the present moment-a state of being that he characterizes as human. The third is "Sein" of which we partake because we are aware of time ("Zeit") as something that precedes our birth, gives shape to our "Dasein" (our being-in-the­ world), and continues after our death-a state of being he characterizes as angelic. These three states or orders of being need not be described in religious terms. Other poets, like Charles Olson and Robert Creeley, for example, apprehended the mystical interrelationship between them without resorting to religious iconography when they said things like: "time is the life of space." Found Rilke didn't know anything about baseball, so you'll find no mention of it in his fifth Duino Elegy (a meditation on Picasso's painting Les Saltimbanques), but George Bowering sure does. You find a lot of it in his fifth Kerrisdale Elegy, in which he ascribes to baseball the same immortal nature as that of Rilke's angelic orders, and in which, just in case the reader is about to miss the point, we also find the sole appearance of an angel: "Baseball angel, / it's early summer, / accept him, / lighten the air, / open the infield, / give him / one white rainbow today, / set him on second, I the lovely red dirt all over his flannel. / Extra / basis." Rilke's angels can also be found as "spooks" in Kerrisdale Elegies. Not even the putatively lost souls of the Beat Generation could deny that the brilliantly radiant last page of Bowering's Fifth Elegy celebrates all that is immortal about our being-in-the-world: "cast blossoms of immortality over nine heads, / bring at 166 last a satisfied smile to the face I between these shoulders here on earth, / on the road, I in last place." Baseball as a metaphor for the immortal (which is what angels are for Rilke) has become almost a cliche for any student of "Modern North American Poetry" but it's useful in this context to revisit the question of why it might have become so. Key to engaging that question are two things that happened in 1845. In that year, Alexander Cartwright wrote down what were to become (and remain, with subsequent additions and amendments) the rules of the game for a New York City ball club called the "Knickerbockers" who were using a park in Hoboken called the Elysian Fields to play "baseball" because Manhattan had run out of soft fields-the island had been paved. 2 In that same year, Karl Marx wrote The German Ideology, in which he first insisted that materialism was the sole motive force in history, and then rejected all of what he and Engels considered to be the "false idealism" of the socialist movement. William Carlos Williams is as helpful as the ancient Greeks here in our attempt to formulate some idea about how these two things might be related to each other- in Spring and All the good doctor writes of a dying woman's "elysian slobber / upon / the folded handkerchief." How ironic that the birth of Marx's historical materialism occurred in the very same year the rules for baseball were born! In the Batter's Box Rainer Maria Rilke began his Duino Elegies as a guest of Princess Marie von Turn und Taxis in Trieste, Friul-Venezia Giulia, Italy, in 1912. Three score and ten years later, George Bowering began his Kerrisdale Elegies as a guest of the Canadian consulate in Dallas, Texas, USA-in 1982. 2 In Greek myth, the Elysian Fields consisted of a beautiful meadow in which Homer says the heroic and virtuous favoured by Zeus cou ld enjoy perfect happiness. Hesiod, in his Works and Days, locates them at the edge of the earth beyond the western ocean (i.e. in the Americas). Pindar describes Elysium in his Odes as a land of shady parks whose residents spend their time pursuing whatever employment they had enjoyed in li fe, along with their athletic and musical pastimes. Both Pindar and Hesiod claim Elysium is ruled by Cronos, fa ther of the Olympian Gods, and Hesiod ve ry specifically locates it "far from the deathless gods." That's pretty much how George Bowering imagines a baseball park on the first page of his Fifth Elegy. 167 It is extraordinary that one can take the measure of how radically cultural sensibilities can change in the course of a biblical lifetime by a careful reading of only these two texts. Rilke's Duino Elegies were written over the ten-year period between 1912 and 1922. The delays in their completion were caused, in the main, by the severe and recurring bouts of depression Rilke suffered as a result of being briefly conscripted into military service (for six months at the war records office in 1916). It's not at all strange then that, like Ezra Pound, he saw hope for a renewed, utopian civilization after this "war to end all wars" in Mussolini's fascist movement. On the other hand, George Bowering's brilliant response to Rilke's call, the Kerrisdale Elegies were composed in roughly one year near the end of the Cold War, an historical period for which baseball was to become as perfect a metaphor as it had become for the immortal orders of the Cosmos. During the nine "innings" of the game, each of the two teams takes turns playing at bourgeois individualism (batting) on the one hand, and collective action (fielding) on the other. Players on either side make "errors"-i.e. cause material imperfections in the perfect fabric of the game. These opposing gestures of play, enacted on an idealized, diamond­ shaped field of green, represent the abstract contending social ideologies defining the political dialectic-the "Zeitgeist"-of the age: capitalism vs. communism.3 So clearly did the counter-culture adherents to the mid-century modernism of North American civics recognize this divine symmetry between the "never­ dying game" and the temporal orders of their everyday, that Bowering, along with numerous other artists, musicians, intellectuals and cultural workers, extended the reach of the Elysian fields of the game beyond the domain of professional actor/entertainers in the North American "World Series" to the all-encompassing Kosmic League of the average Joe and Jill. Rilke's poem begins with a traditional evocation of the transcendent. It opens with: "Who, if I were to cry out, would even hear me, among the angelic orders?" and ends with a nostalgic evocation of the muse of grief attendant at the spectacle of the beauty and promise of all young life born to its certain death; "we who aspire to an ascendant fortune, are overcome by astonishment at the fortunate's fall.
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