OF SAILORS AND POETS: ON CELAN, GRÜNBEIN, AND BRODSKY

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn this essay, I trace the metamorphoses of the trope of poetry as ‘message in a bottle’ in the works of Paul Celan, Durs Grünbein, and Joseph Brodsky. Beginning from a juxtaposition of Osip Mandelstam's conception of the poetic text as a ‘letter in a bottle’ with Bertolt Brecht's depiction of lyric poetry as ‘Flaschenpost’ in light of their conceptual discrepancies, I inquire into the different ways in which three of Brecht's and, above all, Mandelstam's most notable successors – Celan, Grünbein, and Brodsky – have appropriated and deployed the trope in response to their singular socio‐historical situations. Through a number of close readings of contextually relevant texts (including Celan's Bremen Prize Speech, Grünbein's discussion of Celan and Mandelstam as avatars of what he calls the ‘new Robinson’, and Brodsky's programmatic poem, ‘Letter in a Bottle’), I disclose important differences, poetic and ethical, between Celan's, Grünbein's, and Brodsky's (and, by extension, others') recourse to the ostensibly monosemous figure of poetry as ‘Flaschenpost’, as it was signally launched, in the twentieth century, by Mandelstam in particular.