Poetic Affairs: Celan, Grünbein, Brodsky by Michael Eskin

Abstract

MLR, 104.3, 2009 917 apparently greeted with suspicion?but a fuller investigation of thismight have ex ceeded the limits of what is an excellent, concentrated study specifically of the development of Sternberger's language critique. Trinity College Dublin Gilbert Carr Poetic Affairs:Celan, Gr?nbein, Brodsky. ByMichael Eskin. Stanford,CA: Stanford University Press. 2008. 237 pp. $68; ?43.50. ISBN 978-0-8047-5831-4. It isdifficult to do justice to this extraordinarily ambitious, original, and constantly exhilarating book in the space of a short review.At one level itdeals with the complex interface between lifeand literature through the prism of three outstanding poets: theGerman-Jewish poet and Holocaust survivor, Paul Celan; the Leningrad native, US poet laureate, and Nobel Prize winner, Joseph Brodsky; and Germany's premier contemporary poet, Durs Gr?nbein. In each case Michael Eskin focuses on a single traumatic literary existential affair': forCelan the 'G?ll affair' of 1952, which cast a shadow over the rest of the poet's life; for Brodsky his imprisonment in 1964 and subsequent expulsion from the Soviet Union in 1972, while his mind was on a curious menage a troiswith his lifelongmuse Marianna Basmanova and his friend and fellow poet Dmitri Bobyshev; and forGr?nbein the exile of Lucius Annaeus Seneca toCorsica in 41 ce, on trumped-up charges of adultery with theEmperor's niece JuliaLivilla. From these apparently disparate beginnings comes an attempt to capture themetabolization of real life intopoetry and thus intobiographical legend, but also to draw conclusions about the relationship between lifeand poetology per se and finally to articulate theworking of poetry as ethical practice. On closer inspection, of course, thepoets are not disparate at all; and the affairistic reading' (to use Eskin's terms) of theirwork adds up tomore than the sum of its parts. Cumulatively the chapters focus on the constitution of poetic signification (Celan), the emergence ofpoetic subjectivity (Gr?nbein), and finally the assumption of poetic and ethical agency on thepart of thepoetic subject (Brodsky). And in each case the ostensible affair reveals itselfas a way of simultaneously encoding literary love affairs: inCelan's case his poetology of erotic 'Counterword' inhis translation of Shakespeare's Sonnets, forGr?nbein his dialogue with the precious dead', here Seneca; and forBrodsky his ventriloquism of, and response to,Byron. In elucidating the hidden origins of texts by each of these authors in turn Eskin offers a series of dazzling and sometimes dizzyingly erudite close readings. More over, he uncovers themanifold connections atwork between the poets themselves, including a fascinating excursus on Dante in his reading of Brodsky (Gr?nbein's obsession with Dante iswell known), the use of linked images, especially of the 'Flaschenpost' or message in a bottle, and finally, a shared literary genealogy in Osip Mandel'stam (where the image originated). The real plea of the book is to uncover the 'inner lifeof poetry' (p. 130) and that, forEskin, is as ethical agency. Anyone who has followed his work will be aware of Eskin's long-standing agenda in this regard: set out first inEthics and Dialogue in the Works ofLevinas, Bakhtin, 9i8 Reviews Mandel'shtarriy and Celan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) and reiterated in his edited volume Literature and Ethics (=Poetics Today, 25.4 (2004)). This volume takes that same project furtherbut raises an interesting ethical lacuna along theway: the voices ultimately lost and the lives sublimated into art in that short-circuit as greatmen talk to one another across the ages. The lives translated are not only those of the poets but also those of themuse/beloved who has become material for ethical exchange in another arena towhich she has no access. Eskin isone of themost consistently exciting and subtle criticswriting on poetry today; hemoves between languages, traditions, and disciplines with ease. This latest book is in effecta stringentlyfocused and franklybrilliant essay of 150 pages with 50 pages of notes (sometimes three in a single sentence) which would have furnished material almost foranother volume. Some of themost startling insights are, though, frustratinglybrief (almost asides): on the perils ofmetaphor, for example, on the ethics of translation, love poetry, exile as a poetic paradigm, or the erotics of the reading encounter. The book is...