Poems are like reflections in a mirror. You can recognize yourself and your society in them. This experience stirs something in you. A poem by Rainer Maria Rilke gives you an insight into your inner self. For me, poetry is also a form of communication that can open up worlds – inside and outside. It is also a mirror to society and history; it brings back what has been suppressed, it provokes, it takes issue with the present. Its precise, rhythmically condensed language allows poetry to capture the best and the worst aspects of human existence and jolt us out of our habitual ways of thinking and perceiving.
My project in Berlin, "AfterWords”, focuses on 20th and 21st century German poetry. Our aim is to think about temporality in poetry. For the past 40 years, space has been the defining paradigm of literary theory. As a result, little attention has been given to the temporal dimension. We want to change that. We want to flesh out a new theoretical framework for the reception of poetry that more aptly captures how lyric works circulate through time.
I translate a lot of contemporary poetry into English. I approach poems openly. My readings are very close; I want words to unfold their meaning. Only then do I move on to develop my analysis and critique and draw on a poem in its own context in order to read and understand it better.
In literary studies, the concept of “afterness” describes a feeling of coming after, of always being too late and being depedent on what has gone before. Many modern poets, for instance, engage with Rainer Maria Rilke, be it because they want to measure themselves against him, adapt his language to their own purposes, or because they feel burdened by his legacy. We want to understand how some poets are haunted by the past, while others, many younger poets in particular, develop a much more untroubled, playful approach. To this end, we collaborate with contemporary writers, translators, and artists.
Our project also looks at how poetry is disseminated: how poems find their way from one language into another, sometimes only then to enter the canon of world literature. Or how they circulate in film, music, or other environments and thus develop afterlives in new media. Another aspect ("After Confession") concerns how the lyric subject – the “I” or “we” in poems – is created and played with. How women or minorities who previously had no access to this poetic voice, have taken hold of it in the 20th century and developed it. A future focus will be on how poetry engages with ecology and its role vis-à-vis environmental change (i.e., "After Nature").
My hope is that my work will help to shape a different narrative of the history of German poetry. The focus has always been on the “new”: Rilke’s New Poems at the beginning of the 20th century, the “Zero Hour” of literature in 1945 or the new poetry post-1990. But it is easy to reverse this focus and emphasize that poetry has always been a response to what came before. Because even when we label something as new, it is always already woven into history.
Rilke believed that sounds never fade completely, that the cries of the victims of the Titanic disaster and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s final words are still in the world. Brilliant image. We must always engage with the sounds of the past.