Oskar Pastior

Oskar Pastior(1927-2006) was born in Sibiu, Roumania, speaking the out-moded German of his fore-fathers. He said that he had this multilingualism to thank not only for the insights it gave him into the possibilities of writing, but above all the associated "relativisation of normative thinking". In 1945 he was deported to a Soviet Labor Camp in the Ukraine after the Red Army took control of Roumania; he spent five years there as part of Roumania’s reparation for having sided with Hitler. This experience, he says, provided him with his thematic tonic: “the small — but significant — scope between freedom and determinism.” Taking odd jobs upon his return to Roumania, he managed to complete his studies in German literature and to work in radio in Bucharest. In 1968 he fled to the West, living in Berlin from 1969 and working "on the language, with the language".

"My seriousness is really rather childlike, akin to the games of kids who've had their fingers burned."

A member of the Bielefeld Colloquium for New Poetry since 1977, he lectured in poetic theory in Kassel (1992), Frankfurt-am-Main (1994), and Vienna (1994).

Publications include poetry, sound poetry, radio plays, art, and translations into German of Petrarch, Urmuz, Khlebnikov, Gertrude Stein, and Gellu Naum. A master of anagrams, sestinas and palindromes, Pastior was coopted by the Oulipo in 1992. He won the Ernst-Meister-Preis (1986), the Hugo-Ball-Preis (1990), the Prix Huchel (2001) and, in 2006, the Georg-Büchner-Preis, Germany’s most prestigious arts and literature honor. Some poems are available in English, notably in Poemspoems (trans. Malcolm Green; Atlas, 1990) and in Many Glove Compartments: Selected Poetry (trans. Harry Matthews, Christopher Middleton, Rosmarie Waldrop, with a guest appearance by John Yau; Burning Deck, 2001).

always

by Oscar Pastior

there's no such thing as the poem.
there's always only this poem that
happens to read you. but because
in this poem see above you can
say there's no such thing as the
poem and there's always only
this poem that happens to
read you even the poem that you
don't read can read you and there be no
such thing as always only this
poem here. both you and you
read that and this. call both by
name: they read you even if
there's no such thing as you only here
(Translated by Rosmarie Waldrop )

I think I need to read that again. Very deep!

Why have I suddenly leapt to Oskar? Well, because he is mentioned in parallel with Herta Muller. Had to go and look of course, and he is a very interesting study when it comes to poetry, not to mention his biography.

See article below from Sign and Sight :

Signandsight.com

31/05/2006

The spell of a tender eel

Romanian-born poet Oskar Pastior will be 80 next year. The German Academy of Language and Literature would have done a service to literature had they honoured his mystical palindromes and anagrams mid-career. By Martin Lüdke.

A wonderful, long overdue, and surprising decision. Anyone who has ever experienced Oskar Pastior reading, his glasses perched on the end of his nose, heard his soft, amiable voice, warm yet clear with an unfamiliar note somewhere, watched his upper lip and little moustache begin to tremble as he purrs out his vowels – in short, anyone who has learned from him that poetry lives and breathes, that words ring and sing and meaning whirrs and whizzes – must share his pleasure. There is no poet who is more reserved in his manner, more moderate in his nature, more likeable in his whole manifestation. Nor one who is more resolute and uncompromising – and also imaginative – in his work.

Our first meeting, about thirty years ago, came about in rather unusual circumstances. If I remember rightly it was during the Frankfurt Book Fair. Klaus Ramm, the man of letters who was first Pastior's editor, later became his publisher, and has also remained his friend and selfless supporter, came to our place to watch a Germany match on television, and brought his author along too, unannounced. A mildly embarrassing situation, because Pastior was not in the slightest bit interested in football. Neither knowing the rules nor understanding the game, he just sat there, silent, throughout the whole thing, the very incarnation of humanity, occasionally flashing a glance over the top of his glasses, and smiling understandingly even while we – led by the kids – were cheering, booing or celebrating wildly.

In those days, at the Book Fair, Ramm was never without his publishing firm. He literally walked round with a hawker's tray. And when you bumped into him it was almost impossible to get away without buying something. That is how I came to own Pastior's early books, like "Gedichtgedichte" (verseverses: 1973), "Höricht" (1975), "An die Neue Aubergine: Zeichen und Plunder" (to the new aubergine: signs and stuff: 1976), "Der Krimgotische Fächer" (The Crimean Gothic Fan: 1978) and "Wechselbalg" (changeling: 1981), all of which I still have.

And that is why I was so annoyed when the German Academy of Language and Literature decided to award Pastior the Georg Büchner Prize. Thirty years ago (or even twenty) it would have been a courageous choice. It would not only have helped the author, who has always lived by extremely modest means. It would above all have done a service to literature, as an – urgently needed – amplifier of Pastior's own quiet voice. As a corrective to the steady advance of conventionalism. As a counterweight to Marcel Reich-Ranicki's persistent insistence on common sense in our literature and the criticism thereof.

Of course it goes without saying that Pastior deserves to be honoured for his life's work. Which is more than can be said for the Academy's late decision.

But we are with the poet on this one: "for sense and meaning giveth also what they take away, what makes no sense may yet meaning show."


Hebrew is read from right to left, German the other way round of course. Pastior can often be read from either end. He works like a DIY aficionado, designing, planning, building and tinkering. At the same time, he approaches the language as a strategist, has his words assemble, line up and march like soldiers, in the process making full use of his freedoms to create new, surprising constellations with each new order.

The results bear names like palindrome, anagram or villanelle, but also inventions like Sonetburger and Gimpelstift (gimpel meaning "dunce" and stift meaning "pen") They are always attempts to turn the rules of the language against themselves, to crack open the language's obsession with its identity and to home in on the tiny, often minuscule gap that separates said from unsaid, the gap where previously hidden, repressed meanings flicker or show their faces. Behind this language work there is – as behind all great poetry – a romantic (or perhaps better, mystic) (mis)understanding of language. The words that Pastior seemingly takes as simple raw material are in fact always charged with the Eichendorffian hope of making the world resonate by finding the magic spell.

Pastior comes very close to this idea when he reads his own poetry aloud. Then it is, as I once read somewhere, "springtime in your head", or, as one of his forerunners, Eugen Gomringer, put it, an "experience": "I like to listen to him. / I drift off a little / and feel as though transported / to a bazaar, where my gaze / roams over strange delights / arranged with wit. / I pick up the timbre and roguishness / of the voice more than I / am able to follow / the words and their tricks. / The man fascinates me." And rightly so, for, "a tender eel is tougher than a randy monk."

*

Hear and read a selection of Oskar Pastior's poems at lyrikline.org

Martin Lüdke was born in Apolda (Thuringia) in 1943 and has published numerous books of literary criticism and writes for the Frankfurter Rundschau, Die Zeit, Der Spiegel and Literaturen magazine.

The article originally appeared in German in the Frankfurter Rundschau on 15 May, 2006.

Translation: Meredith Dale