A response! Be still my beating heart.
Well, I cheated a bit, I think, bringing up the question in a Celan thread, because Celan does something very different from what any other writer whose project is his experience of the holocaust does (for example Kosinski in Painted Bird, though not poetry).
I suppose Adorno is getting at the notion that the Holocaust is so awful it crushed something, permanently crushed an essential part of that something in us that capable of poetry, and that to continue to produce poetry afterward is either impossible or obscene.
I think quite the opposite is true, though, that it's only after such a crushing experience that people can really write poetry. I don't know if you've ever read a novel by somebody obviously talented, very good, and you read it and sort of admire the skill, but afterward remember very little? And then sometimes you come across something just as well-constructed, but it really knocks you back on your heels, and you're not sure what it is, but it's definitely not the technique? With Celan in particular, his poetry is something very odd: it's both personal and specific in the extreme, to the point where it's pretty impossible to ever annotate it fully, and at the same time somehow personal for the reader. I mean, you read Todesfuge (sp?), and you wouldn't think a schoolkid could get much out of it, right? It's dense, very dense and rich. But they give this poem out to kids and they get a lot out of it, really lovely and open things. I'll try to dig up a link.
Does that make any sense? |
