Jaccottet and Mahon

The poetry of Philippe Jaccottet, who died on 24 February at the age of 95, having in 2014 been sealed by the ‘tombstone’, as he felt it to be, of ‘entering into’ the gilt-and-leather Pléiade, is best-known in English in the translations of Derek Mahon. They were published in Penguin International Poets in 1988, the series in which Mahon’s own Selected Poems later appeared, and then a decade later in a smaller selection as Words in the Air (1998). It’s not hard to find affinities between the two poets, as well as other possible reasons which might have attracted Mahon to Jaccottet, however different they also are. In any case, it’s a notable and in the end quite rare example of a major poet providing extended versions of a major contemporary without working with someone else or from existing translations. In his introduction to the Penguin Mahon calls Jaccottet a ‘secular mystic’ and those words have since been used of Mahon himself by various critics too. Both poets evoke Paul Éluard’s idea that another reality exists, but within rather than beyond the world we know. Jaccottet’s word for this ‘other reality’ is ‘l’illimité’, that which has no limits, and he suggests that beauty arises when ‘the limit and that which has no limits become visible at the same time’. Manifestations of such coincidence he looks for above all in the light, in what Mahon calls ‘light-readings’, and says that poems can be thought of as ‘little lamps where the reflection of another light is still ..

Entstellte Darstellung: Schreiben und Lesen im Zeichen des Todes. : Zur spaten Prosa von Nelly Sachs

My thesis is the first scholarly critique of Nelly Sachs’s later prose and seeks to establish it as a significant body of work, both within Sachs's oeuvre and in German literature after the Second World War. In her later prose Sachs develops, describes and publicly illustrates her own poetics, which I describe as 'disfigured representation'. Sachs does so in three different types of prose, which can be differentiated by their functions: firstly, 'Erschreiben' or 'writing oneself' (autobiographical notes developing her poetics); secondly, 'Anlesen' or 'reading the works of others' (essayistic texts further describing Sachs’s own writing by reading the works of others); thirdly, 'Verlesen' or 'reading oneself to/for others’ (public speeches illustrating her own poetics). Contrary to many of the previous studies on Sachs's writing, I argue that the Shoah should not be seen as the centre and sole issue of Sachs's works, but needs rather to be thought of as the historical base of Sachs's poetics. A personal incident, the death of Sachs's mother, proves to be the main catalyst for Sachs’s renewed prose-writing after 1950 and for the formulation of her own poetics in these texts. Together, the historical base and personal incident inform the realm of death, a realm central to Sachs's poetics. Focusing on Sachs's explicit poetics in my close reading of her later prose allows the revision, reformulation, and fusion of previous studies on the implicit poetics in her poetry and plays. Furthermore, it confirms a newly suggested periodisation of her oeuvre, which is closely linked to the question of how literature, history and biography interact. The 'language of the many' in her 1940s writings is followed by a never-ending search for identity after 1950. This leads to a radical literary openness and bodily poetics, erasing the 'I' more and more, until finally we arrive at a distinct form of ethics and witnessing.</p