The indelible Internationales Literaturfestival Berlin opened yesterday. Maryse Cond?? was the final reader; or, rather, her work was read in translation by Astrid Gorvin, a wonderful actress, who transfixed an audience reading from Robert Walser’s first book at the 2005 ILB. After attending that and the following festival, I’ve missed two years in a row now. Again this year I’ve decided to abstain from looking at the full program: I’m in denial that I’m not in Berlin and I don’t want to know what I’m missing. To name only some of the non-Nobel laureates I saw those two summers: Rae Armantrout, Abbas Beydoun, Inger Christensen, Wanda Coleman, Deborah Eisenberg, Hans Magnus Enzensberger (reading his Wallace Stevens translations), Jonathan Safran Foer (at the Opera), Carlos Fuentes, William Gass, Ko Un, Maria Kodama (recalling Borges), Nathaniel Mackey, Friederike Mayr??cker, Eileen Myles, Helga M. Novak, Michael Palmer, Oskar Pastior, Gerhard R??hm, K. Satchidanandan, Lutz Seiler, Yoko Tawada, Eliot Weinberger, and Uljana Wolf.
After he read from The Tunnel, I got up the courage to ask Gass (’47) how he discovered Robert Walser, and after asking about Kenyon, he told me that a student in one of his undergraduate philosophy courses at Washington U. (St. Louis) had introduced him to Walser’s work. That precocious student, Susan Bernofsky, went on to a career as a translator of Walser (and, among others, Yoko Tawada) and Gass provided the perspicacious introduction to her first collection of Walser’s work, “Masquerade” and other stories.
A month ago, Bernofsky broke ground on her The Berlin Blog: politics, art and culture in the German Hauptstadt (http://berlinfromwithin.blogspot.com/) treating the reader to a historically-minded account of Barack Obama’s visit to Berlin. (Since then, under the rubric of The Deep-Storage Archives, Bernofsky has added some “little texts” backdating them to the days of composition when she was living in Berling “during the academic year 2001-2002 – far before [she’d] ever heard of a blog or blogging” the micrograndness of which lend credence to her assertion – at a Morgen Library event earlier this year – that if he lived today, Walser would be a blogger.)
While I was thinking of Bernofsky (and Gorvin) in Berlin, a friend sent me a link to another blog on the interstices of German and American art, culture, and politics. The most recent post covers reactions in the German press to Obama-Biden, but my friend wanted my response to another recent entry: “50 Near Perfect Books of German Poetry.”
Like its intrepid inspiration, the Liliput Review’s 142 (n??e 100) Near Perfect Books of Poetry, it is an impressive list (far outpacing its tepid inspiration, “100 Near Perfect Books of Poetry” :: see comments), full of great good sense (every book by Celan: what’s more, these, and those by Rilke and Trakl, are aptly qualified: “they are perfect.”) and enough surprises to send me to the stacks (multiple books by Wilhelm Lehmann and Heinz Piontek).
Limiting his list to “1) books published since 1900, and 2) collections or poem cycles published in the poet’s lifetime,” and arranging it by date of publication. The compiler makes “no claim of completeness or objectivity” and modestly guesses that Marcel Reich-Ranicki, Germany’s [Harold Bloom], would heap scorn on many of [his] choices.” (I rather think Reich-Ranicki would approve.)
There are plans to expand the list, which consists of 25 poets, to 100 Books and “comments or suggestions – especially post-1980 book titles” are welcomed. In reflecting on the outstanding crop of poets I heard in Berlin (at the festival and elsewhere), and with recourse to the invaluable recommendations at Shearsman Books, I was unable to limit myself to 50 books. Instead, I offer “52 Plusquamperfect German Poets not represented in 50 Near Perfect Books of German Poetry.” Over the next year, find the present, past, and future perfect books of these poets here.
From Aichinger (appropriately) to Wolf (apropos), with apologies to G??nter Grass, whose poem, “Die Wandlung” is as perfect as the final rhyming lines in The Tin Drum, but, whose poetry without plums is less than plusquam: