Although Richard Sieburth’s magnificent new rendering (available from the essential Archipelago Books) omits the date (following the latest scholarship), I still read B??chner’s unassailable Lenz every January 20th. As does the wonderful poet/translator Andrew Shields, with whom I share a favorite passage in Lenz–but could anyone really have another? Not Paul Celan, for one. Like Shields, I always follow up with Celan’s Meridian speech, which stands with Lincoln’s “Gettysburg” as an address for the ages, and is in some sense a midrash on Lenz’s famous first line:
“On the 2oth of January Lenz was walking through the mountains”
(Rosmarie Waldrop’s translation of Celan’s citation)
Celan’s “Perhaps we may say that every poem has its ’20th of January’ inscribed?” takes on a new meaning in light of tomorrow’s inauguration.
The first translation of Lenz into English was by the late master Michael Hamburger, the first book appearance of which was on the prescient Frontier Press (at left, the precious back cover of their Lenz, with its “blurb” from Artaud),which published pirated editions of a number of modernist high spots, most notably H.D.’s Hermetic Definition and Spring & All. Hermetic Definition was apparently copied “by hand by poets” from the manuscript at the Beinecke, narrowly beating New Directions to the punch. New Directions also followed suit with Spring & All (in Imaginations, omitting the prose!–remedied and now eternally in print in the Collected Poems), which had been out of print for nearly half a century before FP rescued it, sparking a renewal of interest in the work in countless poets in the early 70s. (Besides, the first–and only prior–edition, printed by Contact Press in Paris, was 200 copies.)
A more seasoned blogger than all of us would choose to send our–NOW!–President, the Frontier Press Edition of Spring & All. I admire the specificity of the choice, and will concede in conclusion that it is exactly the right one. But let me put a word in for Lenz. After all, B??chner joins Williams and Ed Dorn in an odd FP trilogy of sorts, the only three books they published in a uniform edition:
As Jill Magi put it in her Cadastral Map (Yo-Yo Labs):
the distinct downturn in our
to an end
(The book came out in 2005.) Clearly a Frontier Press (or, indeed, New Directions) book is the right one for our New Director. If Obama’s–and my dad’s–favorite bookstore is reading, I will happily supply my personal FP Spring & All, (pictured above: associatively worn, it belonged, incidentally and thanks to everyone’s favorite Troubadour Books, to ND poet Bernadette Meyer). In the meantime, I will add to my January 20 tradition and read the following: