Images of the abyss: Two poets who reflected on death

“I write so that death does not have the last word”, confessed the Greek Nobel Odyssey Elytis when he reached old age. “Death, be not proud,” warned the metaphysician John Donne in one of his most famous poems. But it is not easy to sustain that battle against silence and nothingness. There are those who, having verbally resisted the inevitable, at a certain moment decided to burn the ships of their physical permanence and surrender to a darkness that they believed was liberating. In those cases, his work became a log of that existential conflict, of its ups and downs, which led to a deliberate self-elimination.

Paul Celan (1920-1970) carved into his verses images in which sensitivity and rationality intertwine with distressing precision, where the trauma of the Holocaust is dissected through the musicality of horror, biblical and surreal keys that reinterpret history and tradition, of the personal circumstance turned into a collective elegy. Celan, a Romanian Jew, had managed to escape from the hell of the concentration camps, but his father died in one of them from typhoid and his mother from a shot in the neck fired by an SS man. The machinery of extermination swallowed them without leaving a trace. Unraveling that devouring and delving into the absurdity of the destruction of bodies and souls driven by anti-Semitism was one of his essential obsessions.

Perhaps the most impressive poem written about the Shoah (along with some by Nelly Sachs) would emerge from that siege: “Death’s Flight”. Its syncopated rhythm, its mortuary visions and the arrested horror of said composition work in the reader the same sensations that can be unleashed before Resnais’s Guernica or “Night and Fog”: “Cry sound more sweetly death / death is a master from Germany / cry sound more sadly gloomy violins and you will rise like smoke in the air / and you will have a tomb in the clouds it does not lie closely there”. Celan was never able to overcome the Nazi horror; he ended up breaking down when he was unfairly accused of plagiarism and his colleagues’ defense was lukewarm. He ended his days by throwing himself into the Seine; This sentence about Hölderlin was found marked on his desk: “Sometimes the genius darkens and sinks into the bitterest part of the heart”.

John Berryman (1914-1972) was twelve years old when he found the body of his beloved father, who had committed suicide by shooting himself in the temple. That event would make his existence an endless nightmare, punctuated by depression, alcoholism that his old age exacerbated, as well as an enormous consumption of pills with which he tried to erase the pain that tore at his heart and his tortured mind. This unequal battle is evidenced in his poems, especially in his flagship book, “77 Songs of the Dream”, a long project in which Berryman, through his alter ego, Henry, recreates the life of a lonely citizen who “has suffered a terrible lost”. The various rooms of the volume -of dislocated syntax and idiosyncratic idiolect that are very complicated to translate- were built through Henry’s dialogues with a mysterious Mr. Bones, a sort of Mr. Hyde or a sarcastic metaphor of death. Bitter evocations of his bloodied father, endless laments over his social dysfunctionality, lucid reflections that swim between liters and liters of bourbon, celebrations of evil and sadism (“But Henry never, as they think he did, / murdered anyone and dismembered his body / and hid its pieces, where they can be found. / He knows: he counts them all and they are always complete. / Him He often gets up at dawn and checks them. none is ever missing”), make up this truly renovating ode to despair: an unavoidable milestone in contemporary Anglo-Saxon poetry.

Despite the recognition this poetry garnered, it was no consolation to Berryman. Death agreed to a tragic epilogue with him: on January 7, 1972, he dropped from the Minneapolis bridge. A young woman passing by said that before rushing into the void, the poet said goodbye to her with a sad triumphant smile.

Qualification: “Complete work”

Author: Paul Cellan.

Editorial: Trotta

Year: 2013

pages: 528 pages

Qualification: “77 Songs of the Dream”

Author: John Berryman

Editorial: Broken glass.

pages: 219pp.