I work for a company that produces academic content, so we have a pretty substantial reference library. They just announced that they are clearing out their unused and out-of-date materials, so I picked up a nice hefty stack of FREE BOOKS! I focused on grabbing as much poetry as I could, since it is something I've been meaning to tackle a lot more.

Published 2014

 

 

One day I got to my class and after 10 minutes without other classmates arriving, my teacher Winfred Scheulen and I agreed to talk about anything worth our fancy. Being Poetry one of my long-term interests, I asked him who his favourite poet in the German Language was. I was expecting something along the lines of Rilke, Hölderlin, Hesse, but what came out of his mouth was Paul Celan. My journey of discovery regarding Celan started that day. The next day I went out and started canvassing all the bookstores in Lisbon trying to find something with Celan written on the cover, which I did: two wonderful bilingual collections (German vs Portuguese) by one of our most distinguished Professors of German Studies: João Barrento. It was through this collections (“Sete Rosas Mais Tarde”/”Seven Roses Later” with Yvette Centeno and “A Morte É Uma Flor”/”Death is a Flower”) that Celan became instantiated in me.

 

 

 

Hop on my blog should you so wish to read the rest.

Disclaimer: I received an advance reader's copy (ARC - Uncorrected Manuscript Proof) of this book from NetGalley in exchange for my honest review. All opinions expressed are my own, and no monetary compensation was received for this review.

(The book is due to be published on May 12, 2015; review written 10/04/2015)

 

Contents (in bold typeface):

 

Deus Ex Homine

The Server and the Dragon: “These days, the nerd rapture is like the flu: you can catch it. The godplague is a volition-bonding, recursively self-improving and self-replicating program.” Narrative taking place in the span of millennia and feeling like a dream-quest. My favourite story.

 

Tyche and the Ants

 

The Haunting of Apollo A7LB: “The moon suit came back to Hazel the same night Pete was buried at sea.”

 

His Master's Voice: “Before the concert, we steal the master’s head.”

 

Elegy for a Young Elk: “No point in being a poet: they had already written all the poems in the world, up there, in the sky. They probably had poetry gardens. Or places where you could become words. But that was not the point. [ ] Bright words from dark matter, that’s what poetry was about. When it worked.”

 

The Jugaad Cathedral: “They did something right when they made her, up there. [ ] She lives in many worlds at once, thinks in qubits. And this is the world where she wants to be. With me.”

 

Fisher of Men: “The summerhouse was his, his alone. He hadn’t built it, of course, but the vision was his. He had built a 3D version of it out in Second Life.”

 

Invisible Planets: “In the lives of darkships, as in the journeys of any ambassador, there always comes a time that is filled with doubt. As the dark matter neutralinos annihilate each other in its hungry Chown drive heart and push it ever closer to the speed of light, the darkship wonders if it truly carries a cargo worthy of the Network and the Controller.” À la Italo Calvino, Rajaniemi follows the concept of a dialogue between two entities, but in his story the characters are spaceship with embedded AI. Their dialogue is centered around inhabitants of various planets, leading to a reflection on society. This is another fine example of providing backstory without infodumping (there’s a passing mention of a much known and central theorem in the field of Quantum Physics, though it isn’t called by its own name in the story; can you name it? Hint: it has to do with Teleportation…).

 

Topsight: “The night before Kuovi was supposed to fly home, the four of them went to bring back Bibi’s soul.”

 

Ghost Dogs

 

The Viper Blanket

 

The Oldest Game

 

Shibuya no Love: “They were eating takaoyaki by the statue of Hachiko the dog when Norie told her to buy a quantum lovegety. [  ] A what? , she managed to ask. [ ] You don’t have them in Finland? How do you meet boys there? Oh, I forgot, you have the sauna!”

 

Paris, in Love

 

Satan's Typist: “Tap tap tap tap tap, said the typewriter.”

 

Skywalker of Earth: “Twelve hours before the rain of ships. I am four years old and

wearing my best dress. The last man on the moon is on TV. He moves in slow, deliberate bounds and leaps next to a long-legged spidery craft wrapped in tin foil.”

 

Snow White Is Dead, where Rajaniemi explores the concept of Neurofiction in fiction in general and in SF in particular: “[ ] we just wanted to look at what happens in a reader’s brain when they read SF. For example, it turns out that the experience of insight has a very distinct brain wave signal, and I was curious to see if we could deliberately evoke it in a reader.” (Appropriate Scala source code in here for us to play with).

 

Another wonderful excerpt from the “Snow White is Dead”: “I am everything you could ever want. I am everything that you can’t buy, you who sit there in your white coat, with your slicked-back hair and Biarritz tan and expensive watch and a faint smell of pine in your aftershave. I am life. I am innocence. I am fragile. I am sweet. I am the thing you made, from chemicals and electric dreams.”

 

Unused Tomorrows and Other Stories, where Rajaniemi explores the concept and praxis of Microfiction: “Writing microfiction is the ultimate challenge to a writer’s craft. It requires cutting away everything unnecessary, leaving only a sharp, singular image that the reader can grow into a story on their own.” A wonderful example of this so-called microfiction extracted from this segment: “Parallel world: [The movie] 'It’s a Wonderful Life' never gets made. Christmas becomes the suicide season. It rains wingless angels.”For me this epitomizes what Rajaniemi’s fiction is all about. He aims at pruning his writing of everything superfluous, giving the reader (almost) total freedom to make up his or her own story.

 

I've read some of Rajaniemi's short fiction (he's popped up in Gardner Dozois' yearly collection on a couple of occasions in the past few years), but reading him in one go is something entirely different.

 

Rajaniemi’s fiction supports my firm belief that SF is at its best when it uncompromisingly tosses the reader into unfamiliar vocabulary and settings, then slowly giving out clues to understand it. At times, the barrage of intense vocabulary begins to sound like Celan’s poetry (vide several of examples above).

 

When reading Rajaniemi we’re in another “country”.  His fictiopn is everything but traditional, e.g., genre-clichéd. What we’ve got here are complexly stories where even minor details are significant (in a Rajaniemi story one can expect lots of details). Don’t expect infodumps à lá Neal Stephenson, i.e., Rajaniemi rarely breaks stride to explain his science or world (or words come to that). That is actually one of his great strengths. Rajaniemi might introduce a concept such as “quantum lovegety” (a quantum Tinder App with much more explicit undertones) but allow the rationale to disentangle through the actions and dialogue of the characters. Rajaniemi may use a term like “quantum lovegety” over and over again but not explain it clearly until much later in the story (and sometimes never).

 

It is a pretty good way to build a story that adds another strata of mystery to something already mysterious, and thus preventing infodumping so common to SF. Some people will hate as a matter of course. Why? Probably because they get confused (as I am sometimes). SF and Rajaniemi’s fiction in particular impart a sense of glamour, otherness, and estrangement. Don’t expect a Rajaniemi story to include a glossary of terms.

 

Technically I’m always on the look-out for writers able to (ably) write in a language other than their own. Rajaniemi is one of those writers.  His English is literate, and insightful. Drawing a parallel with myself, I’m bilingual, but I’m unable to write fiction (and Reviews, for that matter) in Portuguese. I consider myself to be an outgoing guy English-language-wise. Portuguese-wise I’m more introverted…

 

Due to the fact that it’s a potpourri collection of fiction, some unevenness in the quality of some of the stories is to be expected. Nevertheless the best stories are up there with the best. This collection did not push all of my buttons, but rather pushed all the right ones.

When reading Rajaniemi you’re on your own. Have a nice voyage.

 

NB: My own attempt at writing microfiction (go easy on me…):

Jagged pieces of light stream throughout the computer store front window, creeping under the doorways. They had to dodge the impact. Of light that sparks up when there’s too much avoidance. It caroms off the shelves, past the sidewalk, and landing right on a purple tiled floor. It disappears at last. Darkly with a mind that is now made up. It oozes into the color like the purple of poppy ripping. Congruous. Pieced together until it fits perfectly.

(Based on the ideas and prose by Hannu Rajaniemi. I'm sure he'd agree that it makes you think about what comes next in the story).

 

SF = Speculative Fiction 

 

About one thousand pages of Celan’s poetry.

I’m in for a treat… This's my first all-encompassing collected edition of Celan's poetry.

When reading Celan’s poetry I always compare him with Berthold Brecht, whose poetry of social and political comment was much more clear-cut.

Celan’s poetry is always open to the unexpected and the unpredictable. One cannot foresee where one of Celan’s poems is going.

In Celan’s poetry each tiniest detail is meaningful, ie, the “meaning” (if one is able to discern meaning in Celan’s poems) only gets revealed in the wholeness of the poem and not by “understanding” the parts per se.

Like Rilke, Celan invented a new (German) language for himself (for instance the word “Der Irrsee”/”The Wildsee”?). German lends itself to the formation of compound words in a way that Portuguese (and English) do not. German verbs can also be given new functions through their direct combinations with prepositions (like Rilke did, but now going further afield).

Let’s see if I can make head or tail of the poems of his late period, which is the most difficult to “interpret”.

Final thoughts after reading the all thing: I'm still dazed... Bereft of words. Later on I'll try to give an account of this otherworldly poetry...

“Ich bin du, wenn ich ich bin” (I am you when I am I”/”Sou tu quando sou eu”) from the poem Lob der Ferne (Praise of Distance) is one of my favourite one-liners.

Paul Celan stands among the most powerful poets. His poems are distilled and piercing, usually compact yet heavy constructions of well chosen words. Most poetry readers know his story. Born in eastern Europe to Jewish, German-speaking parents, he lost his parents to Nazi criminals, as well as any sense of “home,” I would assume. It’s strangely just that the greatest poet of the holocaust is a native German speaker. S/he just as well could have been Polish or Dutch or Italian or Hungarian. But here we have the victim speaking in the tongue of the perpetrator, the two are united in language. How better to penetrate and reflect?

Celan is most famous for his poem "Todesfuge," which is a masterpiece (“Black milk of daybreak..."). I think John Felstiner, the translator of this volume, does an excellent job of rendering it in English. Before writing this short review, I compared his with some other translations and he scores high. The translation by Jerome Rothenburg on www.poets.org, for example, is too stylized. Where Celan writes “wir trinken sie abends,” Rothenburg writes “we drink you at dusktime.” First, “abends” is simply evening and not “dusktime,” and the “sie” with a small ‘s’ is “it,” not “you.” Later in the poem, Celan does say “wir trinken dich,” or we drink you, but this does not and should not happen at the start of the poem. I don't mind translators taking liberties for the sake of idiom and making the poem comfortable in its new language, but I do take issue with imposing unnatural 'flourish.'

Because Celan uses a lot of German compound words in his poetry, translators often import them as single words into English, where they can look uncomfortable. I think compound words are one of the charms of Celan’s poetry, and that charm can get lost whether the word is preserved as one or split as is more natural in English. Sometimes it works. Fadensonnen is fine as Threadsuns; Atemwende is fine as Breathturn. We do build such words in poetry in English, too, but they stand out more in English than they do in German. I think Felstiner handles them well, though not always.

For me Celan is a poet who has really known despair, not the personal despair of the depressed insurance salesman cured by Xanax but the despair induced by having witnessed and experienced the depravity and inhumanity of mankind. He is shocked at once to silence and to speech. His is the terrible wound that won’t close, that should not close because we need to know it. These are the things you will find in Celan poems: bread, almonds, roses, wine, ash, soil, snow, stones, breath, eyes. He is not a fancy poet, and he is economical with his symbols to great effect.

**
Count up the almonds,
count what was bitter and kept you waking,
count me in too:

I sought your eye when you looked out and no one saw you,
I spun the secret thread
where the dew you mused on
slid down to pitchers
tended by a word that reached no one’s heart.

There you first fully entered the name that is yours.
you stepped toward yourself on steady feet,
the hammers swung free in the belfry of your silence,
things overheard thrust through to you,
what’s dead put its arm around you too,
and the three of you walked through the evening.

Render me bitter.
Number me among the almonds.
**

I would definitely recommend this volume, which offers a good selection of Celan in clean translations. It is not complete. The book
[b:Mohn und Gedächtnis|2286909|Mohn und Gedächtnis|Paul Celan|http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41-x8t3KOBL._SL75_.jpg|2293114] alone, Poppy and Memory in English, for example, has nearly sixty poems. There are only 15 poems from that book in this volume. I always have to remind myself that I speak German fluently and can read the original but I do like to have my native English, too.