Tag: loss

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Best Reads 2013. II: Connie Palmen, I. M.: Ischa Meijer. In Margine. In Memoriam

Connie Palmen, I. M.: Ischa Meijer. In Margine. In MemoriamIn February 1991 Dutch author Connie Palmen is interviewed by the well-known talk show host and journalist Ischa Meijer. It is a meeting that changes the course of their lives, and what ensues is a relationship that is not easily matched for intensity. In this stunning and admirably honest autobiographical work Palmen reflects on their love and brokenness. And she gives us insights into the working habits and practices of two writers, whose approaches to their work couldn’t have been more different but who nonetheless profited immensely from what was an intensely symbiotic relationship.

This is also a book about travel, especially in North America, which Palmen and Meijer both adored, and it is a heart-rending and very honest account of loss and grief, because in 1995 Meijer dies from a sudden heart attack. Palmen devotes only the last forty pages to her struggle to come to terms with her loss and grief, but these are poignant pages indeed. My quotes from Palmen’s reflections come from this final part of her book:

Und inmitten dieses lautlosen Tumults lernte ich meinen Gott kennen, der in mir geboren wurde und der, so versicherte Er mir selbst, schon immer dagewesen war. Er verband mich mit allen Zeiten und allen Menschen, tot oder lebendig.

(And in the midst of this soundless tumult I got to know my God, who was born within me and who, so he ensured me himself, had always been there. He connected me with all times and all people, dead or alive.)

Sucht ist eine Freundschaft ohne Freund. Du suchst, was in unmittelbarer Nähe und greifbar ist. Eine Zigarette ist ein Halt, ein Halt, der verbrennt. Der größte Vorzug einer Schachtel Marlboro ist, daß sie dich nicht betrügen kann, dich nicht verlassen kann, daß sie niemals aufhören wird, dich zu lieben, und natürlich, daß sie nicht sterben kann. Das ist die Essenz einer Sucht, glaube ich. Du umgehst die Risiken, die du bei einer Liebe oder Freundschaft notgedrungen eingehst, weil du sonst keine Liebe und keine Freundschaft hättest.

(Addiction is a friendship without a friend. You search for something that is close and tangible. A cigarette is a foothold, a foothold that is consumed by fire. The biggest advantage of a box of Marlboro is that it cannot betray you, cannot leave you, that it will never stop loving you and, of course, that it cannot die. That is the essence of an addiction, I believe. You avoid the risks that you inevitably run in the case of love or friendship, because otherwise you wouldn’t have love or friendship.)

Ich mache die Trauer zur Vollzeitbeschäftigung.

(I am turning grief into a full-time occupation.)

Ich denke wie verrückt, aber es nützt mir nichts.

(I am thinking like mad, but it is to no avail.)

Gutes, Amüsantes und Schönes läßt mich leiden, weil ich es allein sehen muß, es nicht mit ihm teilen und dadurch verdoppeln kann, weil er nicht mehr genießen kann, was ich genieße.

(Good, amusing and beautiful things make me suffer, because I have to see them on my own, can’t share them with him, thus redoubling them, because he can’t enjoy anymore what I am enjoying.)

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And so I’m hooked. Rumi (as mediated by Coleman Barks)

Having come across Rumi a few times in references by several writers, I was finally persuaded to give him a go when a woman I met on a recent trip to Chicago recommended him most enthusiastically. And so I began reading him. And so I’m hooked.

But am I really reading Rumi, or am I reading Coleman Barks, in whose translation I am currently encountering him? For Barks does not read Persian and thus can only work from literal, scholarly transcriptions. And he has apparently taken not a few liberties in creating poems that feature, in the words of Franklin Lewis (in Rumi: Past, Present, East and West. The Life, Teachings and Poetry of Jalâl al-Din Rumi), ‘a modern American idiom’ and present Rumi’s originally ‘rhythmic and perhaps even trance-like’ poetry as free verse.

Does this really matter though? Well, yes and no, I suppose. Yes in that, as again Lewis points out, Barks, due to his lack of Persian, sometimes misunderstands the original while also teleporting the poems out of their cultural and Islamic context into a modern ecumenical American one. Yet I do believe Barks is right to claim that Rumi would have wanted his poems to resonate with audiences from a different culture. And in Barks’s translation they do, which is why I’m hooked. Would I have been as interested if I had encountered Rumi in wooden, literal transcriptions? Probably not.

There is one thing that worries me a little though. According to Lewis, Barks has turned this ‘poet of overpowering longing, [who is] trying to grope through his acute and shattering sense of loss’, into a serene dispenser of wisdom. That frenetically searching poet I would have liked to meet, but I’m hooked regardless. And Barks does give us beautiful poetry.

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Best Reads 2013. I: Martin Walser, Das dreizehnte Kapitel

Martin Walser, Das dreizehnte KapitelMartin Walser’s latest novel talks about a chance meeting that leads to an intimate correspondence between a male author and a female theologian – and a love that, precisely because of its impossibility, is of the utmost intensity.

It is a poignant book about love, loss and pain. Here are some highlights:

Ich möchte nicht der sein, der ich war. Ich möchte der sein, der ich durch Dich bin.

(I do not want to be the one that I was. I want to be the one that I am through you.)

Streich das Warum.
Heiße den Schmerz willkommen.

(Erase the Why.
Welcome the pain.)

Ohne Unmögliches kann ich nicht leben. Umgeben von nichts als Möglichem erlischt das Leben selbst.

(Without the impossible I cannot live. Surrounded by nothing but the possible, life itself is extinguished.)

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