Out of the Dust
by Klaus Merz, translated by Marc Vincenz; Spuyten Duyvil, NY, NY,
2014.
Reading
this volume of 80 pages by Klaus Merz, Out of the Dust,
as translated by Marc Vincenz, I had to ask: why do some of the
short lyrics hit with the aphoristic depths of Nietzsche, with the
precise language of the lawyer/poet Jean Follain, and with the
beautiful music of “Dust in the Wind,” an immensely popular song
of the 70s American rock group Kansas, while some other of these
poems are opaque and seem to hang as the dull moments of life
itself? Is the complaint the usual complaint about translations,
especially of poetry? But MarcVinzenz is a veteran translator of the
German and himself has six volumes of poetry to his credit. The fault
must lie with me to some extent of my complacent laziness not to
really distinguish the signifier
from the signified. In
Zen terms, I am mistaking the moon
for the finger
pointing at the moon.
Let's
start with Merz's “Biography (p. 31)” – “In the passing of
time, / I became a pencil myself, / a pencil that also remains a
pencil / when it doesn't
write.” This is a very modest self-assessment considering what the
publisher Spuyten Duyvil of NY, NY tells me. Klaus Merz was born in
1945 in Aarau, Switzerland, and has published twenty volumes of
poetry and numerous works of fiction, has been recognized with major
awards, including the Herman Hess Prize in Literature in 1997 and the
Holderlin Prize in 2012.
Here is the rub;
the problem may lie with me. Born just a few years later than Merz, I
am a village boy transplant from China and know nothing of the German
language or much European culture. I have to take the English words
of the translator Marc Vincenz for its veracity and faithfulness in
its rendition from German to English. Vinzenz is British-Swiss and
was born in Hong Kong, a city I had briefly lived in. Although I have
lived in the US since 1960, I am no less of an exile than all the
immigrants and refugees whose recollections of their homeland now
only exist in solipsistic memory. The world has transformed this
global village, and so I should perhaps try to discover some sort of
permanence that poetry can afford the soul and to find it in Merz's
work.
It become quite
plausible to connect with Merz, for he is an unobtrusive commentator
of life. Since the Chinese are like watercress that when strewn
anywhere there is mud and running water, it thrives. I personally
connect with “In Command (p.19),” a poem Merz's grandmother
speaks to her brood, from the couch to narrate family history, and
Merz comments, “already we are all over the hills.” My maternal
grandmother was such a matriarch who in fact had her feet bound and
her brood is all over the world. The reader is able to fit the shoes
Merz provides whether he/she is musician who “transform their /
impermanence into tones / and reconcile us in time,”or be he/she
simply be anyone living in a region who comes “to know themselves /
as the head that doesn't / fit into their hat.”I find the
word choice “hat” astonishing for when I was young, my Uncle in
China told me, “Never wear a tall hat,” which variously means “do
not take false compliment,” “do not be corrupt as an official,”
or simply “don't be a dunce.” As an aside, the Supreme Leader of
China Deng Hsiao Ping had been paraded in public wearing the dunce
hat. Merz is indeed a master of the precise apercu.
This volume of
poetry is divided into five sections of thematically related poems
with headings like
“Residue of a
Dream,” “Big Business,” and “Beyond Recall.” It is also
illustrated by Heinz Egger with what resembles Sumi-e ink brush work.
One possible reason why it is just making an inroad to the American
poetry scene is Merz's unassuming and unannounced subtlety, of which
I recall great American poets like William Carlos Williams and Donald
Justice. But it reminds me also of Chinese poetry whose use of poetic
devices is sparing and whose meanings are multiplicities. In
“Wiepersdorf, later, (p.10),” I found this incredible imagery
“the carcass of a rabbit still fleeing (my italics),”and
in “Repose (p.14),” about farm life, after the labors and the
harvest, “Behind the silo the farmer / leans on the farmer's wife.”
Yes, we ought to give credit to where credit is due. The title of the
book “Out of the Dust” almost implies that we will also “Return
to the Dust,” but before all that, there is a little “waiting
game,” as in Merz's poem, “Happy Days (p. 15),” where Beckett's
nephew is seated / in a corner” and he is waiting “for the
wrinkles / to appear in his face.” Likewise, I am waiting as Robert
Creely said, “If you wander long enough, you will come to it.” I
have come to the end of this review, but I will be wandering in Klaus
Merz's poems some more. He has inspired me “to waste more time
(Robert Bly)”, and that's because unlike much contemporary American
poetry, Merz's poems are not just for himself, as a masturbatory
exercise in “construction” or “employment of devices.”
Reviewed by Koon
Woon
Five Willows
Literary Review
August 1, 2014
