Louise Glück’s longing to fall out of time finds its master in a hotel porter in the volume “Winter recipes from the collective”. After a dozen silent collections of poetry and two volumes of essays, it is the first book that she has published in front of an international audience. The poet, who was born in 1943 and previously won the highest American literary prizes, only became world-famous in 2020 through the Nobel Prize for Literature. A year later, a small selection of 15 new poems appears.
The second of these is called “The Denial of Death” and it begins with the lyric self losing its passport. Whereupon a person traveling with you drives on alone and only sends postcards back to where they split up and where the spokeswoman is no longer even in the motel: “The concierge got me an old blanket. / During the day I sat in front of the kitchen. At night I sat in front of the kitchen I take off my blanket / under the orange trees. One day is like the other, except for the weather. “
Detached and in repetitive processes, the self finds its fulfillment, it experiences a more authentic time and this “concierge” becomes a kind of Zen master of eternal waiting. He teaches to think in terms of further eras and shows his lesson on a pocket watch: “Try, he said, / to determine by looking at whether it is Monday or Tuesday. / But if you look at the hand that is holding it , you will notice that I am not a / young man anymore “.
“It’s all over, I said.”
The poems that mean something to her, said Louise Glück in her Nobel Prize lecture, are those that require the participation of the readers. She distinguished it from a different kind of lyric poetry, which one could only witness in amazement (she named Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 18” with the well-known first verse “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” As an example of such an art). On the other hand, she wanted an intimate pact with every single reader. It is only through their help that “the voice is encouraged to ask and to remain confidential”.
The Zen exercise of reading an age on the clock should therefore also be ours. Glücks poems want us stressed contemporaries, of all people, that we leave the timing of the appointment calendar behind us: “Don’t be sad,” says the concierge: “You have started your own journey / not into the world like your girlfriend, but to yourself and your memories. “
In Louise Glück’s work, every artistic movement has long gone into the self. In addition, in this poetry of old age, it is particularly important to say goodbye to a long afterlife. Everything on these pages is in the last light. “The beautiful golden days when you should soon die” begins a poem and another: “Everything is over, I said. (…) And if that is the case, / there is no point in starting something, / not once a sentence “.
In this new volume, the scene of this speaking, which was started just before it fell silent, seems fittingly to be a retirement home: “You’d better say goodbye to getting up, / says my sister. We sat on our favorite bench / outside the common room and drank / a glass of gin without ice. / Looked like water, so the nurses / smiled at you when they walked by / pleased with how well you hydrated yourself. ” The Beckett-like scenario of a life after its end is transformed into almost happy moments of supervised living with Louise Glück.
Louise Glück: Winter recipes from the collective. Poems. Translated from the English by Uta Gosmann. Luchterhand, Munich 2021. 80 pages, 16 euros.
Even under the pressure of the Nobel Prize, Glück’s poetry did not reveal whether it should be regarded as depressed, deliberately turned away from the world or as irritatingly contemplative. The ironic moments in it are difficult to translate into German: “We were having a fine old time getting old”, the old people say to each other, Uta Gosmann lets rhythm and duplication fall and translates in a conversational tone: “We had a great time during dinner”.
More than Ulrike Draesner, who translated earlier poems by Louise Glück, Gosmann has apparently decided to translate the free verse as simply as possible into German. But then it is noticeable how much in Louise Glück’s verses, which, according to their narrative character, often tend towards prose poetry, depend on tiny idiomatic tricks. Of bonsai trees, which play an almost mythical role in this volume, it says at one point: “We have deprived them of their origins, / they have come to need us now.” The fact that the verb “come” is an auxiliary verb and at the same time, as a verb of movement, releases the image that the things of nature that people have taken from their naturalness are now coming back to them and calling for help can hardly be translated into German. Uta Gosmann writes: “We have robbed them of their origin, / therefore they need us now.”
If you don’t resonate in such details, you probably can’t read Louise Glück’s poems without finding them strangely pale. In return, they are enormously generous towards identifying readers, who immerse themselves in their atmosphere and see their own existential forlornness reflected in the emptiness in the center of the text. “We stood in silence for a while, looked at it together,” says the poem “The Setting Sun” about a work of art. Louise Glück’s lyrical voice is just as reverent when it comes to life, which is always viewed from the sidelines: an I and a you look at it, sensitively falling silent. In the Glück readers mobilized by the Nobel Prize, there may be a few new instances of this you this winter. No more is needed for a collective in Louise Glück’s sense.