Born in 1939, Margaret Atwood is one of the literary stars that has also shone brightly on television screens in recent years. The series “The Handmaid’s Tale”, which first aired in 2017, made her an icon even among young people thirty years after the publication of her science fiction novel of the same name. The film costumes also became a symbol: red robes with oversized white hoods, into which an evangelical regime forces young women who, after the environment has been completely destroyed, are still able to give birth to children. That should be their sole reason for existence. Atwood himself actually dives for you cameo appearance in the second season to slap the face of the downtrodden young Offred as a minder.
As is well known, poems are rarely filmed, they are more like moons and asteroids, which only come into the light indirectly and have always appeared in the orbit of Atwood’s many novels. The volume “Die Füchsin” was last published in German in 2020, for which some of the most important contemporary poets translated the poems they had written between 1965 and 1995. Now Atwood’s most recent poems – written between 2008 and 2019 – are published in a bilingual edition. Here, too, her major issues are in the foreground: feminism, environmental protection and the bleak prospects for both.
Blue feathers on the cover reveal: Birds, as she also writes in her short foreword, appear particularly frequently in the volume. If Atwood should publish a book of poetry despite her old age, she would like to see more birds in it – and that there may be more birds in the world: “Let us all hope together.”
The perspective of a combat drone shows that it scrapes past a crisis of meaning
By their very nature, calls to hope sound less hopeful and more hopeless. During the eleven years that she wrote these prose poems, it is said, “the world darkened”. It is all the more surprising (and gratifying) that the first poems are astonishingly light, not at all difficult and oppressive, but clear, simple and straightforward.
Berlin-Verlag has found the right translator for Atwood’s poems in Jan Wagner. These are not just two big names at once: The Büchner Prize winner from 2017 has actually achieved everything that can be achieved in the German alphabet sport in terms of medals. To stay with the bird theme, Wagner’s own poems are related to Atwood’s: in formal terms, neither leans out of the window – they prefer to describe the window itself . Atwood writes about a cat with dementia, her old passports, an empty hotel room, plastic finds on the beach, cicadas in summer and mushrooms in autumn. There seems to be little that Atwood and Wagner can’t empathize with. In one poem, she even takes on the perspective of a combat drone that, in the face of its massacre, is just a hair’s breadth from a crisis of meaning.
They are poetic poems. They are everyday observations. Many people should be able to relate to the feelings it triggers. Who hasn’t thought about collecting old passport photos “to prove that I was who I was”. How lifeless it looks: Atwood feels like “a mermaid doomed to / go ashore every five years” and loses vibrancy each time. Again and again she talks about her own aging – the fact that cats are not immune to dementia reflects her own fear and ends in the harsh request to her loved ones: “If I get like this, get fur, cry (…) lock it. Locked the window.” Some lines have a touching beauty that you won’t soon forget. One poem consists of contemplating one’s old mother in her sleep “curled up like a spring fern, / Though she is nearly a century old”.
This is not experimental poetry, not avant-gardism, not irony played across a thousand corners. There’s no suggestion here that you have to be a particularly remarkable or odd character to be a poet – which is comforting given that one in two people on Twitter claim to be a nerd, a geek, an oddball. There is no spelling out of the political thrust. A deep sigh remains about the world and the fate of the woman.
Margaret Atwood: “Sincerely. Dearly”. Piper, 240 pages, 28 euros.
(Photo: Piper-Verlag)
Sometimes these deep sighs get lost in the vague. The clearer the political stance, the less keen the power of observation. If you just follow the cat wandering through the apartment, which no longer recognizes itself, the poems, in which concern for nature and the environment is expressed, seem like sentences strung together indiscriminately: “Birds don’t need the lost names. / We needed her, but that was then. / Who cares now?”
The same goes for the clearly Atwoodfeminist poems, which fans of “The Handmaid’s Tale” will get their money’s worth. When sisterhood is the only point of reference and violence the constant threat, both remain abstract and nameless. You have to understand it as a song or mantra, otherwise there is not much more than vague emphasis: “So many sisters lost / So many lost sisters / In all the years, millennia / So many before time / Cast out into the night / By men who believed it was so.” Luckily, Margaret Atwood also knows that the female gaze can also be humorous: “Once upon a time, all werewolves were male. / They burst through their blue jeans clothes and their own split skin, / exposed themselves in parks, / howled at the moon / What fraternities do.”
Anyone who is hopeful is also called forward-looking. Anyone who turns to the future, however, does not automatically draw hope. Rather the opposite is the case. Perhaps looking in the wrong direction is looking for hope in the future. Perhaps it has more to do with a firm hold, something that already exists or is already in the past. Perhaps poetry is better suited as a beacon of hope than science fiction or “speculative fiction”, as Margaret Atwood prefers to call her novels. Most of the poems come “too late”, she writes in the first poem of this volume, “like a sailor’s letter / that arrives after being drowned”. A poem captures something experienced – “whatever it was, it happened long ago”.