The John Clare anthology “A Language That Is Ever Green”. Review. – Culture


When John Clare wrote the poem “I am” (“I am”), he was 54 years old and had been admitted to a “lunatic asylum” for the second time, an institution that was called an “insane asylum” in German at the time “called. Who he really was must have been an ambiguous affair for John Clare at the time of writing in the early summer of 1847: at times he thought he was Shakespeare, at times Lord Byron, which went so far that he edited the latter’s poems with the conviction that it was would be their own. For him, however, there was no doubt that there was an “I”: “I am – yet what I am none cares or knows” is the first line of this three-verse poem, which is one of the most famous lyric works in the English language. “My friends forsake me like a memory lost”. In the most recent German translation it becomes: “I am, but what, nobody knows, nobody cares / The friends flee from me, how one loses what I remember”.

John Clare, born July 1793 in Helpston, a village in Central England, was the child of a day laborer. He himself remained a farm and casual laborer until the doctors had to take care of him. He made his way as a gardener, hired himself out to the Landwehr and worked as a lime burner. In the German-speaking area, despite the many children of poverty and starvation, there was no romantic poet who grew up in such need and whom this misery, regardless of some bookseller consequences, never left. Clare’s schooling was fragmentary, the language of his poems was shaped by his origins in the rural proletariat, the grammar at least personally. Nevertheless, to the astonishment of his contemporaries, he wrote more than three thousand poems (in addition to some prose works), in which self-reflective observations of nature are often mixed with archaic descriptions of rural life: “He loved the creek’s murmuring mouth / The swallow in a steep flight / He loved measure lovers on a green background / The sky full of clouds enough. “

In English, because of the shorter words, these verses walk on steady feet even more than in the German translation, and the end rhymes make every stanza a compact thing. Most of John Clare’s poems are of this type: Just as they seem to strive back to the beginning of all poetry, to a situation in which a person first encounters nature and tries to find a language for it, the poet appears in them with considerable self-confidence .

One believed and still believes in the poet, in whom country life finds itself

One of his carers in the “lunatic asylum” reported that there was mainly confusion about John Clare in his daily dealings. As soon as he began to write, however, he expressed himself clearly and with concentration. In this change, not only does the romantic conviction return that at the beginning of all language there was poetry, but also an ancient notion of the poet as a medium in which village and country life find expression. In England in the early nineteenth century people apparently liked to believe in such figures of inspiration, especially in the cities, and have long been doing so again.

John Clare’s poems are about the lark, which “then hangs in the sky as a speck of dust”, they speak of the moor, “in flowing shadows green and brown and gray”, and they greet the native village “with its steeple in its modesty / megalomania and lust for fame unknown “. There are many invocations (“Oh, get me out of the hustle and bustle”), confessions too (“I found my poem in the meadows / wrote it as I like it”), and some things rest lonely here, not just the forest. There is also love, drinking and dancing, maybe like John Clares in real life.

An early photograph from 1862 shows the late John Clare. He spent his last years in a “lunatic asylum” and died in 1964 at the age of 70.

(Photo: mauritius images / Alamy / Pictorial Press)

Some verses sound naive and in an elementary sense idiosyncratic. But the reader can rest assured that the poet knows what he is doing: he is a romantic after all, including occasional transitions into irony and satire. Nature appears to him as something threatened, especially with regard to the “Enclosure Movement”, the dissolution of the village commons in favor of a rationalized agricultural economy dominated by the British nobility. The Berlin Anglicist Manfred Pfister, editor and translator of the present volume, therefore declares John Clare an ecologist. Better to call him a rural conservative.

The poem “I am” ends in a vision in which the “I” is with God: “To lie undisturbed and undisturbed myself. / To nestle between the grass and the sky”. Redemption and self-dissolution find each other in these lines. It ended differently with John Clare: he died in May 1864 after spending the last 27 years of his life almost exclusively in psychiatry. His national fame as the “peasant poet”, which he enjoyed in the 1920s and early 30s of the 19th century and which had temporarily introduced him to literary circles in London, had long since faded by that time. He was rediscovered at the beginning of the 20th century: in 1935 a first complete edition appeared in two volumes, poets such as Robert Graves, Seamus Heaney and John Ashbery declared themselves to be his successors, and there is just as little lack of anthologies as of literary studies.

John Clare: A Language That Is Ever Green. Poems in German / English. Edited, translated and introduced by Manfred Pfister. Verlag Das Kultur Gedächtnis, Berlin 2021. 272 ​​pages, 28 euros.

Another anthology is the volume “A Language Is Ever Green”, which brings together a good fifty poems by John Clare in the original and in a German translation, structured according to the poet’s life stages and each with a commentary on their origin and context. Manfred Pfister’s edition is the first company to make the poems known in the German-speaking world after the writer and translator Esther Kinsky had previously published two volumes with autobiographical sketches by John Clare. Manfred Pfister’s decision to save meter and rhyme into German can be doubted: In the translation, some of the lightness and precision of the original is lost; instead, the effort to poetry becomes visible. But such questions only concern details. “I am” says a strange poet who dedicated a ballad of downright fatal empathy to the badger in his way of life and the fear of death. And how the poet got there, and what else he has written: You can find out about that in this book, and it’s not a little.

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