Showing posts with label hölderlin's poltergeists. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hölderlin's poltergeists. Show all posts

1 Jan 2024

A Tale of Two Ears and Notes on Aural Regeneration

This ear? 
Yes, that there.
 
 
I. 
 
For Síomón Solomon, the human ear "is not merely a passive cavity or vacuous opening but a transfigurative chamber of auditory fantasy" [1]. If this makes it for some the most poetic organ, so too does it help to explain why for ear fetishists aural sex is the only game in town.
 
One famous lughole lover is the American filmmaker David Lynch, who not only assigns the severed, decomposing ear crawling with ants discovered in a field at the start of his cult movie Blue Velvet (1986) symbolic importance, but gives it something of a lead role [2]
 
For as Solomon goes on to note, Lynch became so fixated with the prosthetic ear, that he and his make-up supervisor Jeff Goodwin referred to it as a character in its own right - 'Mr Ear' - and designed it out of silicone rather than latex, "even embellishing it, in a superbly disquieting fetishistic signature, with locks of Lynch's own scissored hair" [3]
 
Lynch's ear serves much the same function for Jeffrey Beaumont as the rabbit hole does for Alice; it is what leads him (and us) into a troubling and dangerous underworld. It is only when he finally comes through his ordeal that he (and we as viewers) exit the ear.
 
Of course, not all detached ears found lying on the ground have such a serious symbolic role to play. In Carry On Screaming! (dir. Gerald Thomas,1966), for example, Oddbod's ear has a strictly comic function, allowing for a couple of predictable (but still amusing) gags. 
 
Whether the ear possesses the same remarkable regenerative capacity as the repulsive-looking finger which Oddbod also loses, wasn't made clear in the film, but the possibility of regrowing lost tissues or organs is an intriguing one worth looking at in a bit more detail ...
 
 
II.
 
Salamanders are well-known for their ability to regenerate complex body parts and this has long fascinated scientists keen to discover if people too may one day be able to regrow lost limbs, etc. 
 
Whether this would involve genetically engineering human-salamander hybrids or simply transplanting blastema tissue from these loveable amphibians, I don't know. But, either way, it would be remarkable if doctors found a way to induce regeneration (and tumor regression) in animals such as ourselves with a limited ability to repair our own bodies and a penchant for the quick-fix of forming scar tissue. 
 
Having said that, it might prove easier simply to 3D print new bits and bobs in the lab, as in the recent case of a young Mexican woman who had her external ear reconstructed using this technique to create a living tissue transplant. 
 
According to press reports [4], the transplant procedure was successfully carried out at a US hospital in March 2022 and such newly developed technology promises to transform the lives of people born with microtia; a rare congenital condition in which one or both outer ears are absent or incompletely formed.
 
The company behind this groundbreaking work  - 3DBio Therapeutics - said the new ear was composed of a 3D-printed collagen hydrogel scaffold using the patient's own cartilage cells. Clinical trials involving several other patients are ongoing, but fingers crossed the organ won't be rejected so that what's ear today won't be gone tomorrow.    
 
 
 
Notes
 
[1] Síomón Solomon, Hölderlin's Poltergeists, (Peter Lang, 2020), p. 101. For further discussion of Solomon's audiopoetics, see the post of 10 May 2021: click here.
 
[2] To watch the scene in Blue Velvet in which Jeffrey Beaumont (played by Kyle MacLachlan) discovers the ear, click here.
 
[3] Síomón Solomon, Hölderlin's Poltergeists, pp. 99-100. 

[4] See for example Roni Caryn Rabin, 'Doctors Transplant Ear of Human Cells, Made by 3-D Printer', The New York Times (2 June 2022), and/or Nicola Davis, 'Woman's ear rebuilt with 3D-printed living tissue implant' The Guardian (2 June 2022).


11 Jun 2023

Notes from a Drama Workshop ...

Poet and playwright Síomón Solomon 
 discussing his audio drama Hölderlin's Poltergeists 
at Queen Mary University of London (9 June 2023)

  
I.
 
Whilst attending a table read of selected scenes from Síomón Solomon's Hölderlin's Poltergeists (2021) [1], I was struck by the idea that madness often manifests itself as the hearing of multiple voices, whereas, on the other hand, sane individuals are those who listen faithfully (and in compliance) to the voice of reason (or, as it is sometimes referred to, common sense). 
 
In other words, we might define insanity as a form of disobedience, i.e., an inability (or refusal) to turn towards (and heed) the sound of a unified voice (be it of man or God) which speaks the Truth (as an expression of moral logic), and sanity as a form logocentricity
 
This perhaps helps to explain why certain philosophers and artists are fascinated by madness and write in favour of polyvocality, straining their ears to hear multiple voices whispering in many alien tongues, where others like to discern but one voice speaking clearly in a comprehensible manner.       
 
 
II.
 
Academics interested in the history (or, perhaps better to say, histories) of mental ill-health are also keen these days to "place the voices of previously silent, marginalised and disenfranchised individuals at the heart of their analyses" [2] - to let the mad speak for themselves, as it were, and celebrate neurodiversity as just another form of queerness
 
Whether this is as productive (and as radical) as some believe, I don't know ...
 
For whilst I'm quite happy to reflect on strangeness and listen to psychotic voices - even to the howling of wolves, or the loud rumble of thunder - in order to grasp something of a reality that isn't exclusively defined by human reason, I'm not sure we can (or should) re-imagine our own identities on the delusions of a mad poet calling himself Scardanelli ...  
 
 
Notes
 
[1] I have written several posts on Síomón Solomon's astonishing drama for voices, a work that is not merely a translation from the German of Stephan Hermlin's radio play, Scardanelli, but an extended remix. Click here to read a selection of such. 
      The table read took place at Queen Mary University of London, in Mile End, as part of a two-day arts and mental health event on the theme of queering boundaries: click here for details.  
 
[2] Those who are interested in this might like to take a look at Voices in the History of Madness, a collection of interdisciplinary essays ed. Robert Ellis, Sarah Kendal, and Steven J. Taylor, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). I quote here from the introduction to this work. 
      I would also encourage readers to check out the following article by Allan Beveridge, 'Voices of the mad: patients' letters from the Royal Edinburgh Asylum, 1873-1908', in Psychological Medicine, Vol. 27, Issue 4, (Cambridge University Press, July 1997), pp. 899-908. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S003329179700490X 


24 Jun 2021

Final Reflections on Hölderlin's Poltergeists (A Drama for Voices by Síomón Solomon)

(Peter Lang, 2020)
 
 
I. 
 
Astute readers may have noticed that whilst I published a quintet of posts last month on the supplementary writings contained within Síomón Solomon's study Hölderlin's Poltergeists,* I didn't actually comment on the highly original adaptation of the radio play which is at its heart. 
 
This was due to the fact that although Nietzsche may figure prominently in my intellectual background, I simply do not feel qualified to do so: I am not a German literature scholar and not only have I never studied Hölderlin, but I hadn't even heard of Stephan Hermlin or his 1970 audio drama, Scardanelli, before reading Solomon's book. 
 
Further, whilst I've read a lot of novels and seen a lot of films, my knowledge and appreciation of plays is shamefully underdeveloped. I don't know why, but watching plays unfold on stage, or listening to them on the radio, has always filled me with a kind of performance anxiety. I even find reading plays troubling. 

And so, I'm perfectly happy to accept Dan Farrelly's estimation of Solomon's work as a "beautiful, free and creative translation" which "opens access to an extraordinarily creative poet who is superbly served by the playwright and his translator" [1]
 
Happy also to reproduce below remarks made by Solomon in his introduction, which give a fascinating insight into his thinking and working method ...    
 
 
II. 
 
According to Solomon, although his adaptation is rooted in "an exhaustive attentiveness to the minutiae" [2] of Hermlin's original German text, he has nevertheless seen fit to take a transmorphic approach in accordance with which he has made "a host of minor and major infidelities to the mother script, from compensations (moved text), borrowings (untranslated language items), tweaked directions, insertions and elisions to new dramatis personae and whole scenic re/writings" [3]
 
Solomon continues:
 
"As a result, the source text - already, of course, a seething intertext implicating a range of semiotic fields (Classical/Romantic poetics, early European psychiatry, Franco-German revolutionary politics, epistolary erotics, etc.) - has been both critically trimmed and lavishly enhanced. Our clamorous ark of thirty-five speakers [...] through twenty-eight scenes - roughly doubling Hermlin's quantities in each case and all doing their many varieties of violence to Hölderlin's voice - has been accordingly relaunched as a keening vessel of ventriloquized voices, in which ill-starred poets, idealist philosophers, literary editors, hamstrung employers, pious relatives, mortified lovers, political tyrants, ghoulish voyeurs and anonymous critics collide and collude." [4] 
 
In consequence: Solomon calls his work a 'remix', "aiming as it does to offer a musical variation on a pre-existent artistic matrix" [5]
 
And in sum: "Hermlin's play has been treated playfully, with a passionate recklessness or irreverent love" [6] that some might term abusive fidelity

 
Notes
 
[1] Dan Farrelly, Senior Lecturer in German (retired), University College Dublin. I am quoting from the blurb provided by Farrelly for the back cover of Hölderlin's Poltergeists.
 
[2] Síomón Solomon, 'Translator's Introduction', Hölderlin's Poltergeists, (Peter Lang, 2020), p. 13. 

[3] - [5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid., p. 14.

 
* The quintet of earlier posts inspired by Hölderlin's Poltergeists are: 

 
 
 
 
 
 

7 May 2021

What's in a Name? Quite a Lot When That Name is Scardanelli


Ja, die Gedichte sind echt, die sind von mir, aber der Name ist gefälscht! 
Ich habe nie Hölderlin geheißen, sondern Scardanelli!
 
 
I. 
 
Nietzsche is not the only great poet-philosopher and madman of German letters. Before him came the early Romantic figure Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843), who, long plagued by mental illness, was finally committed in 1806. 
 
Deemed incurable - despite the belladonna preparations and cold water baths - Hölderlin was released into the care of a kindly carpenter called Ernst Zimmer, who gave him a room at his house in Tübingen. Here, Hölderlin would spend the last thirty-six years of his life; a period referred to by those in the know as the Turmzeit
 
During this so-called Tower period, Hölderlin would occasionally write rhymed quatrains signed with a variety of theatrical-sounding pseudonyms, including Scardanelli, a name which Stephan Hermlin would use as the title of his 1970 Hörspiel, which deals with the poet's breakdown triggered (arguably) by the realisation that there is little room for art in a world dominated by politics and philistinism; something that Hermlin himself would also come slowly to accept despite his life-long communist affiliations and affinity.
 
II. 
 
Offering as it does a "musical variation on a pre-existent artistic matrix" [1], one wonders why Síomón Solomon didn't simply call his translation-adaptation of Hermlin's play Scardanelli: an Extended Remix, instead of opting for the (admittedly more paranormally suggestive) title of Hölderlin's Poltergeists.
 
For whilst I appreciate his desire to announce the work's originality and emphasise its spectral chaos, I think the name Scardanelli should have remained in the title somewhere or other. For Scardanelli is a name that has a real magic to it and which has continued to resonate within creative circles for over 200 years; not just amongst poets and playwrights, but also composers, filmmakers, and even graffiti artists. 
 
I'm thinking, for example, of the large-scale Scardanelli-Zyklus project that the Swiss composer Heinz Holliger worked on from 1975 to 1993 (ECM Records); the 2003 film written and directed by Harald Bergmann entitled Scardanelli, and starring André Wilms as Hölderlin (see image below); and of the fabulous piece of street art (reproduced above) painted on shutters in Milan and posted on the designer Campbell Johnson's Instagram account: click here [2].
 
My point is this: the name Scardanelli unites a wide range of artists and artworks and I think Solomon's work is best understood in relation to this world rather than the academic world of German studies. There's no doubting Solomon is a fine scholar: but he is also an amazing artist in his own right.  
 
 
 
 
Notes
 
[1] Síomón Solomon, 'Translator's Introduction', Hölderlin's Poltergeists, (Peter Lang, 2020), p.13 
 
[2] Mention must also be made of Austrian poet Friederike Mayröcker's recent collection of poems entitled Scardanelli, trans. Jonathan Larson, (The Song Cave, 2018); a collection haunted by the presence of Hölderlin throughout, an author to whose work Mayröcker is, by her own admission, addicted. Click here for more details.       
 
 

4 May 2021

There is No Tongue That is Not Forked: Notes On Síomón Solomon's Fantasia of Translation

Der Übersetzer - ready at any moment 
to shed their skin and become-other
 
I. 
 
What is the role of the translator? It's an old question: but it remains a fascinating and important question. 
 
And it's a question that the poet and playwright Síomón Solomon has clearly spent a good deal of time thinking about, as evidenced by the Introduction to his translation - and extended remix - of Stephen Hermlin's radio play, Scardanelli (1970), in a newly published text celebrating the life and work of the German Romantic poet Friedrich Hölderlin [1].
 
I'm hoping to discuss Solomon's bold adapatation of Hermlin's audio drama in a later post. Here, however, I wish only to examine his theory of translation [2] which, in a nutshell, posits the translator as an artist in their own right; one who (paradoxically) shows fidelity to a text not by staying as close as possible to it, but by daring to deviate. 
 
Solomon's theory of translation is, therefore, ultimately rooted in a perverse aesthetic; one that queers the text and allows for the birth of an illegitimate (sometimes monstrous) new literary offspring [3]; one that hears strange voices and intertextual murmurings [4] ...  
 
II.
 
Now, of course, there will be many critics who will loathe and despise this model of translation; who will loathe and despise Solomon for what he does with Hermlin's work and for his schizopoetic reading (and re-creation between the lines) of Hölderlin. But I'm not one of them. 
 
In fact, I'm happy to endorse this model which acts "'as a preventative against cultural atrophy and homogenisation'" [5]. And if, as Solomon acknowledges, the translator's cruelty of style results in an inevitable giving and taking of offence, well, that's too bad - can there be art without somebody being disturbed or having their nose put out of joint?  
 
Solomon nails his colours to the mast in the following superb passage:
 
"What we wish to affirm is that [...] the infidelity of [every translation] is not merely an occupational hazard but its transcendental sickness. On this basis, we propose recalibrating the translator's 'success' according to the boldness of [their] betrayals. [...] What is by definition commemorated and celebrated by the translator's Janus-faced remakings is the insufficiency of the source to itself, whose rewriting represents a wager on the literary future. In the necessary corruption of practice, to translate means to return to the origin/al to reimagine it, to complicate and regenerate it, and to recompose its music - even and especially in the teeth of 'misreading' it - through the rash passion for metamorphosis." [6]     
 
Later, Solomon reduces things down to just one (memorable) line that invites readers to imagine translators as a breed of reptilian shape-shifters living and working in a domain in which : "There is no tongue [...] that is not forked" [7].
    
  
Notes
 
[1] Síomón Solomon, Hölderlin's Poltergeists, (Peter Lang, 2020).
      Solomon explains what he means by the term remix to describe his adaptation of Hermlin's play on pp. 13-14 of his Introduction; "we are calling this work a 'remix', aiming as it does to offer a musical variation on a pre-existent artistic matrix [...] influenced by Kenneth Goldsmith's modish conception of translation as renovatory displacement". 
      Readers interested in knowing more about Solomon's reading of Goldsmith can find his three-part post on this topic on Torpedo the Ark: click here. And those who may wish to check out Goldsmith's work for themselves should see Against Translation: Displacement is the New Translation, (Jean Boîte Editions, 2016).  
 
[2] It should be noted that at no time does Solomon refer to his writings on translation as his theory of such and I'm fairly certain he'd wince at the idea, probably insisting that it's more a delirious shared fantasy of translation (of what it might become if pushed to its external limit). Whilst I understand his postmodern concerns and desire to move beyond theory (towards play, performance, and poetry), I'm using the word here for the sake of convenience. However, I have substituted the term fantasia in the title of this post in the hope that this is one that he will very much approve of.    
 
[3] Solomon recalls and transposes Deleuze's self-styled relationship to the history of philosophy as a form of buggery via which he sought to engender monsters; see pp. 9-10 of his 'Translator's Introduction' to Hölderlin's Poltergeists. 
      I have to say, it's a little odd to find Deleuze posing as a sodomite and delighting in fantasies of anal rape (or bum banditry, as Solomon refers to it). Perhaps it betrays the influence of his friend Michel Foucault on his thinking; or maybe he was thinking of D. H. Lawrence, who argued that the power of inspiration always comes from outside and enters us from behind and below.
 
[4] There's a very good reason that Solomon uses the following from Roland Barthes as an epigraph to his work: "Do I hear voices within the voice? But isn't it the truth of the voice that it be hallucinated? Isn't the entire space of the voice an infinite spaciousness?" 
      If, as I do, you accept Kristeva's idea of intertextualité (and/or Bakhtin's dialogism), then the question of translation is made all the more complex; arguably, every text is already a translation at some level and the author a multiple personality who speaks with many tongues masquerading as a unified subject. 
      Clearly Solomon also (more or less) accepts this line of thinking; see footnote 20 in his Introduction where he quotes from Susan Bernofsky's Foreign Words (2005). Bernofsky has also explored the significance of Barthes's work on intertextuality and the death of the author for contemporary theories of translation.   
 
[5] Mark Polizzotti, quoted by Síomón Solomon, 'Translator's Introduction', Hölderlin's Poltergeists, footnote 1, p. 2. 
 
[6] Síomón Solomon, 'Translator's Introduction', Hölderlin's Poltergeists, p. 7. 
 
[7] Ibid., p. 12. 
 
 
For a related post to this one - on Stephan Hermlin's short text 'Hölderlin 1944', trans. Síomón Solomon, click here  
 
 

2 May 2021

How Fascism Makes Killers Of Us All (With Reference to the Case of Stephan Hermlin)

Stephan Hermlin (1915-1997)
 
 
I.
 
One of the defining features of Hitler's Germany is that no one was ever left alone; the private citizen was effectively abolished and every man, woman and child was forced to participate and declare themselves as either for or against the Third Reich.
 
(One of the privileges of living in a lacklustre (pre-pandemic) liberal democracy, by contrast, is that the individual is free to abstain or remain apathetic.)  
 
Given this state of affairs, many Germans enthusiastically raised their arm and shouted Sieg Heil, whilst others put their hands up and surrendered to the Nazis as if resigning themselves to Fate. A courageous few actively took up arms against the regime. 
 
But saying nothing and doing nothing was not an option; everyone was politicised and mobilised for  the coming catastrophe; no one could simply ask to be excused. 
 
 
II. 
 
I was reminded of this whilst reading Síomón Solomon's new translation of Stephan Hermlin's short text 'Hölderlin 1944' [1].  
 
In this piece - described by Solomon as a memoir essay, though one wonders to what extent it's a fictionalised account that blurs reality and dream [2] - Hermlin recalls his time on the run in southwest-central France in early 1944, when resistance to the German occupation was at its height and hardly a day went by "without explosions, attacks, massacres" [3]
 
Warned by comrades that his situation was compromised and that the authorities were closing in on him, he agrees to be taken to a new (and safer) location - a solitary farmhouse in the middle of he knew not where:
 
"A farmer, still young, received us in a friendly manner [...] He was helping the Resistance with his wife and two adolescent children. But I would need to be aware, he explained to me in a whisper, that there was someone dangerous to me living on the farm, namely his old mother, who was a fanatical supporter of Pétain and would turn me over to the Germans in an instant should she discover my presence. If I kept quiet, I would be tolerably safe from her. [...] The farmer escorted me into the barn. I clambered up into the hayloft, which was to be my eyrie for some time." [4] 
   
Although the long days hiding in the hayloft could be monotonous, at least there was plenty of time for reflection and reading his volume of Hölderlin, about whom he decides to write an essay. But then, one day, an incident occurs that could have easily ended in a terrible and tragic manner ...
 
"It was around lunchtime when, at an unaccustomed hour, the door squeaked, and unknown footsteps and a reluctant muttering were heard. I guessed that the ominous old woman had entered the barn, and, when the ladder began to creak, I realised she was heading for the hayloft. [...] I pulled the hay silently over me, breathing as lightly as possible. In the same moment, I felt a strange cold fury. I knew that, in the instant of discovery, I would not hesitate to kill that nameless old woman, lightning quick and without a sound. At that moment, she was standing about three metres away from me; I had pulled myself back deep into the hay but could see her with one eye. A dangling piece of straw obscured my view, but for a few blurred seconds I beheld my potential victim, a haggard crone in a black dress, whom I had never seen before, would never see again. At that moment, she gave up her search and climbed, grunting, back down the ladder. I lay with my body over Hölderlin's verses, having not had to become a murderer." [5] 
  
Whether this actually happened or it's a homocidal fantasy, I don't know. But the point remains the same: fascism makes killers of us all - or, at the very least, it obliges us to recognise that we all have the potential to commit terrible deeds when forced to do so. 
 
 
Notes
 
[1] Síomón Solomon, 'Hölderlin 1944', in Hölderlin's Poltergeists, (Peter Lang, 2020), pp. 83-88. The original German text can be found in the Hölderlin-Jahrbuch 23, (1982/83), pp. 172-77.
   
[2] It's no secret that Hermlin reimagined the facts of his own life. He was certainly creative with the truth, shall we say, when it came to his experiences during the War; portraying himself as an anti-fascist hero who fought with the Resistance in France and the Republicans in Spain. His tendency to dissolve the genre distinction between life and literature is best exemplified in Abendlicht (1979). 
      Solomon addresses this issue and provides some useful references to other critics who have been troubled (or amused) by Hermlin's tendency to project subjective experience into false historical context and tell true lies in part (ii) of his 'Translator's Introduction' to Hölderlin's Poltergeists. Unsurprisingly, since Solomon is himself a poet, he concludes sympathetically: 

"The hyperreal horror of the German menace and the continuous terror by which its paranoiac war machine infected the spirits of those it harassed and hunted down can hardly be underestimated, moreover, for the chaos it formented in curdling the contours of actuality, fantasy and memory. At the same time, poets are beings predisposed by definition to exercises of poetic licence. In the political interstices of Hermlin's own Vergangenheitsbewältigung, his reconciliation with his past, if he retrospectively massaged his own myth, he was surely in some measure just being himself." [21]
 
One work that Solomon doesn't refer us to, but which is certainly relevant to this discussion, is David Bathrick's 'Rereading Stephan Hermlin: Residues of Difference in the Post-Wall Public Sphere', in What Remains? East German Culture and the Postwar Public, ed. Marc Silberman, (American Institute for Contemporary German Studies / The John Hopkins University, 1997), pp. 90-100. To read as a pdf online, visit: https://www.aicgs.org/site/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/silberman.pdf
    
[3] Síomón Solomon, 'Hölderlin 1944', in Hölderlin's Poltergeists, p. 85.
 
[4] Ibid., p. 86.
 
[5] Ibid., pp. 87-88.
 
 
For a related post to this one - on Síomón Solomon's fantasia of traslation in Hölderlin's Poltergeists - click here