The ‘Polyglot Poetics’ of Ulrike Draesner and Kurt Schwitters
Tom Marshall
University of Cambridge
tmem2@cam.ac.uk
Lincoln College, Oxford, 17 June 2019
Many thanks for having me here today. Although I studied German at university I would not describe myself as a Germanist per se; I have made something of a transferral – one might even say a translation – not only from German to medieval Norse and its attendant mythology, but also from here to the Other Place, and I’m afraid that when I say that I don’t mean the Humboldt. With these caveats then, it’s good of you to grant this non-Germanist, this ex-Germanist, a seat at the table. I’ll try not to lapse into Old Norse.
My subject today is far more modern: the work of the acclaimed novelist and poet Ulrike Draesner and the way in which her oeuvre, both fiction and non-fiction, constitutes what has been called ‘polyglot poetics’,[1] most notably in the intersection of English and German. I will particularly focus on her forthcoming novel Schwitters in the Lakes, but will be informed by interviews conducted with Draesner, essays on her work, some of her previously published fiction, and lastly by my own correspondence and first-hand collaborations with her on translating and adapting some of her work for an English audience.
Before turning to writing full-time, Draesner had an academic background in both English and German literature, including having studied here in Oxford for a year in the 1980s. It is no surprise, then, that English literature exerts a significant influence over her fiction. As she writes herself:
…most of what I know about narrative or poetic forms I learned by examples set in English. So an ode to me is connected to Grecian urns and London’s nightingales. I don’t know any Ancient Greek; my path was paved by Hölderlin, first, and changed by Keats. In fiction Virginia Woolf and James Joyce were formative for my ideas about structure and voice.[2]
This is not in and of itself unusual; the number of German writers who have been influenced by English literature, from Shakespeare to Milton, is sizeable, and of course includes such luminaries as Lessing and Goethe. But fewer have written in both German and English, and fewer still have done what Draesner has done in Schwitters in the Lakes, about which more in a moment. Draesner’s own background makes her uniquely suited to tackling the complications that arise in transgressively writing across different literary and cultural borders and traditions, even across different tongues. Her father’s family, German migrants living in Poland, fled for Germany in 1945, with the result that she grew up amid the giddy cocktail of, in her own words, ‘Protestants vs. Catholics, farmers vs. middle class citizens, Bavarian vs Silesian rites, recipes, songs, traditions, clothes’.[3] This background, she writes, ‘created a kind ‘de-rootedness’, by which I don’t mean ‘rootlessness’ but rather movability. Surrounded by roots, but standing beside them. Rootable, yet easily detached. Half rooted down, half elsewhere – and always longing for both. Which in turn means constant motion, tending towards paradox: you’re nomadically rooted’.[4] A preoccupation with exile, migration, multilingualism and the associated questions of identity has been central to her work, most notably in the ambitious 2014 novel Sieben Sprünge vom Rand der Welt, but it also forms the backbone of Schwitters in the Lakes, and most recently has underpinned a third novel in this thematic triptych which is still in its early stages.
That Draesner would eventually write a full-length novel in English is perhaps unsurprising, given her love for and roots in the English literary tradition, although it took her two-year stay here as a Visiting Fellow at New College from 2015-17 to actually bring about the genesis of such a novel (so Oxford must take some credit). The resonances of the English language in her German novels and poems have always been there – from quirky turns of phrase to central concerns such as relationships between English and German characters – and they have played a part in her non-fiction too, from translations of Shakespeare’s sonnets and Gertrude Stein to analyses of Virginia Woolf and A. S. Byatt. In her own words:
…there have always been certain underlying English structures to my writing in German. Those are sometimes linguistic, but more often they are literary […] this has given a certain edge, some degree of weirdness even, to my writing in German, because it never really absolutely fits into German traditions.[5]
Draesner’s most recent project, the as-yet-unpublished novel Schwitters in the Lakes, certainly fits neatly into neither German nor English traditions. For those of you not familiar with Kurt Schwitters: he was a twentieth-century DADA artist who favoured surrealist collages, a ceaseless playfulness and sense of mischief, and installation art such as his famous Merzbau structures, one of which still stands in Newcastle today. Schwitters grew up in Hannover and fled Germany in 1937, beginning an exile that took him from Norway to the Isle of Man, where he spent fourteen months in Camp Hutchinson as an ‘enemy alien’, to London, and finally to the Lake District, where he lived until his death in early 1948. He died at the age of 60, the day after his long-awaited English naturalisation papers arrived in the post; he had been too weak to sign them. He was survived by his son Ernst and by his English lover Edith Thomas, whom he christened ‘Wantee’ after the way in which she asked if he wanted a cup of tea. I have called him a DADA artist, but he was a writer, too, inventive with words as he was with shapes and colours, although only in German; he wrote few English poems of any note. Even something as straightforward as comparing the respective Wikipedia.de and .co.uk entries is instructive in terms of public perception – the English simply calls him ‘a German artist’, as indeed he is best known here, but the counterpart entry in German reads ‘ein deutscher Künstler, Maler, Dichter, Raumkünstler und Werbegrafiker’. Schwitters was an innovator in all sorts of media, linguistic as well as sculptural.
Here, then, we have an artist, a creative figure torn – ruptured, split – between Germany and England, who serves as the perfect protagonist for a Draesner novel: German, yet exiled, forced to begin a new life in the UK; treated as a foreigner, given different rations to others, and confronted with various national stereotypes; faced with the necessity of speaking, reading and writing a new tongue, what he came to call his ‘tongue of survival’.[6] The account of his later years that Draesner found herself drawn towards writing, she realized, would have to be written in English: ‘this would have been how he perceived the world through the language and how I could follow him much more specifically. At a practical level, any subcutaneous German left in my English could easily be attributed to him. That’s why he is so perfect. He is my mask.’[7] It was only when a friend to whom she gave a few English pages for an artistic project asked her if he could see ‘the original German’, a manuscript which did not exist, which had never existed, that the potential magnitude of the enterprise sank in. What resulted was another novel-length account of events, this time in German, meaning that together the two texts form a ‘split novel; split in that it is in two languages and two different bodies – a book in England and a book in Germany’.[8] The tone and timbre of his German and English lives are paralleled, alongside the cultural and artistic traditions that form the canvas on which he paints his corner: Benn, Kandinsky, Shelley, Beckett, Karl Valentin. The process of composing this particular novel involved an ongoing negotiation, a conversation, between the two texts; chapters that never existed in the English cropped up in the German because the events they told demanded to be told in that language, and then they needed to be reworked back into the English. ‘Vom Schwitters-Roman,’ writes Michael Eskin, ‘gibt es zwei Originale – ein englisches und ein deutsches –, was soviel bedeutet wie kein einziges… Beide Originale sind nur Abschattungen von etwas, das nur in Abschattungen existiert’.[9] The very nature of what we mean by ‘original’ or ‘translation’ is thrown into doubt by this singular pair, this twofold single work. If I might mangle Robert Louis Stevenson, though without any of the value judgements evoked by the figures of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, I would say Draesner illustrates that ‘books are not truly one, but truly two’,[10] if not truly more.
But what is most fascinating about Draesner’s multilingual project is that the structures of the two works are not the same – rightfully so, because one’s perspective on Schwitters will inevitably be different depending from which cultural and linguistic background one approaches him. The German text begins in Hannover in 1936, amid a backdrop of unease and rising fascism with which a German-reading public will be extremely familiar, and then proceeds to tell Schwitters’ journey into exile in a more-or-less linear fashion right up until his death, followed by an epilogue set in the mid-1960s as Schwitters’ Merzbau is transferred, nay, translated, to Newcastle’s Hatton Gallery. The English text, on the other hand, begins with Schwitters as an elderly invalid in the Lake District, sitting on a fell-side surrounded by sheep and enjoying the landscape; what insights we get into his pre-English existence emerge as flashbacks away from his life in his adopted homeland, adding depth and colour to this strange old German hermit.
The most rewarding experience, as Eskin has suggested, is to be able to read the two works in tandem, as I have been able to do during the past year or so whilst assisting the author on various questions of translation and linguistic veracity of the English text. Indeed, ‘privilege’ might be a better word than ‘experience’. You can imagine the trepidation but also the excitement with which I, a native of England who grew up in the Lake District and then studied German here at university, approached this task. It was always varied: many chapters already existed in the English version but needed tweaking; some had been written as part of the German text but had no counterpart in English as yet. In some ways, and as I found on other projects, Draesner’s work defies translation – everywhere one finds the same playfulness with language that Schwitters (and indeed another of Draesner’s artistic inspirations, Gertrude Stein) deployed: puns, wordplay, linguistic ironies, multilingual neologisms. All the sorts of things a translator both dreads and relishes; some idioms suggest themselves remarkably quickly and are exactly what you wanted, but sometimes one must admit defeat. How do you render ‘feurigste Hitlerin Döhrens mit dem Ziel, die feurigste Hitlerin Hannovers zu werden’[11] in English? Somehow ‘she was Döhren’s most ardent Hitlerette with her sights set on being Hanover’s’ seems a pale comparison. Or the absurdist pomp of the following pithy, three-word description of Kurt’s fiercely National Socialist mother-in-law: ‘Fiederalla, Grüßkanone, Wedelreich’,[12] for which I suggested the necessarily much lengthier ‘Fiederalla, the saluting canon, Reich that waved but never wavered’. Note how much more elegant the German is, how much less laborious the expression of context! Wrestling with such inventive compound words, of which Draesner is particularly fond, is both the bane and the joy of the German-to-English translator’s existence.
The English text, however, is just as rich and linguistically varied as the German, and arguably even more fascinating, filtered as it is through the German-in-exile voice of Schwitters and the German-garnished-with-English voice of Draesner. It makes for quite a different kind of reading experience, as a bilingual reader is always conscious of the weight of both languages behind every passage. Here, for example, is the evocative opening of the first chapter of the English text, in which we meet Kurt as he sits on a Cumbrian fell-side:
Stretching its spinsterly fingers, the fog crept through the air a few inches above the meadow, which it seemed to render visible and hide each time it took a breath. Spinsterly presumably wasn’t the right word, presumably “presumably” wasn’t the right word, he was suspicious of himself, “spinsterly” was probably a deduction, a deuce casting dice in his head, from “Gespinst”. But he liked the sounds that entered him, the fine fingerishness of fog hovering above an English meadow, he liked how it managed to hover&creep, ever changing shapes.[13]
The linguistic concerns we find Kurt musing on here remain central throughout the work – they are not dry and dusty matters, the domain of textbooks and grammatical treatises, but vitally important, the living life-blood of a man who has been uprooted, physically, artistically, linguistically, and who now finds himself trying to adopt a new identity, a new language, a new home, trying to write a fresh narrative on top of the palimpsest of his life. Every page surprises you with a new, light-footed, quicksilver linguistic insight that doubles up as a character beat. Chapter Two of the English text, for instance, sees Kurt walking into a pharmacy and asking for a “recipe for a cream”, a classic false friend for ‘prescription’. He muses on the rather romanticised literal meaning of the German word for tramp, Landstreicher, ‘one who ranges (alternatively: paints) the countryside’, and imagines rather enjoying being someone who paints the countryside all over with his tracks. And he grapples with the unique challenges of the present continuous tense (‘did he walk or was he walking?’),[14] the way in which he now perceives time differently because he thinks in another language, and how that shift in perception necessarily engenders different thoughts about life as a whole.
Questions of what Heimat – that semantically rich and in many respects troubled word – really means for this exiled curio of a man, this almost nomadic artist, recur in landscape and in language throughout Schwitters in the Lakes. In Chapter Twelve of the English text we find this delightful passage, which conveys so perfectly the Cumbria, the Lake District, of my childhood and adolescence:
He loved to listen to the villagers in the pub. Their words about the weather weren’t clad social messages. They simply meant: “This is our home.” The landscape sat in their bowels, their limbs, their hearts. They knew Viking routes of trading wool, each fell, each crumbled rock, each formation of clouds. Probably their dreams were moulded by crates and riffs as early as in their mothers’ wombs. How did a place translate into flesh? How did a place translate into art through flesh? The becks’ constant splashing and gurgling over the boulders, the electromagnetic fields of enormous columns of clouds, the sodden fields, the surprisingly metallic August skies, tarnished Verdigris, the colour of copper or orange in fog, the sound and taste of sheep.[15]
I am not sure an English novelist could ever have written a passage quite like this – it positively hums with that heartfelt, fascinated, curious distance required when not working in one’s mother tongue but nonetheless describing with love an adopted homeland. Would an English author observe, as Draesner does looking both from without and from within, that our word ‘relationship’ contains the suffix ‘-ship’, with all its attendant connotations of constantly needing to go and to stay, to be moored and anchored, to be set free and waved goodbye? Would an English author have delighted in the appropriateness of such a word for this island nation obsessed with ships? Perhaps. But I find such observations – or the observations in the passage I’ve just read – simultaneously enjoyably fitting, as though they’ve always been true, and yet disarmingly unfamiliar, as though we have simply never noticed them; such a realisation resembles an outsider coming along and pointing out a glaringly obvious bit of internal design, grasping a crucial aspect of a family dynamic to which the family members themselves are blind, or even simply seeing something with fresh eyes and therefore better appreciating its beauty or power.
I want to return to the term ‘polyglot poetics’ used in my paper’s title. It was coined by Tobias Döring in a paper given at a symposium on Draesner’s works here in Oxford in April 2016. Döring suggests that the term describes the way the English presences in her works thus far form attempts to ‘defamiliarize conventional uses and notions of language’.[16] I think this is exactly right; what Draesner achieves – seemingly effortlessly, though of course from my time working with her and observing her creative process I know that it is not – is to deconstruct familiar phrases, words, concepts, lexemes, often uncoupling them from their original meanings and simply treating them as units of sound, drawing startling parallels with similar-sounding units from other languages – often English, but French, Italian and others are frequently present too – and then crashing the meanings together in a way that makes you re-evaluate both. This is one thing in the arena of poetry, where we might expect such linguistic freewheeling and indeed find it in examples dating back to T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, but it is quite another matter in a prose work. Döring distinguishes between Draesner’s playful, polylingual sprite of translation and the more conventional spirit of translation, that Geist der Übersetzung which he associates with Luther, the Denn wir haben Deutsch maxim and the dubious conviction that one can ever ‘have’ a language, possess it, have mastery over it. The purism of ‘mother tongue’ rhetoric is a kind of linguistic tyranny. Draesner shows us that it is far more rewarding to instead accept a language’s vast scope, savour its weirder tastes, and play in the linguistic sandpits where English and German – and indeed other tongues – interact. That is after all where the most unusual, the most challenging, and the most enlightening juxtapositions are often found, as Schwitters himself frequently demonstrated in his collages.
In the ideology of polyglot poetics, words, too, are essentially homeless, peregrinating, migratory things which do not belong fully to one language or another. They transgress borders, reappear in bizarre new lights, break down into constituent segments, homonyms, homophones. Looked at in this way, words and people are much the same – individual units of meaning with chequered histories which can be translated and retranslated from place to place. Life is necessarily a process of translation, let alone those fraught lives which feature exile and migration. In such a context, the gift of a foreign tongue becomes something reinvigorating: as Döring says, ‘the only chance to find ourselves aright must lie in facing strangeness’.[17]
I highlight this not as a showy exercise on the author’s part or a vehicle for her own etymological erudition; rather, we are invited in, encouraged to bring our own readings to the table. One of the major USPs of Sieben Sprünge vom Rand der Welt was the website that accompanied it, ‘der siebte Sprung’, in which sources, essays, and reader responses were all gathered together – readers who added to the conversation around migration and exile, and in that sense continued the life of the novel long after the final chapter. ‘Polyglot poetics’ is thus not defined by the achievements of a single voice, by its very definition, but involves this interwoven, interactive lattice of many voices – reading authors and authoring readers. In Schwitters in the Lakes Draesner similarly invites us into a wholly new aesthetic achievement, an utterly different kind of novel which pushes at the boundaries of what the novel is. Both the English and the German texts – the medievalist part of my brain almost wants to call them ‘redactions’ – are complete works individually, but neither would exist without the other, and the greatest rewards will surely be reaped by those who tackle both. The whole project is radically polyperspectivist and multilingual, the product of two translated artists who have spent time living and working in the texts’ two languages. When the book sees publication, I am confident it will prove a seminal addition to the field of Anglo-German literature, a field to which Draesner has already contributed a great deal; it will be an engaging read, but it will also no doubt spark discussions about how we can best define a ‘polyglot poetics’ in the works of others and whether it is an approach which others, too, will adopt in the future.
Bibliography
Draesner, U., Developing a Polyglot Poetics: The Power of Testimony and Lived Literary Experience.
Draesner, U., ‘Huhediblu’.
Draesner, U., The Indecipherable Stone: Interview with Ulrike Draesner on the Processes of Literature, with K. Leeder and L. Marven.
Draesner, U., Schwitters in the Lakes.
Döring, T., German Is a Foreign Anguish: Draesner and the Sprite of Translation.
Eskin, M., Bemerkungen zu Ulrike Draesners Schwitters-Roman.
Stevenson, R. L., Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
[1] Döring, T., German Is a Foreign Anguish: Draesner and the Sprite of Translation.
[2] Draesner, U., in The Indecipherable Stone: Interview with Ulrike Draesner on the Processes of Literature, with K. Leeder and L. Marven.
[3] Draesner, U., Developing a Polyglot Poetics: The Power of Testimony and Lived Literary Experience.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Draesner, U., in The Indecipherable Stone: Interview with Ulrike Draesner on the Processes of Literature, with K. Leeder and L. Marven.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Eskin, M., Bemerkungen zu Ulrike Draesners Schwitters-Roman.
[10] Stevenson, R. L., Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
[11] Draesner, U., Schwitters in the Lakes.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Ibid.
[15] Ibid.
[16] Döring, T., German Is a Foreign Anguish: Draesner and the Sprite of Translation.
[17] Ibid.
