Poem O the Day

Thanks, WV, for the poem and the reading.

The loss of life in WWI was horrific, and it included the poet above. Tens of millions. Horrific levels of maiming too. All of this despite the far lower levels of “kill rate,” which our government soon sought to change. Most soldiers during WWI refused to actually shoot to kill. A majority wouldn’t purposely shoot to kill their enemies.

Governments around the world tried their best to increase the kill rate, with America in the lead. Went up during WWII, then up more in Korea, then waaay up in Nam. By the time we hit the Gulf War and the most recent invasions, that kill rate was top notch. The Psy-ops folks could then feel really “proud.”

If you’re interested in WWI history, I read an excellent book on it not long ago. Kind of a “people’s history,” but with a set number (20) of on the ground voices:

The Beauty and the Sorrow: An Intimate History of the First World War, by Peter Englund – review

It’s really worth reading.

Also, IMO, one of the greatest prose stylists in the English language, Ford Madox Ford, wrote a masterpiece/tetralogy on the subject. Four absolutely brilliant novels:

Parade’s End.

nittany ram wrote:

So Owen is saying he doesn’t like war?

Hard to tell given his bland, non-descriptive verbiage.

He was antiwar. Arguably the two greatest English poets of that war were Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. Both were either antiwar going in, or became that way after seeing the slaughter, being gassed, suffering PTSD, etc.

nittany ram wrote:

Billy_T wrote:

nittany ram wrote:

So Owen is saying he doesn’t like war?

Hard to tell given his bland, non-descriptive verbiage.

He was antiwar. Arguably the two greatest English poets of that war were Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. Both were either antiwar going in, or became that way after seeing the slaughter, being gassed, suffering PTSD, etc.

Yeah I know. I was joking. That was about the most descriptive poem about the horrors of war that anyone could possibly write.

Oh, man. You got me.

;>)

See, that’s what happens online when there’s no available “non-verbal communication.”

Hope all is well, Nittany.

Okay, so I am preparing a lesson on War Poetry, and I already have this one, and the Thomas Hardy one in mind. I think it’s “The Man I Killed.”

Any other memorable war poems anyone can think of?

Thanks, Nittany.

___

Zooey,

Have you considered Paul Celan’s Deathfugue? It’s beyond devastating. I don’t read German, but I bought his (bilingual) selected prose and poetry, translated by John Felstiner. Have previously read his excellent bio on Celan, with its essential (side) discussion on the difficulties of translation.

I read it too long ago to be sure about this, but I think Celan’s poem was at least in part an answer to Adorno’s comment, “There can be no (lyric) poetry after Auschwitz.”

(That comment has been translated with or without the lyric part.)

https://www.celan-projekt.de/todesfuge-englisch.html

Black milk of daybreak we drink it at evening
we drink it at midday and morning we drink it at night
we drink and we drink
we shovel a grave in the air there you won’t lie too cramped
A man lives in the house he plays with his vipers he writes
he writes when it grows dark to Deutschland your golden hair Margareta
he writes it and steps out of doors and the stars are all sparkling, he whistles his hounds to come close
he whistles his Jews into rows has them shovel a grave in the ground
he commands us to play up for the dance.

Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink you at morning and midday we drink you at evening
we drink and we drink
A man lives in the house he plays with his vipers he writes
he writes when it grows dark to Deutschland your golden hair Margareta
Your ashen hair Shulamith we shovel a grave in the air there you won’t lie too cramped

He shouts jab the earth deeper you lot there you others sing up and play
he grabs for the rod in his belt he swings it his eyes are so blue
jab your spades deeper you lot there you others play on for the dancing

Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink you at midday and morning we drink you at evening
we drink and we drink
a man lives in the house your goldenes Haar Margareta
your aschenes Haar Shulamith he plays his vipers
He shouts play death more sweetly this Death is a master from Deutschland
he shouts scrape your strings darker you’ll rise then as smoke to the sky
you’ll have a grave then in the clouds there you won’t lie too cramped

Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink you at midday Death is a master aus Deutschland
we drink you at evening and morning we drink and we drink
this Death is ein Meister aus Deutschland his eye it is blue
he shoots you with shot made of lead shoots you level and true
a man lives in the house your goldenes Haar Margarete
he looses his hounds on us grants us a grave in the air
he plays with his vipers and daydreams der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland

dein goldenes Haar Margarete
dein aschenes Haar Shulamith

(Übersetzung von John Felstiner, in: Paul Celan – Poet, Survivor, Jew. New Haven 1995.)

It’s not poetry, of course. But another brilliant (and neglected) writer, who concentrated primarily on WWI and its aftermath is Joseph Roth. One of my favorites, all-time. Austrian. German-language. I’ve read a half dozen of his novels and some of his reportage, and I don’t think people can go wrong with any of them.

His most famous novel, however, and arguably his best, is The Radetsky March. He was pretty much a life-long leftist, too.

Emperor of Nostalgia

and:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5552090

Excerpt:

Zoe Heller on a Joseph Roth Classic

July 13, 20062:45 PM ET

Chris Lehmann

Zoe Heller was born in England in 1965. Her most recent novel, What Was She Thinking, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2003 and has now been adapted for the screen. (The film, starring Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett, is to be released in December 2006.) Her next novel, The Believers, will be published by Henry Holt in 2007.

Call them buttonhole books, the ones you urge passionately on friends, colleagues and passersby. All readers have them — and so do writers. This summer, NPR.org talks with authors about their favorite buttonhole books in the weekly series “You Must Read This.”

Joseph Roth’s 1932 masterpiece, The Radetzky March, captures with remarkable fullness the abrupt passage of the Old Europe into the modern world. Roth captures this big theme in an arresting account of the rise and fall of one imperial Austrian family: the Trottas, a line of Slovenian peasants who came into nobility when an army lieutenant in the line famously saved the life of Kaiser Franz Joseph at the Battle of Solferino in 1859. Promoted to captain and given a title, Baron Joseph von Trotta retires into rural obscurity and dies; his son, Franz, grows up to be a nondescript government functionary.

Franz’s bumbling son, Carl Joseph, resumes the family’s military vocation at his father’s urging, with consistently disastrous results. He ineptly thrusts his best friend, the Jewish doctor Demant, into a senseless duel. He takes a married lover, and piles up gambling debts and lost alcoholic weekends in a remote military outpost near the Ukrainian border. A crisis builds that would permanently jeopardize the family’s honor and good name, and the machinery of imperial favor lurches into gear one final time — only to be overtaken by the assassination of the Kaiser’s son Franz Ferdinand and the approach of the Great War.