Good afternoon and welcome to this book at lunchtime event on Porcelain Poem on the Downfall of My City by Josquin been translated by Karen Leader.
My name is Professor Wendy Williams. I'm the director here at Torch and I'll be chairing today's session.
It's a great pleasure to be here to introduce this book at lunchtime event book at lunchtime is as regulars will know Torture's flagship event series.
Taking the form of fortnightly bite sized book discussions with a range of commentators
in normal times would be offering you sandwiches and the rest in lockdown times.
We're offering you food for thought. Please do take a look at our website and newsletter for the full programme for the rest of this term.
And indeed, we're already preparing for next term after the summer.
I'm going to start today by introducing briefly the full participants in what I'm sure will be a rich, wide ranging and really exciting discussion.
First of all, I'm delighted to welcome both the author and the translator to the screen to screen Bine, who hopefully will come on screen in a minute.
And current leader Josquin Bowen was born on the 9th of October 1962 in Dresden.
He's one of the most important and internationally renowned German poets and essayist.
After the opening of the Iron Curtain, he travelled throughout Europe, South East Asia and the US.
He was a guest of the German department at NYU, New York University and the Villa Aurora in Los Angeles.
He's received numerous awards for his work, including the Georg Bishnu Prise, the Friedrich Nietzsche Prise,
the Friedrich Holyland Prise and the Polish BNF Herbut International Literary Award.
His books have been translated into several languages, including, of course, by current leader.
He lives in Berlin and Rome.
Professor Karen Leader is a professor of modern languages, German at Oxford University and a fellow of new college, Oxford.
She's published widely on modern German culture and is a Prize-Winning translator and of contemporary German literature,
most recently winning the English PEN Award and an American Pen Hyam award for her translation of Ulrica Olmert Sunday.
She was a torch knowledge exchange fellow with the Southbank Centre a while ago,
and she currently works with empty modern poetry in Translation Poet in the City and the Poetry Society on her continuing project,
mediating more modern poetry. Welcome to you both.
Current and become the next member of our panel today is Professor Patrick Major.
Wait until Patrick comes on screen. Hello, Patrick.
Patrick is a professor of history at the University of Redding, where he's also an associate of the Eastern German Studies Archive.
His research interests are primarily the political,
social and cultural history of divided Germany in the Cold War is published on the rise and fall of the Berlin Wall and on Hollywood's depictions of,
quote unquote, bad Nazis and quote unquote good Germans is currently researching the bombing of Berlin in the Second World War.
Finally and absolutely not lost in any sense of least the moment.
The member of our panel is Edmund Ovalle. Hello, I'm delighted to welcome you on screen now.
Edmond is an artist who writes much of his work is about the contingency of memory, bringing particular histories of loss and exile into renewed life.
Both his artistic and written practise of broken new ground through their critical engagement with the history and potential of ceramics,
as well as with architecture, music, dance and poetry.
Recent sites include the Venetian Ghetto and Athanasiou of NATO for his two part project, some coinciding with the Venice Venice Biennale in 2019.
The latter holds the world's most ambitious work to date the Library of Exile,
a pavilion of 2000 books written by those forced to leave their own country or exiled within.
It will also, I think, be thinking about other aspects of Edmans work, including the very recent Comando.
As you'll see, we've assembled here to our great privilege, an amazing group of people.
All it needs me to do is just to say a few more words about how we plan to run the next hour or so.
We'll begin with a reading from Davos. This will be followed by contextualisation of the bombing campaign, amongst other things, from Patrick.
Some thoughts then on translation and the reception of dosis collection in poetry, as well as the work of translation.
The craft from Karen, followed by Edmans thoughts on poetry, pottery,
the work of memory and much else besides will then enter a free for all discussion,
including, of course, questions from you, the audience, which I'm hoping you will put in the Q&A function as the discussion today develops.
I'll bring those questions into the into the debate, to the table, as it were in the last quarter, an hour or so of the time we have.
All that left me to do now, then,
is to thank our speakers for coming to this session and to ask you to us to begin with your reading and for others to turn their.
Yeah. You've already got your sound of all time. My camera off hand over to you.
Thank you. Thank you very much for inviting me to this session.
It's a pleasure to be with you. And I will read some of the poems of this cycle of 49 parts.
I will read seven parts. And well, let me just say one word to one.
One sentence was always in my mind when I was writing these poems 15, 20 years ago.
That was a sentence by Bertolt Brecht, who once said, all our cities are only a part of all the cities which we destroyed.
That was uttered in 1944 by the data in our entire footnote in Stettin.
There should be a statue in this allergic tone.
But you can never forget this, this cat, which let's say dialectics of war zone.
And that's when when the idea of that poem started. Porcelain pots, Illan.
INDs. What to clague and speakable land for the debauch that formed Ornsteiner Vignacourt Ashin.
Coifed albums and, of course, how. It is not to be suf linked to secluding Zingale convict and Kalima, Uganda Ed,
I was told by estaba and stringers unhide Skrull plus the one on one tolba bleep provided to.
Which does not reflect what happens in Saxon's Pough Fleshman walks and unfortunately,
you must understand gluten allergy as catfish look of Wajda would support an.
Fine foods. Lizer years, young feebs was driven by it here and now after the life of Kristen Dristan.
Stofan Nazeem pantsing is Civita Unfussy at a heavy dish that unconditionally Tostin.
Motion filed against him, Payzant Kayna and a son near the Sri Lanka Diamond invalided Dan Senor Feuerbach,
Father Castlebar and the Kenova middle out at deeply Buster Keaton's will get Marnia Head.
I'm at my pawn, Antonin Scalia, and I cannot believe I haven't seen Justin Faqir.
Seabourne. Istanbul under the calm down and now the calls and Karen outscores spooked when an incursion deep Manolete.
Others came in London, attracted in museums.
Quantum Leap and Glass and Clim plan need a lot to go start and you will have to hold Situationist Hougan debated Lauter Shyama existence,
an inferno of DeNardo putting glitz and council Facenda Inuit's above a dish that was there before standing next to only trace value,
not cash can a algazi. After seeing.
A politician who can Zebb and kick for flatout.
Constable Schlaff dish shut up to was the same sensation in the hoola,
Kenshin Hillal is Nakatani response to these understands this team isolette does Tanon Kingdom place that so had to blend in?
Vega of Insulin Pinguin and many of Glueck worked for Tostes.
Unclick aims to please the islanders estimate's to these women of now Fitzgerald, Andinet, South and Gippsland can still plan B and Diana Hunt.
Swanzy helped enough on discounters like Yorn and Comcare to look to him, but he couldn't have imagined and flying.
And I wonder, do you now know on an. Clinton, Kinde and Folkman's,
I'd see after the endangered psychologising info you invade OT's in mind the 2000 spizzirri
music in Shrader in here memoir I volunteer here gets the house and you get Duncan Lasan,
ESPN Legal Reman not some trees and of a state and found cause you were tired and go home and make those people talamona.
Ireland has been fined and Youngstown's only bus flipped, but should be charged in the laundries,
Duluth and you all comment in the day in came for and shift some Spezia Gambardella
where he for such an outing posta Blauman Luv Colognes and Druken Zamon Atorvastatin,
Glitz and Farlam Metsu fussin badass most discordant lose lam was disciplined soon be travelling
from La Metabolomics is amazing as wild as Spitzer for Mittal magnetising fainted after Naza Tense.
On Fitzy. Common symptom and weakness in the past year 2000,
Tevan Earthrise like the Guinness baker who rushed out of the see an American climate
climbin into the sun from which the MusclePharm would have put forth transept,
thereby to save a corporation, a Garden of Eden and poverty.
The and breathlessness for Lauvergne is a high Kēlen Follman one gets here and allows us to touch them.
Limosine is indicative, even with a toasted site known as the Toast of Town.
Thank you. I'll just bring my camera back on again as well.
Thank you so much to us. It's a great start to our discussion today.
Now, as I said to to some degree, Contextualise wanted to give us a bit more about the original moment of the bombings.
I'd like to hand over to Patrick Major. Right.
I hope that you can see some images that I'm going to show, too, but I think that this is a poem that has a lot of historical references in it.
So what I wanted to do is actually to go back to the moment really of the end of the war.
Nineteen forty four to nineteen forty five. And try to explain why this happened.
But some say the politics of afterwards. So could you move to the next slide please.
Now of course there's a reference in one of the poems to Arthur Arthur Harris,
who is the head of Bomber Command and perhaps the most controversial military leader,
certainly of the British in World War Two, who was charged with this aerial bombing campaign.
And I think we have to remember that they they are an effort quickly discovered that bombing in daylight led to
too many being shot down so they would bomb at night and they could only really hit anything as big as a city.
But I think we have to be absolutely clear that the targets were the civilian residential areas of the cities.
This was not collateral damage, to use a phrase, from perhaps later on in the 20th century that the bottom right,
you can see one of Arthur Harris's so-called blue books where he was almost lovingly document the destruction to anything in blue is destruction.
And you can see there the main weapon of destruction was the incendiary bomb.
The theory was that this would create a kind of self consuming conflagration where cities would destroy themselves.
This only worked in terms of creating a firestorm in two cities, Hamburg in July 1943 and placed in February 1945.
But I think it's important to remember that if Arthur Harrison, Bomber Command, had their plans worked,
then every German city would have been experiencing these sorts of levels of destruction.
The next slide, please. This was part of what was called Operation Thunderclap now set that I'm researching the bombing of Berlin,
and it was a revelation to me early on to discover that originally the main target had been the German capital.
The plan may be to try and push Germany out of the war if it would seem to be on the point of collapse anyway.
And all the targets which were chosen at the top. Right.
You can see the base of my circle of destruction. Interesting that the ground zero is the shtup Schloss,
which has been recently rebuilt and the plans even considered that there might
be something like 200000 casualties if bomb bombing of Berlin just went on for,
let's say, the best part of a week with the British and the Americans alternating day and night.
It's also important that part of Operation Thunderclap did consider other Eastern cities,
especially if they were undamaged, and that brought Dresden into the fray.
But when this plan was first considered, it was then shelved in 1944.
Next slide, please. So how did Dresden come to replace Berlin in this plan?
Well, the beginning of 1945, we have to remember the context of the where, how the war was going.
The Soviets mounted a huge winter offensive, the bestowal offensive in the middle of January.
It may have got all the way to Berlin, but it really began to peter out at the beginning of February on the banks of the border.
But before that had happened, British intelligence had raised the possibility that could the West help out the Soviet offensive?
And the so-called temporary evacuations and reinforcements, a lot of the language which is used, is very euphemistic.
Churchill himself is key to this decision making for political reasons because he's about to meet Stalin at Yalta.
He encourages these plans. And so Operation Thunderclap really gets broken down into smaller pieces,
the Americans bombed Berlin very heavily on the 3rd of February and then both Bomber
Command and the Americans bomb Dresden on the 13th of 14th of February in a night-time,
so called double tap raid where the British have one raid and then another three hours later to try to catch the emergency services out in the open.
So it's extremely calculated stuff. This leads again because of the concentration of the bombing to a firestorm and 25000 dead.
It's been estimated killed, including many refugees.
So I think in a part of the controversy, if this is,
that this would not be allowed under current international law, but whether this could be considered a war crime.
Next slide, please. I think what's interesting is when the allies become this kind of sensitive to this
and one of the big questions for me is why don't the the British and the Americans,
if you like, realise what's going on in their name earlier.
But in a press conference immediately after dressed and a reporter, Howard Cowan,
files a report in which he uses the phrase deliberate terror bombing.
And then this gets picked up by other newspapers so that, for instance,
The Sunday Times is using this phrase, the weekend after taste and is reporting 250000 dead,
which was, interestingly, the number that Goebbels had given where he seems to have inflated it tenfold for propaganda effect.
And by the end of March 1945, Churchill himself is beginning to want to distance himself from this and.
Writes a famous memo where he talks about the wanton destruction having to stop and at which Arthur Harris is invited for his view,
and you can see at the bottom this is his type section S.
Interestingly, I think this was added,
you could almost feel the anger in his memorandum because he felt that he was just carrying out really the orders of Churchill and the government.
But there were references to this memorandum also in the in the poems.
But he talks about cycle psychologically.
He would explain it by the connexion with German bands and placed in Shepherdess is the shepherdess is are they the Meissen porcelain?
So there was if you like it, it's an emotional response which the British media are now indulging in for him.
I just wanted at the top. Right. Have put a few examples of porcelain.
He also makes the point that Dresden was a massive munition works.
I think we also have to remember that lots of enterprises which might have been used
for peacetime production in the war were co-opted into this massive war effort,
including porcelain, so that Telefunken, which was the one of the kind of electronics companies working Berlin,
used a very kind of high grade form of porcelain, which it sprayed on to elements in its radio components.
But also a posten was used to isolate electricity, but also the bottom right.
You can see actually just the little beads made of porcelain, which we used in the German stick grenades on the end of the string.
A final slide, please. I think just to raise some questions about the aftermath of this, I mean, I suppose my big question is why?
Dressed as they are a symbol of conventional destruction, Hamburg probably experienced more dead in July 1943, about 40000.
I think we shouldn't forget that. We're also still more area bombing raids,
which were highly destructive force home 10 days after they dressed and rights and for what time was a relatively small town.
So proportionally it lost more of its population. Kurtzberg, but also Potsdam.
Potsdam was the final straw, interestingly, for Churchill, and at that point area bombing officially stopped.
But it was literally three weeks before the end of the war.
But I think a lot of the poem, of course, talks about memory and talks about the period afterwards.
And we have to be aware that this was a site of Cold War contestation,
that books such as policemen and a camera clocked on was a picture volume which came out in East Germany in 1949, which I'm not showing.
You see the horrific pictures inside. But there were other books which equated Dresden with with Hiroshima, of course.
Also, it's a possibility for reconciliation.
And I'm talking to you from just down the road from Coventry. I used to teach in Coventry for 17 years.
Of course, Coventry had its own experience of the war and the famous Coventry Cross of Nails copy of which
you can see in the Frauenkirche that traced and was used as some sort of bridging function.
But clearly, Treston left a huge question mark over British conduct in the war, so I'll stop there.
Thank you so much, Patrick. Thank you.
And. As you said, this is also a site of contestation long after the war, and I'm going to hand over now to Karen to talk about this collection,
perhaps more directly, the work of translation and also the reception of the collection in contemporary Germany.
Thank you, Karen. Thank you. I'll be very brief, but just to say that I began working on this poem.
I was working on a an anthology of poems covering 15 years of his work.
And interestingly, he asked me to include about 20 of these poems from this selection, which is a considerable number.
And it intrigued me that it was so central to his conception of his own work and gave me a taste to do more.
And the poem, if he had a taste of it,
I think already is a sequence of 49 poems written over a long period between 1995 and 2002 and says that he sat down on the anniversary of
the bombing each year to write one as a kind of ritual or game and then brought them together at the end and tressell in his hometown.
And that's part of the title, The Downfall of My City.
So it's an elegy, a modern elegy in many ways, but not a conventional elegy.
I think it's fair to say in that you saw right at that first strophe,
the first poem and all kinds of voices take over the green leg room by means green,
like the novice writing back to a history that he didn't experience, literary speeches, many, many literary works, politicians, musicians, myths.
Foremost amongst those is Power Salen, the great Jewish poet of the Shoah.
And indeed, in the title Porcelain, you can hear poor Ceylan for long and many, many other literary quotations come up.
So it's a very dense sort of bringing together of voices.
It's also a political call. As Patrick said it.
It was introduced its. It's an attempt to reinsert the fate of what might be called a British war crime into
the logic of German aggression and to move away from the idea that Treston War was
an innocent symbol of beauty and culture that has been attacked north of Dresden as
a unique victim has been manipulated and instrumentalise by the right in Germany,
and thereby also taking away the ability of individual Germans to mourn their own losses and.
So it operates at three levels, it seems to me it's very real, the real things that happen.
You've got that beautiful poem about the tinfoil strips that the allies dropped as they approached Dresden to confuse the anti-aircraft guns,
leaving the city completely vulnerable. But also it's about memory, the business of memory, and finally,
the business of how to find a language for modern Eligio language for such destruction.
And it seems to me the immortalises all those things that moves on all those levels.
There's a key further point, which is about form. It has a very grand title in German poem.
We don't have the normal word for poems and it's written in a classical meta.
You've heard it with trophy's rhymes. Strength is not right.
From the beginning, it seemed to be vital to to translate into that form as well.
Although rhyme and rhythm are often historical clothing here,
it seemed to me to be part of the business of trying to write and elegy for something that's gone,
but also a disturbed elegy, a broken elegy, just like the porcelain at the centre of the paper is is broken.
Now, when I started this enterprise, my interest was quick and really I the reception of the poem in German.
And I have to say, and I hope just doesn't mind me saying, it was a pretty rocky reception when it came out in 2005.
And the four central issues critics. Disputed the rights of someone born after the bombing of Dresden to write about it to Toll,
and then they worried about the tone, which they thought was partly too full of pathos, the hometown,
but also too cynical to distance, too fascinated with the violence,
thereby evoking the question again of what kind of language can you use to write about and to write about for to write about destruction?
And then they write about the food.
They really didn't like this idea of the classical form and felt it either inappropriate to this vast material or sentimental,
even pornographic is extraordinary. The number of times the word pornographic comes up.
And when I talked about my translation work in various contexts in Germany or the US or here,
it's astonishing how those objections to the poem come out again and again and again.
It's a very visceral level. This is obviously a raw live memory for many, many Germans who object to any way to try and get hold of hold of it.
That made me even more determined by the reception in Germany, which I thought was just covid and wrong,
but also that ongoing sense that this is too hot to handle as a subject.
And I'd say only two things about my work on this.
And I hope it comes up in the in our discussion first is that I think the critics are wrong about this sense of the form you will have had already.
I think the raw rhythm's, but there are rhymes, but that wasn't deliberately mistruth sort of rhymes.
And for example, zombies to rhyme zombies post with zombies within centuries.
Seems to me an interesting clash. Words are facially overdetermined.
The word spoon comes in in one particularly controversial poem, which means both a crack, a jump between events and again.
So it boils down questions constantly, questions language, but finally, also porcelain.
The poem is full of quotations of such literary quotations, but also full of art.
And at the centre is porcelain does talks about how he was triggered by a line from a poem,
a song of porcelain, the sound, little sound of porcelain being crushed as a symbol of loss.
But it also seems to me that if porcelain is the symbolic centre of the poem and the tradition of Meissen porcelain in the city,
it's also constantly aware of its own inadequacy as a form for holding so much loss.
And part of the job of the work as a whole is to constantly test these broken forms and these broken symbols and these inadequate symbols.
And as I was concluding my work, I came across a fantastic display at the Japanese in Dresden,
which moved to the British Museum partly by Edmund Deval.
And it gave me a way into thinking about this poem, which was and I know Edward is going to talk about it,
not so much anymore, but to think of the poem maybe as a kind of Kentucky,
as a joining of shards, but not echoing wholeness, not bringing things together, but remember history and remembering the brokenness.
And I tried very hard to do that in my translation. So thank you very much.
Thank you, Karen. That was wonderful.
And it set up Edmund very well. I think in a positive sense.
I hope they were set up to bring us to to to bring your thoughts to the final section of this individual
responses to this collection and to the larger questions of memory and pottery and poetry that evoke.
So I'll hand over to you now, Edmund. Thank you. What is this thing of whiteness?
Asks Melville in Moby Dick, it's white earth.
Kosslyn It's up to my album at home.
It's the whitest and most translucent thing there is in the world.
It's come a very long way. Porcelain is fantasy.
It begins on the other side of the world. It can only get to Europe through the Silk Road through unimaginable journeys.
But when it arrives in England, it's an object of desire, a material that tells you that you have power,
that you are holding something which is very fantastical and mysterious and desirable.
It arrives, of course,
in Saxony and desire to comes in contact with Augustus the Strong sitting in that extraordinary series of palaces interest and he wants porcelain.
He has, he says, Putzel. And how can the madness of porcelain?
He has hundreds of illegitimate children. He has horses.
He has treasures in the green vaults. But most of all, he wants porcelain, white gold, and he captures a young alchemist.
He persuades a philosopher at the very start of the 18th century.
And this becomes the story of how you, Dresden and Meissen and porcelain become intertwined.
Dresden becomes a city of alchemist's, of walling up science in those vaults underneath the city walls,
and then finally in 1788, they open a kiln and outcomes, the first piece of white earth transformed into porcelain in the West.
It's extraordinary. It's a thing of utter beauty.
It's so extraordinary that the person who picks it up says it is white and almost as fragrant as a narcissus.
And you have to imagine this becomes the beginning of a whole way of thinking about the world.
Through white clay, Augustus builds a palace across the empire, the kind of chappellet where one room of porcelain has to be white, the next yellow,
the next couple all ending up with a room of fantasy where he's going to sit on a throne and the whole world will come and kneel in front of him.
And they're chattels of porcelain and are swarms services.
And the whole world is turned into commodities at Meyssan, where one thing after another can be made out of this purest of materials.
And because it's pure, it's dangerous because purity is saying that the world is something you can control.
And of course, it's a good German material. Which is why in 1936 and 1937, Himmler decides that he wants to have his own porcelain manufactory to.
And it starts on the outskirts of Munich in a little village where they start to make porcelain pure,
beautiful German for the Nazi functionaries, and then because they can, they move the porcelain factory to Dhaka.
So there is a porcelain manufacturer in Dakar with slave labour where visiting dignitaries can choose beautiful white German porcelain.
And in 1945, in February, as we've heard, there is the bombing of the city.
And on a truck in that city on that night, there is a whole wagon full of crates which had been looted in 38 from the Von Klemperer family,
a Jewish family that collected Postnet live.
It was then, of course, and had had their collection looted from and the collection is mostly destroyed like everything else in that city.
And after the war, as they sift through that wreckage, they find shards of shards of put away in boxes.
And then in 2011, these shots of rediscovered and their restituted to the Von Klemperer family.
And they come up for auction and I buy a dinner service in fragments,
a broken dinner service of my son plates that was once on a Jewish family table in Dresden.
And then over several years, I ask a friend of mine, an artist,
could my code sue me to slowly put together with Keisuke with gold and lacquer so that we can mark loss,
not repair these Meissen plates, but actually have this great network of gold lacquer so that you can see where that damage occurred.
And then in 2019, I open in the Spanish Alcalay, a library of exile,
and on the walls of this library I brush porcelain slip and I write the names of
all the destroyed libraries of the world from Alexandria all the way through,
including the looted library of my great grandfather in Vienna and the destroyed university libraries.
And there it sits surrounding books of exile, a nearby.
I have these stacks of plates and as I open it,
I only then realise that this is not only two hundred and fifty metres from the first book burning in Germany in 1963,
but this is the same room that Victor von Klemperer set when he was allowed until he was barred
and wrote that extraordinary series of scholarly things and diaries in that particular room.
So here we have does is it is iterative. It is extraordinary.
It's full of spaces. I've been reading Ceylan all my life and now I read this goodbye and I'm moved to tears by what
he has done because I think that what he's done is take us back into a particular moment,
interest in history, one image before I shut up, which is in those extraordinary laboratories where they made Postnet,
they had a burning mirror where the light came in and it was forced into such intensity
that mineral's would be turned into their constituent parts and then they could remake.
And I think what does is done in this incredible and moving translation by current leader is to give us a burning mirror for Dresden and for poetry.
It's hugely moving to be part of this conversation today.
I'm shut up now. Thank you so much.
The last thing we want you to do is to shut up. Thank you so much for what you said.
I'd also like to bring everybody else back on the screen, please.
So many images that the burning mirrors that concern the those.
Yeah, chilling maps that you showed us, Patrick, and of course, so many sounds, including the patterns of noise that are in dozens of original poems.
And then in Karen's translations, we have a couple of questions or one question about metrics already from the audience, please.
Those who are with us to put more questions into the question and answer function, if you'd like to ask more,
what I wanted to perhaps start things off with is just to pick up on, it seems to me, a number of things that sort of came across and that.
One is this relationship. Between now, between kind of contested history and the design nonetheless, to make something of it.
And Edmund, you talked about not repairing, but marking the loss.
And I wanted us to go back to you if you had any sense of repairing something.
Obviously, the concern is part of the poem as well as well as marking loss.
So I wondered if we could start with this, this double movement of repairing reparation,
making amends, but at the same time marking that which is missing, which is lost.
Am I making sense to you here? Well, I don't think that that can be any relief, of course,
but there is one element in this whole cycle which brings me and hopefully the reader to back to childhood, to a to a childhood, really, in a way.
And this is also marked by by the word or the image of porcelain.
Porcelain was also in many, many families.
Through all the different, let's say, shifts of society, a very important thing there is like Sonya,
I remember my grandmother with not much money, but she had a little collection of Meissen porcelain, which was a very rare thing.
So when on Sundays it was used and as a child, when I came to her,
so I had the cake was served on some plates of of of mice and porcelain with the blue onion ornaments.
Right. And in all the families, these these items were kept and handed over to the next generation and so on and so on.
And a lot of these things, of course, were damaged at that moment.
So and there was from the very beginning on was this link between trust and the destruction of Dresden and this material of porcelain.
I had a lot of a big collection of quotes or material collection around this poem.
And one thing is I found that the BBC News right on the 16th of February, nineteen forty five,
that means three days later after the bombing, she said there is no porcelain in Dresden anymore.
So the equation was made very, very early, but.
And I found that in the diaries of Samuel Beckett, he used to he visited Germany amidst the 30s.
That means Nazi Germany went to Berlin, also dressed in Christ, and was very important for him.
He wanted to see the picture gallery. And then in his diaries, he refers to the porcelain Madonna, which is typical Beckett and so on.
So it goes through through all the centuries, starting from the moment when when,
as Edmund mentioned, August, the strong forced his alchemist Poetica to to to make porcelain.
Actually, the story behind is that this guy came to the court and told the king that he could that he could make gold, which of course, could not.
But then he was incarcerated and had some time.
And then he intended to save his life, so to speak.
He went to the porcelain and offers the strongest, as always said the desire for porcelain is like the desire for oranges.
So you see, I'm amidst a fantastic dream in a fantastic world.
And this idea of porcelain seems to connect the h.s.
Connect people, connect collectors. And of course, one of the last touching stories is that of the Klemperer edition collection.
So I think and this is what I try to put all these things into this poem.
So the poem is actually a kind of a collage, a constellation of memories of of thoughts, feelings, and most of them are collective ones.
Thank you, Karen.
I wonder if we could pick up on something that you said in your comments on the poem as precisely to pick up on this idea of collecting,
because obviously one of the really striking things about this collection is that it's a collection,
that it's that it's a long poem in one sense, but also that, as you said, there are many,
many voices, objects, other bits of culture, shall we say, inside this poem.
So the poem is itself a collection of of various shards, elements, etc., of history and of culture.
Have you more to say about that in particular, I guess, about how to transfer or translate some of the energy of that collecting into English?
There's two separate questions I want about the sort of form itself, but also the mode of transforming that collection into English.
I'm with saying and because we don't have the books sort of in front of us,
that the little poems are spaced out in the book and sometimes at the bottom of the page, sometimes the top of a page.
And so they feel they feel like discrete objects with a lot of weight around them.
It was wonderful when it comes to white animals talking about animals.
And so it feels like shards. They feel like shards of brought together.
I love the idea of the burning section. I think that's an image which we should think about.
Maybe the burning glass is in the poetry or in the translation here too.
And I suppose I could focus for a second. But the difficulties,
because the different voices are often put together very closely and so that you get a shift of tone from classical
pathos to absolute demotic or from very beautiful image of porcelain to a terrible image of griddled corpses.
And and that's one of the things that I think caused the offence and still causes offence, but is also a challenge, I think,
for the translator to resist the temptation to smooth it over and make it a whole and make it beautiful,
because I think part of it is precisely about the the desperateness of these different things.
The fact that they are a collection of voices and feelings and quotations, but which end up being more than the sum of the parts,
which are a kind of collection, is an image of a of music,
because a lot of the connexion as well, the voices coming together to create a great analogy.
And I think it must be something like that. Edmondo. Yes.
Go for it or else waving because I'm so interested.
I mean, I of course, they sit as objects, text objects on a page beautifully.
This is something.
And they are absolutely intensely polyphonic, you know, as a series of poems across the book, which I think is very, very special and extraordinary.
But what I really wanted to say was that the surely one of the things about this is, is that it's it's it's it's it's it's iterative.
It's about to return each poem because it has the same form.
What I feel does it's doing is saying you can't contain all of this within a single a single, tiny,
small entity or a single lyric that it's so so you have that sense of return and return to that.
And that surely takes you to a morning. I mean, takes you straight to what Freud understood as morning and Melancholia,
which is that you actually that the grief is about something which actually has no resolution,
has no lyrical sense of of of being able to be put down in any way.
And that's what I think is at the heart of this extraordinary work, is that it is unresolved, you know, intentionally unresolved.
And and in some ways, it's generative, it's fissile. You feel almost like entered it.
And I thought, well, come on, does is the next time.
And that surely is what makes this so extraordinarily rich for the reader.
So I'm off. I'm meeting. No, no, that's that's that's wonderful.
And I guess before I come to you, Patrick, because I'd like to pick up the notion of repetition and the iterative in a different register,
really in a moment in relation to the bombing campaign and the kind of details that you gave us about how the bombing worked.
But does could you better tell us why that why you stopped what you did?
In other words, Edmans question. Come on, where's the next poem? Is there a reason?
Is there a sense? Is there a logic and necessity to stopping at the point that you did?
Your muted. Well, Karen told you already that I had this contract with myself to to write each year another poem around the 30th of February.
Well, in one day I realised this is it's enough now.
It's never been enough. But I have left a lot more of parts, but I had to arrange them.
And when I arranged them, I found out that there will be a number which is good for for the for the purpose.
The 49. I don't know why. Sometimes not only me per poets or novelists are playing a lot with numbers.
Just think of Dunnington. I'm now translating a little bit of Spanish and they always this play with with numbers.
So despite there are some more and the material is much wider, I decided to to to finish it at that point.
So also to, to and now comes to point also to, to, to bring it to the public and to test it.
Know when I and it started very from the beginning in German receptions, I realised that this will cause a debate and a debate which is still ongoing.
So I know it's very controversial being receptive.
And and actually, I must say, it makes me proud because I don't like that the books are just let's say bye bye.
Critics are just marked and then thrown away. It's good to have a text which is which is a stepping stone as to speak or whatever you call it.
So and I'd also like that in one of the reviews they picked up when one of the
little pieces of this whole thing is built of elements of syntactic element.
And one of those little pieces was dissy forms. And of course, it comes in the last poem.
And of course, these are dissy forms and we have to discuss about that.
What is the dicey ness of these forms? You already did it. So to come back, I, I just finished it and then I offered it to the audience as a test.
It was a test and I really was interested in the also historical debates because these historical debates or the debates on right memory,
they are still going on each year. You can you can write a book about the changing of the function of memory of the Dresden bombing each year.
There is another little anecdote. So I was writing a little bit about that.
And also why I finished that is that I could go further in other texts to dressed.
And so that the city is is always the main motive in my writing.
So I wrote some essays and now I'm working on another book.
So but with this series, I was finished.
Well, I must add one thing only what I found very early, let's say in my youth it started that there is a somewhat hypocritical point in this debate.
And I tried to find out and I had so many discussions with people about that in Germany as well as in England.
And I've mostly found, I must say, the the the the English pardners, very, very fair.
I must say, I can I can really understand the English point of this thing.
And let me just say this. The main concern at that moment was to finish the war.
I don't know if it was really appropriate, but it was part of this concept to finish the war and at any cost, of course,
so well and for myself, I can say, okay, it's only one of the many stories of World War Two, but it's a family story.
And that's why they picked it up. The family story.
Right. In terms of the family porcelain all the way through to the as Karen said,
the poem of my city is is, I would say, enormously strong in this collection.
I want to go back to Patrick, though,
to to pick up on both on what was just said about the kind of the desire to finish the war and the kind of powerfully brutal,
really calculation of repetition of the iterative bombing raid that the first the Americans and then the British.
And then, you know, we need to we need to plan this very carefully, which you brought out so strongly in your presentation.
I wonder if you want to say a little bit more about that in relation to to perhaps either.
Well, I'll give you an either in itself, if you like,
in the moment or in relation to this question of when will we be finished with talking about this,
when we when will this be not something that we need to return to.
Right. Yeah, I mean,
I think one thing we should remember is that there were huge disagreements within the Air Force leadership about whether this was the right strategy.
The Americans on the whole, were pretty critical of this and didn't want to become involved.
But I think it's crucial that we need to remember the Americans were involved in place and they were also involved in Hamburg.
So in the the really destructive raids, this sort of alternating pattern of what they call round the clock bombing made a difference.
I think at the time they felt that they just had this surprise then offensive, which they'd had to contain.
The Germans seemed to be devising these new sort of super weapons like jet fighters.
And so there was quite a pessimistic feeling in January 1945 when they started reviving Operation Thunderclap.
And I think my point would be that in terms of helping the Soviet offensive, it had stopped in early February.
Nineteen forty five. They knew they weren't trying to break through.
So I mean, what I actually found out when the Soviet actually going to test and it's not till after the final capitulation.
So it's not till I think it's something like the 8th or the 9th of May, 1945.
So there's a lot of politics going on around it. But I wanted to actually come back to the thing that really strikes me about the poems
is the sense of place and space and the architecture and buildings and the history is,
you know, built in to to the city. I mean, I first visited Dresden in January 1989.
So it's just sort of an interesting year to visit it.
It really struck me about how there were kind of bits of ruins still left and then bits of reconstruction.
It felt quite kind of messy in a way. But I grew up in Hull, which was the biggest the most sort of bombed city in Britain.
I'm used to seeing places with missing bits, and I taught in Coventry where there were also lots of missing pieces.
But I'm struck by the fact that in Coventry, the cathedral, it was deliberately left as a ruin.
And in Berlin, there's the goddess Kisha.
And I just wonder what I still feel slightly uncomfortable about the do we want to call it the Kinski of the Frauenkirche of kind of,
you know, reconstructing it almost as a perfect replica of itself.
But just to add on points of reparation and the Cold War, which is where I sort of first came, interested in Coventry,
the canon of the cathedral, Paul Oestreich was one of the big kind of champions of reconciliation and after long negotiations,
got a group of British students to go to dressed and then I think 1965 and to actually work on physical,
you know, just sort of clearing up rubble and making some sort of atonement.
But what was interesting was that the Stasi were deeply suspicious of what was
happening there and always thought that there was kind of something untoward happening.
It was being used as a cover for something else of the Cold War or was made it very difficult to to make reparation.
Thank you. We've got about five minutes left, and that's all, I'm afraid,
but I would like to just pick up on one of the questions that is there, partly so that we go to the sort of the matter of the poem.
So there's a question from Erico which is said, I'd like to hear a bit more about metrics from both Dorson.
Karen, this is also something that Edmund drew attention to.
Is there any regular or more or less regular metrical pattern underlying the collection as a whole?
And does this metrical pattern reappear in the English translation?
So perhaps we can end, in other words, with the, if you like, the gold of the metrics itself in within this poetry?
I'd like to do this sort of backwards, if I may. In other words, start with Karen first, because Karen is a kind of reader, if you like,
of the noise of the German and then the business of of working that across to the English.
And then we'll end with with those.
Yes, and I think they were wrongly read by German, which quite often we thought of them as absolutely regular and not regular.
This is an approximation of a kind of hexameter, which often has extra bits.
But and the rhyme isn't entirely regular either.
But but there is this sort of gesture towards grand constructions of grand architecture, a lost wholeness.
And but often it plays with that.
And one of the challenges of the translation and the readers can decide whether or not was to try and replicate that in English,
which that kind of form doesn't say in English. We use five beats.
We're used to Shakespeare in our heads. So it already feels a little bit old and unstable in English.
Dicey maybe, which I hope adds to the effect. But yes, very much.
I want to try and get those breaks and lapses and false steps because I think that part of the poem.
Where's your mute? Which one?
Yeah, sorry. You'd think after all this time, good,
good does would you like to say anything about the metrics that the Rhythmicity Karens made it very clear that there is a metrical pattern here,
but that it's a broken one, a kind of disruptive.
And I mean, I for one, think that she's that was really one of the things I was most amazed by in the reading was,
was how well that functioned and how her limping at various kinds it was.
And other times you were kind of leaping through so that if if metre is also a way of walking,
it seemed to me that the sort that the walking patterns in this collection are just extraordinary in English.
How was it for you in the German? Well, when you say walking, so you relate to the body.
And I first of all, I always relate to to what I call the inner ear.
So I don't actually like to speak only in technical terms about metres because the metre comes very naturally to me.
So it starts with some lines. And I know this is a good sound and then that's my rule.
It had to be very natural.
So I don't like so much like literary or literary literary forms, which which which have too much an impulse on the technical side.
Of course there are. I would say it's it's a tohe or whatever and but it has to be like a natural voice speaking first of all.
And then of course and that's that's this is limiting everything.
You come to the end of the line and then you have to think about how the line is going on.
If you if you make an Jumpman, a break or whatever and.
Well, and there are so many opportunities to to to jump to the nut, to another line,
to another image, but still I had this rule just to stay in a sentence like natural like form.
So what do you see? These are all sentences.
Also, the ones were rather disrupted, but these are all sentences, so and that gives the whole thing a kind of stability.
So again then is the question, how many lines should one piece have?
So. Well, that also comes natural.
I tried different lengths forms.
Right. But then I realised that only this form here could work as a piece of a single memory.
So and most of the time when I when I compose things like this,
I walk around and I had them in mind for some months, so and I rearrange them in mind first.
It's really well, this is this is the process.
And and of course, it's it's it's a hidden dialogue with other poets.
Yes. Yes. And I said that I mean that again, both Edmund and Karen talked about the degree to which this is that, I would say.
But also, I mean, from my perspective, it seems to me that there's all sorts of Jaballah and various other poets in here to whether
they're consciously there or not in terms of the architecture of the city and the elegy and so on.
Yes, it's also about the problem of rhyming in one of the pieces there.
There is a term which is probably hard to translate.
The B rhymed the one who is not rhyming any more.
And there this is from Ceylan and he's referring to the Bundestag because for us it Mandelstam and these modern Russian poets,
it was still natural to rhyme as it was for Brodsky, for instance.
But for Ceylan it was not any more. In Salen, he was always referring to his mother.
His mother taught him German and most of all, German poetry by heart.
So she was actually quoting all those famous German poetry, and he had it in his mind and he had really to struggle with it as a poet.
So and sometimes he was rhyming still. But then there came the break in silence work.
And he was thinking constantly about this break. Probably it was the break within the culture.
You can't rhyme anymore in the old ways.
In the old fashion. Yeah. Yeah, we said earlier.
Why does this collection have to end where it does?
I'm afraid this conversation has to end now, but I would like to end with actually one of the comments,
which is in the question and answer session, which is not a question,
but huge thanks to all four participants for a fascinating discussion and perhaps
it was combined for starting off such an extraordinary series of Connexions.
I don't think I need to say anything else other than to say that I really do hope that this will be the first of a number of conversations
we might continue to have about porcelain and about the work of memory and poetry and history and the way they're all I mean,
desire and power and collecting. So many things came up today.
And I just want to thank all four of you really enormously for for giving your wisdom, your thoughts,
your expertise to this discussion and to say to our audience, thank you also for being there and for listening.
And I'll hold up the book one more time, make sure you get a copy.
You can see the Consuegra on the cover as well as the the the buildings, the architecture that Patrick was talking about.
Yeah, this could go on for a very long time. We have to end here. But thank you so much, everybody.
And hopefully we can do something like this again in real life in present in a room somewhere before too long.
Thank you all. And hopefully we'll see you in a couple of weeks.
Those who'd like to come back to book at lunchtime, I can't remember what it is in a couple of weeks time, but it's on the website.
So do look and see. And thank you also to the backstage team of Mia and Christina, who've put this together with us at Torch.
Have a good afternoon.