1 00:00:07,420 --> 00:00:18,820 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. 2 00:00:18,820 --> 00:00:24,460 My name is Professor Wendy Williams. I'm the director here at Torch and I'll be chairing today's session. 3 00:00:24,460 --> 00:00:33,400 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. 4 00:00:33,400 --> 00:00:39,370 Taking the form of fortnightly bite sized book discussions with a range of commentators 5 00:00:39,370 --> 00:00:45,460 in normal times would be offering you sandwiches and the rest in lockdown times. 6 00:00:45,460 --> 00:00:52,390 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. 7 00:00:52,390 --> 00:00:56,950 And indeed, we're already preparing for next term after the summer. 8 00:00:56,950 --> 00:01:06,490 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. 9 00:01:06,490 --> 00:01:16,960 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. 10 00:01:16,960 --> 00:01:24,700 And current leader Josquin Bowen was born on the 9th of October 1962 in Dresden. 11 00:01:24,700 --> 00:01:30,340 He's one of the most important and internationally renowned German poets and essayist. 12 00:01:30,340 --> 00:01:35,470 After the opening of the Iron Curtain, he travelled throughout Europe, South East Asia and the US. 13 00:01:35,470 --> 00:01:41,410 He was a guest of the German department at NYU, New York University and the Villa Aurora in Los Angeles. 14 00:01:41,410 --> 00:01:47,890 He's received numerous awards for his work, including the Georg Bishnu Prise, the Friedrich Nietzsche Prise, 15 00:01:47,890 --> 00:01:54,040 the Friedrich Holyland Prise and the Polish BNF Herbut International Literary Award. 16 00:01:54,040 --> 00:01:59,110 His books have been translated into several languages, including, of course, by current leader. 17 00:01:59,110 --> 00:02:02,860 He lives in Berlin and Rome. 18 00:02:02,860 --> 00:02:09,820 Professor Karen Leader is a professor of modern languages, German at Oxford University and a fellow of new college, Oxford. 19 00:02:09,820 --> 00:02:17,050 She's published widely on modern German culture and is a Prize-Winning translator and of contemporary German literature, 20 00:02:17,050 --> 00:02:26,170 most recently winning the English PEN Award and an American Pen Hyam award for her translation of Ulrica Olmert Sunday. 21 00:02:26,170 --> 00:02:30,790 She was a torch knowledge exchange fellow with the Southbank Centre a while ago, 22 00:02:30,790 --> 00:02:39,010 and she currently works with empty modern poetry in Translation Poet in the City and the Poetry Society on her continuing project, 23 00:02:39,010 --> 00:02:42,910 mediating more modern poetry. Welcome to you both. 24 00:02:42,910 --> 00:02:50,600 Current and become the next member of our panel today is Professor Patrick Major. 25 00:02:50,600 --> 00:02:55,810 Wait until Patrick comes on screen. Hello, Patrick. 26 00:02:55,810 --> 00:03:02,870 Patrick is a professor of history at the University of Redding, where he's also an associate of the Eastern German Studies Archive. 27 00:03:02,870 --> 00:03:05,450 His research interests are primarily the political, 28 00:03:05,450 --> 00:03:15,050 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, 29 00:03:15,050 --> 00:03:25,400 quote unquote, bad Nazis and quote unquote good Germans is currently researching the bombing of Berlin in the Second World War. 30 00:03:25,400 --> 00:03:30,900 Finally and absolutely not lost in any sense of least the moment. 31 00:03:30,900 --> 00:03:37,910 The member of our panel is Edmund Ovalle. Hello, I'm delighted to welcome you on screen now. 32 00:03:37,910 --> 00:03:48,700 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. 33 00:03:48,700 --> 00:03:56,800 Both his artistic and written practise of broken new ground through their critical engagement with the history and potential of ceramics, 34 00:03:56,800 --> 00:04:01,210 as well as with architecture, music, dance and poetry. 35 00:04:01,210 --> 00:04:12,220 Recent sites include the Venetian Ghetto and Athanasiou of NATO for his two part project, some coinciding with the Venice Venice Biennale in 2019. 36 00:04:12,220 --> 00:04:17,060 The latter holds the world's most ambitious work to date the Library of Exile, 37 00:04:17,060 --> 00:04:22,600 a pavilion of 2000 books written by those forced to leave their own country or exiled within. 38 00:04:22,600 --> 00:04:32,860 It will also, I think, be thinking about other aspects of Edmans work, including the very recent Comando. 39 00:04:32,860 --> 00:04:39,100 As you'll see, we've assembled here to our great privilege, an amazing group of people. 40 00:04:39,100 --> 00:04:45,790 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. 41 00:04:45,790 --> 00:04:53,500 We'll begin with a reading from Davos. This will be followed by contextualisation of the bombing campaign, amongst other things, from Patrick. 42 00:04:53,500 --> 00:04:59,170 Some thoughts then on translation and the reception of dosis collection in poetry, as well as the work of translation. 43 00:04:59,170 --> 00:05:04,630 The craft from Karen, followed by Edmans thoughts on poetry, pottery, 44 00:05:04,630 --> 00:05:10,900 the work of memory and much else besides will then enter a free for all discussion, 45 00:05:10,900 --> 00:05:18,890 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. 46 00:05:18,890 --> 00:05:27,310 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. 47 00:05:27,310 --> 00:05:28,600 All that left me to do now, then, 48 00:05:28,600 --> 00:05:36,580 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. 49 00:05:36,580 --> 00:05:40,390 Yeah. You've already got your sound of all time. My camera off hand over to you. 50 00:05:40,390 --> 00:05:48,580 Thank you. Thank you very much for inviting me to this session. 51 00:05:48,580 --> 00:05:59,900 It's a pleasure to be with you. And I will read some of the poems of this cycle of 49 parts. 52 00:05:59,900 --> 00:06:09,460 I will read seven parts. And well, let me just say one word to one. 53 00:06:09,460 --> 00:06:18,130 One sentence was always in my mind when I was writing these poems 15, 20 years ago. 54 00:06:18,130 --> 00:06:30,190 That was a sentence by Bertolt Brecht, who once said, all our cities are only a part of all the cities which we destroyed. 55 00:06:30,190 --> 00:06:38,260 That was uttered in 1944 by the data in our entire footnote in Stettin. 56 00:06:38,260 --> 00:06:44,740 There should be a statue in this allergic tone. 57 00:06:44,740 --> 00:06:54,300 But you can never forget this, this cat, which let's say dialectics of war zone. 58 00:06:54,300 --> 00:07:01,930 And that's when when the idea of that poem started. Porcelain pots, Illan. 59 00:07:01,930 --> 00:07:15,600 INDs. What to clague and speakable land for the debauch that formed Ornsteiner Vignacourt Ashin. 60 00:07:15,600 --> 00:07:28,090 Coifed albums and, of course, how. It is not to be suf linked to secluding Zingale convict and Kalima, Uganda Ed, 61 00:07:28,090 --> 00:07:37,520 I was told by estaba and stringers unhide Skrull plus the one on one tolba bleep provided to. 62 00:07:37,520 --> 00:07:44,630 Which does not reflect what happens in Saxon's Pough Fleshman walks and unfortunately, 63 00:07:44,630 --> 00:07:58,050 you must understand gluten allergy as catfish look of Wajda would support an. 64 00:07:58,050 --> 00:08:12,010 Fine foods. Lizer years, young feebs was driven by it here and now after the life of Kristen Dristan. 65 00:08:12,010 --> 00:08:21,160 Stofan Nazeem pantsing is Civita Unfussy at a heavy dish that unconditionally Tostin. 66 00:08:21,160 --> 00:08:32,770 Motion filed against him, Payzant Kayna and a son near the Sri Lanka Diamond invalided Dan Senor Feuerbach, 67 00:08:32,770 --> 00:08:40,720 Father Castlebar and the Kenova middle out at deeply Buster Keaton's will get Marnia Head. 68 00:08:40,720 --> 00:08:54,570 I'm at my pawn, Antonin Scalia, and I cannot believe I haven't seen Justin Faqir. 69 00:08:54,570 --> 00:09:06,180 Seabourne. Istanbul under the calm down and now the calls and Karen outscores spooked when an incursion deep Manolete. 70 00:09:06,180 --> 00:09:10,650 Others came in London, attracted in museums. 71 00:09:10,650 --> 00:09:23,970 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, 72 00:09:23,970 --> 00:09:38,850 an inferno of DeNardo putting glitz and council Facenda Inuit's above a dish that was there before standing next to only trace value, 73 00:09:38,850 --> 00:09:49,680 not cash can a algazi. After seeing. 74 00:09:49,680 --> 00:09:55,320 A politician who can Zebb and kick for flatout. 75 00:09:55,320 --> 00:10:02,250 Constable Schlaff dish shut up to was the same sensation in the hoola, 76 00:10:02,250 --> 00:10:13,980 Kenshin Hillal is Nakatani response to these understands this team isolette does Tanon Kingdom place that so had to blend in? 77 00:10:13,980 --> 00:10:19,320 Vega of Insulin Pinguin and many of Glueck worked for Tostes. 78 00:10:19,320 --> 00:10:40,060 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. 79 00:10:40,060 --> 00:10:51,420 Swanzy helped enough on discounters like Yorn and Comcare to look to him, but he couldn't have imagined and flying. 80 00:10:51,420 --> 00:10:56,690 And I wonder, do you now know on an. Clinton, Kinde and Folkman's, 81 00:10:56,690 --> 00:11:04,580 I'd see after the endangered psychologising info you invade OT's in mind the 2000 spizzirri 82 00:11:04,580 --> 00:11:13,310 music in Shrader in here memoir I volunteer here gets the house and you get Duncan Lasan, 83 00:11:13,310 --> 00:11:29,990 ESPN Legal Reman not some trees and of a state and found cause you were tired and go home and make those people talamona. 84 00:11:29,990 --> 00:11:38,900 Ireland has been fined and Youngstown's only bus flipped, but should be charged in the laundries, 85 00:11:38,900 --> 00:11:46,490 Duluth and you all comment in the day in came for and shift some Spezia Gambardella 86 00:11:46,490 --> 00:11:53,880 where he for such an outing posta Blauman Luv Colognes and Druken Zamon Atorvastatin, 87 00:11:53,880 --> 00:12:01,300 Glitz and Farlam Metsu fussin badass most discordant lose lam was disciplined soon be travelling 88 00:12:01,300 --> 00:12:19,330 from La Metabolomics is amazing as wild as Spitzer for Mittal magnetising fainted after Naza Tense. 89 00:12:19,330 --> 00:12:27,440 On Fitzy. Common symptom and weakness in the past year 2000, 90 00:12:27,440 --> 00:12:35,640 Tevan Earthrise like the Guinness baker who rushed out of the see an American climate 91 00:12:35,640 --> 00:12:44,010 climbin into the sun from which the MusclePharm would have put forth transept, 92 00:12:44,010 --> 00:12:48,780 thereby to save a corporation, a Garden of Eden and poverty. 93 00:12:48,780 --> 00:12:58,740 The and breathlessness for Lauvergne is a high Kēlen Follman one gets here and allows us to touch them. 94 00:12:58,740 --> 00:13:15,090 Limosine is indicative, even with a toasted site known as the Toast of Town. 95 00:13:15,090 --> 00:13:20,820 Thank you. I'll just bring my camera back on again as well. 96 00:13:20,820 --> 00:13:27,060 Thank you so much to us. It's a great start to our discussion today. 97 00:13:27,060 --> 00:13:34,890 Now, as I said to to some degree, Contextualise wanted to give us a bit more about the original moment of the bombings. 98 00:13:34,890 --> 00:13:48,600 I'd like to hand over to Patrick Major. Right. 99 00:13:48,600 --> 00:14:00,390 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. 100 00:14:00,390 --> 00:14:06,900 So what I wanted to do is actually to go back to the moment really of the end of the war. 101 00:14:06,900 --> 00:14:12,810 Nineteen forty four to nineteen forty five. And try to explain why this happened. 102 00:14:12,810 --> 00:14:21,330 But some say the politics of afterwards. So could you move to the next slide please. 103 00:14:21,330 --> 00:14:26,490 Now of course there's a reference in one of the poems to Arthur Arthur Harris, 104 00:14:26,490 --> 00:14:33,060 who is the head of Bomber Command and perhaps the most controversial military leader, 105 00:14:33,060 --> 00:14:41,130 certainly of the British in World War Two, who was charged with this aerial bombing campaign. 106 00:14:41,130 --> 00:14:47,520 And I think we have to remember that they they are an effort quickly discovered that bombing in daylight led to 107 00:14:47,520 --> 00:14:55,620 too many being shot down so they would bomb at night and they could only really hit anything as big as a city. 108 00:14:55,620 --> 00:15:04,080 But I think we have to be absolutely clear that the targets were the civilian residential areas of the cities. 109 00:15:04,080 --> 00:15:10,740 This was not collateral damage, to use a phrase, from perhaps later on in the 20th century that the bottom right, 110 00:15:10,740 --> 00:15:21,780 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. 111 00:15:21,780 --> 00:15:29,880 And you can see there the main weapon of destruction was the incendiary bomb. 112 00:15:29,880 --> 00:15:39,470 The theory was that this would create a kind of self consuming conflagration where cities would destroy themselves. 113 00:15:39,470 --> 00:15:51,650 This only worked in terms of creating a firestorm in two cities, Hamburg in July 1943 and placed in February 1945. 114 00:15:51,650 --> 00:15:59,720 But I think it's important to remember that if Arthur Harrison, Bomber Command, had their plans worked, 115 00:15:59,720 --> 00:16:06,390 then every German city would have been experiencing these sorts of levels of destruction. 116 00:16:06,390 --> 00:16:17,700 The next slide, please. This was part of what was called Operation Thunderclap now set that I'm researching the bombing of Berlin, 117 00:16:17,700 --> 00:16:26,670 and it was a revelation to me early on to discover that originally the main target had been the German capital. 118 00:16:26,670 --> 00:16:33,300 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. 119 00:16:33,300 --> 00:16:37,200 And all the targets which were chosen at the top. Right. 120 00:16:37,200 --> 00:16:44,820 You can see the base of my circle of destruction. Interesting that the ground zero is the shtup Schloss, 121 00:16:44,820 --> 00:16:53,070 which has been recently rebuilt and the plans even considered that there might 122 00:16:53,070 --> 00:16:59,130 be something like 200000 casualties if bomb bombing of Berlin just went on for, 123 00:16:59,130 --> 00:17:04,740 let's say, the best part of a week with the British and the Americans alternating day and night. 124 00:17:04,740 --> 00:17:11,190 It's also important that part of Operation Thunderclap did consider other Eastern cities, 125 00:17:11,190 --> 00:17:15,870 especially if they were undamaged, and that brought Dresden into the fray. 126 00:17:15,870 --> 00:17:21,870 But when this plan was first considered, it was then shelved in 1944. 127 00:17:21,870 --> 00:17:31,520 Next slide, please. So how did Dresden come to replace Berlin in this plan? 128 00:17:31,520 --> 00:17:40,520 Well, the beginning of 1945, we have to remember the context of the where, how the war was going. 129 00:17:40,520 --> 00:17:48,080 The Soviets mounted a huge winter offensive, the bestowal offensive in the middle of January. 130 00:17:48,080 --> 00:17:58,370 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. 131 00:17:58,370 --> 00:18:08,060 But before that had happened, British intelligence had raised the possibility that could the West help out the Soviet offensive? 132 00:18:08,060 --> 00:18:17,120 And the so-called temporary evacuations and reinforcements, a lot of the language which is used, is very euphemistic. 133 00:18:17,120 --> 00:18:26,660 Churchill himself is key to this decision making for political reasons because he's about to meet Stalin at Yalta. 134 00:18:26,660 --> 00:18:35,480 He encourages these plans. And so Operation Thunderclap really gets broken down into smaller pieces, 135 00:18:35,480 --> 00:18:40,610 the Americans bombed Berlin very heavily on the 3rd of February and then both Bomber 136 00:18:40,610 --> 00:18:47,630 Command and the Americans bomb Dresden on the 13th of 14th of February in a night-time, 137 00:18:47,630 --> 00:18:58,370 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. 138 00:18:58,370 --> 00:19:11,080 So it's extremely calculated stuff. This leads again because of the concentration of the bombing to a firestorm and 25000 dead. 139 00:19:11,080 --> 00:19:17,180 It's been estimated killed, including many refugees. 140 00:19:17,180 --> 00:19:19,820 So I think in a part of the controversy, if this is, 141 00:19:19,820 --> 00:19:30,890 that this would not be allowed under current international law, but whether this could be considered a war crime. 142 00:19:30,890 --> 00:19:39,910 Next slide, please. I think what's interesting is when the allies become this kind of sensitive to this 143 00:19:39,910 --> 00:19:44,650 and one of the big questions for me is why don't the the British and the Americans, 144 00:19:44,650 --> 00:19:49,360 if you like, realise what's going on in their name earlier. 145 00:19:49,360 --> 00:19:54,940 But in a press conference immediately after dressed and a reporter, Howard Cowan, 146 00:19:54,940 --> 00:20:00,550 files a report in which he uses the phrase deliberate terror bombing. 147 00:20:00,550 --> 00:20:04,690 And then this gets picked up by other newspapers so that, for instance, 148 00:20:04,690 --> 00:20:12,070 The Sunday Times is using this phrase, the weekend after taste and is reporting 250000 dead, 149 00:20:12,070 --> 00:20:20,140 which was, interestingly, the number that Goebbels had given where he seems to have inflated it tenfold for propaganda effect. 150 00:20:20,140 --> 00:20:29,060 And by the end of March 1945, Churchill himself is beginning to want to distance himself from this and. 151 00:20:29,060 --> 00:20:37,980 Writes a famous memo where he talks about the wanton destruction having to stop and at which Arthur Harris is invited for his view, 152 00:20:37,980 --> 00:20:41,930 and you can see at the bottom this is his type section S. 153 00:20:41,930 --> 00:20:44,270 Interestingly, I think this was added, 154 00:20:44,270 --> 00:20:54,140 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. 155 00:20:54,140 --> 00:20:59,420 But there were references to this memorandum also in the in the poems. 156 00:20:59,420 --> 00:21:03,440 But he talks about cycle psychologically. 157 00:21:03,440 --> 00:21:13,520 He would explain it by the connexion with German bands and placed in Shepherdess is the shepherdess is are they the Meissen porcelain? 158 00:21:13,520 --> 00:21:22,550 So there was if you like it, it's an emotional response which the British media are now indulging in for him. 159 00:21:22,550 --> 00:21:27,830 I just wanted at the top. Right. Have put a few examples of porcelain. 160 00:21:27,830 --> 00:21:34,700 He also makes the point that Dresden was a massive munition works. 161 00:21:34,700 --> 00:21:39,260 I think we also have to remember that lots of enterprises which might have been used 162 00:21:39,260 --> 00:21:45,830 for peacetime production in the war were co-opted into this massive war effort, 163 00:21:45,830 --> 00:21:54,980 including porcelain, so that Telefunken, which was the one of the kind of electronics companies working Berlin, 164 00:21:54,980 --> 00:22:02,780 used a very kind of high grade form of porcelain, which it sprayed on to elements in its radio components. 165 00:22:02,780 --> 00:22:08,930 But also a posten was used to isolate electricity, but also the bottom right. 166 00:22:08,930 --> 00:22:18,110 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. 167 00:22:18,110 --> 00:22:30,740 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? 168 00:22:30,740 --> 00:22:42,110 Dressed as they are a symbol of conventional destruction, Hamburg probably experienced more dead in July 1943, about 40000. 169 00:22:42,110 --> 00:22:48,980 I think we shouldn't forget that. We're also still more area bombing raids, 170 00:22:48,980 --> 00:22:59,270 which were highly destructive force home 10 days after they dressed and rights and for what time was a relatively small town. 171 00:22:59,270 --> 00:23:04,430 So proportionally it lost more of its population. Kurtzberg, but also Potsdam. 172 00:23:04,430 --> 00:23:12,200 Potsdam was the final straw, interestingly, for Churchill, and at that point area bombing officially stopped. 173 00:23:12,200 --> 00:23:16,070 But it was literally three weeks before the end of the war. 174 00:23:16,070 --> 00:23:22,850 But I think a lot of the poem, of course, talks about memory and talks about the period afterwards. 175 00:23:22,850 --> 00:23:28,280 And we have to be aware that this was a site of Cold War contestation, 176 00:23:28,280 --> 00:23:38,300 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. 177 00:23:38,300 --> 00:23:48,410 You see the horrific pictures inside. But there were other books which equated Dresden with with Hiroshima, of course. 178 00:23:48,410 --> 00:23:54,260 Also, it's a possibility for reconciliation. 179 00:23:54,260 --> 00:24:00,530 And I'm talking to you from just down the road from Coventry. I used to teach in Coventry for 17 years. 180 00:24:00,530 --> 00:24:07,700 Of course, Coventry had its own experience of the war and the famous Coventry Cross of Nails copy of which 181 00:24:07,700 --> 00:24:15,530 you can see in the Frauenkirche that traced and was used as some sort of bridging function. 182 00:24:15,530 --> 00:24:25,310 But clearly, Treston left a huge question mark over British conduct in the war, so I'll stop there. 183 00:24:25,310 --> 00:24:29,330 Thank you so much, Patrick. Thank you. 184 00:24:29,330 --> 00:24:43,450 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, 185 00:24:43,450 --> 00:24:50,170 perhaps more directly, the work of translation and also the reception of the collection in contemporary Germany. 186 00:24:50,170 --> 00:24:57,250 Thank you, Karen. Thank you. I'll be very brief, but just to say that I began working on this poem. 187 00:24:57,250 --> 00:25:04,000 I was working on a an anthology of poems covering 15 years of his work. 188 00:25:04,000 --> 00:25:13,300 And interestingly, he asked me to include about 20 of these poems from this selection, which is a considerable number. 189 00:25:13,300 --> 00:25:21,490 And it intrigued me that it was so central to his conception of his own work and gave me a taste to do more. 190 00:25:21,490 --> 00:25:25,600 And the poem, if he had a taste of it, 191 00:25:25,600 --> 00:25:35,620 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 192 00:25:35,620 --> 00:25:45,010 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. 193 00:25:45,010 --> 00:25:48,970 And that's part of the title, The Downfall of My City. 194 00:25:48,970 --> 00:25:56,770 So it's an elegy, a modern elegy in many ways, but not a conventional elegy. 195 00:25:56,770 --> 00:26:02,620 I think it's fair to say in that you saw right at that first strophe, 196 00:26:02,620 --> 00:26:09,550 the first poem and all kinds of voices take over the green leg room by means green, 197 00:26:09,550 --> 00:26:22,780 like the novice writing back to a history that he didn't experience, literary speeches, many, many literary works, politicians, musicians, myths. 198 00:26:22,780 --> 00:26:29,830 Foremost amongst those is Power Salen, the great Jewish poet of the Shoah. 199 00:26:29,830 --> 00:26:40,660 And indeed, in the title Porcelain, you can hear poor Ceylan for long and many, many other literary quotations come up. 200 00:26:40,660 --> 00:26:45,970 So it's a very dense sort of bringing together of voices. 201 00:26:45,970 --> 00:26:50,920 It's also a political call. As Patrick said it. 202 00:26:50,920 --> 00:26:59,530 It was introduced its. It's an attempt to reinsert the fate of what might be called a British war crime into 203 00:26:59,530 --> 00:27:05,890 the logic of German aggression and to move away from the idea that Treston War was 204 00:27:05,890 --> 00:27:13,840 an innocent symbol of beauty and culture that has been attacked north of Dresden as 205 00:27:13,840 --> 00:27:20,080 a unique victim has been manipulated and instrumentalise by the right in Germany, 206 00:27:20,080 --> 00:27:29,790 and thereby also taking away the ability of individual Germans to mourn their own losses and. 207 00:27:29,790 --> 00:27:34,080 So it operates at three levels, it seems to me it's very real, the real things that happen. 208 00:27:34,080 --> 00:27:42,990 You've got that beautiful poem about the tinfoil strips that the allies dropped as they approached Dresden to confuse the anti-aircraft guns, 209 00:27:42,990 --> 00:27:52,170 leaving the city completely vulnerable. But also it's about memory, the business of memory, and finally, 210 00:27:52,170 --> 00:27:58,770 the business of how to find a language for modern Eligio language for such destruction. 211 00:27:58,770 --> 00:28:03,520 And it seems to me the immortalises all those things that moves on all those levels. 212 00:28:03,520 --> 00:28:10,140 There's a key further point, which is about form. It has a very grand title in German poem. 213 00:28:10,140 --> 00:28:15,630 We don't have the normal word for poems and it's written in a classical meta. 214 00:28:15,630 --> 00:28:20,130 You've heard it with trophy's rhymes. Strength is not right. 215 00:28:20,130 --> 00:28:26,970 From the beginning, it seemed to be vital to to translate into that form as well. 216 00:28:26,970 --> 00:28:30,660 Although rhyme and rhythm are often historical clothing here, 217 00:28:30,660 --> 00:28:36,180 it seemed to me to be part of the business of trying to write and elegy for something that's gone, 218 00:28:36,180 --> 00:28:47,220 but also a disturbed elegy, a broken elegy, just like the porcelain at the centre of the paper is is broken. 219 00:28:47,220 --> 00:28:55,230 Now, when I started this enterprise, my interest was quick and really I the reception of the poem in German. 220 00:28:55,230 --> 00:29:00,810 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. 221 00:29:00,810 --> 00:29:10,890 And the four central issues critics. Disputed the rights of someone born after the bombing of Dresden to write about it to Toll, 222 00:29:10,890 --> 00:29:17,280 and then they worried about the tone, which they thought was partly too full of pathos, the hometown, 223 00:29:17,280 --> 00:29:21,960 but also too cynical to distance, too fascinated with the violence, 224 00:29:21,960 --> 00:29:31,110 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? 225 00:29:31,110 --> 00:29:32,590 And then they write about the food. 226 00:29:32,590 --> 00:29:43,710 They really didn't like this idea of the classical form and felt it either inappropriate to this vast material or sentimental, 227 00:29:43,710 --> 00:29:48,300 even pornographic is extraordinary. The number of times the word pornographic comes up. 228 00:29:48,300 --> 00:29:54,510 And when I talked about my translation work in various contexts in Germany or the US or here, 229 00:29:54,510 --> 00:30:00,480 it's astonishing how those objections to the poem come out again and again and again. 230 00:30:00,480 --> 00:30:10,980 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. 231 00:30:10,980 --> 00:30:17,640 That made me even more determined by the reception in Germany, which I thought was just covid and wrong, 232 00:30:17,640 --> 00:30:22,800 but also that ongoing sense that this is too hot to handle as a subject. 233 00:30:22,800 --> 00:30:26,340 And I'd say only two things about my work on this. 234 00:30:26,340 --> 00:30:39,870 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. 235 00:30:39,870 --> 00:30:47,010 I think the raw rhythm's, but there are rhymes, but that wasn't deliberately mistruth sort of rhymes. 236 00:30:47,010 --> 00:30:52,710 And for example, zombies to rhyme zombies post with zombies within centuries. 237 00:30:52,710 --> 00:30:57,990 Seems to me an interesting clash. Words are facially overdetermined. 238 00:30:57,990 --> 00:31:07,210 The word spoon comes in in one particularly controversial poem, which means both a crack, a jump between events and again. 239 00:31:07,210 --> 00:31:14,430 So it boils down questions constantly, questions language, but finally, also porcelain. 240 00:31:14,430 --> 00:31:19,710 The poem is full of quotations of such literary quotations, but also full of art. 241 00:31:19,710 --> 00:31:28,010 And at the centre is porcelain does talks about how he was triggered by a line from a poem, 242 00:31:28,010 --> 00:31:35,730 a song of porcelain, the sound, little sound of porcelain being crushed as a symbol of loss. 243 00:31:35,730 --> 00:31:43,230 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, 244 00:31:43,230 --> 00:31:52,080 it's also constantly aware of its own inadequacy as a form for holding so much loss. 245 00:31:52,080 --> 00:32:01,740 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. 246 00:32:01,740 --> 00:32:10,380 And as I was concluding my work, I came across a fantastic display at the Japanese in Dresden, 247 00:32:10,380 --> 00:32:15,420 which moved to the British Museum partly by Edmund Deval. 248 00:32:15,420 --> 00:32:20,430 And it gave me a way into thinking about this poem, which was and I know Edward is going to talk about it, 249 00:32:20,430 --> 00:32:25,080 not so much anymore, but to think of the poem maybe as a kind of Kentucky, 250 00:32:25,080 --> 00:32:35,940 as a joining of shards, but not echoing wholeness, not bringing things together, but remember history and remembering the brokenness. 251 00:32:35,940 --> 00:32:42,470 And I tried very hard to do that in my translation. So thank you very much. 252 00:32:42,470 --> 00:32:46,680 Thank you, Karen. That was wonderful. 253 00:32:46,680 --> 00:32:49,950 And it set up Edmund very well. I think in a positive sense. 254 00:32:49,950 --> 00:32:59,400 I hope they were set up to bring us to to to bring your thoughts to the final section of this individual 255 00:32:59,400 --> 00:33:07,200 responses to this collection and to the larger questions of memory and pottery and poetry that evoke. 256 00:33:07,200 --> 00:33:14,480 So I'll hand over to you now, Edmund. Thank you. What is this thing of whiteness? 257 00:33:14,480 --> 00:33:20,870 Asks Melville in Moby Dick, it's white earth. 258 00:33:20,870 --> 00:33:24,830 Kosslyn It's up to my album at home. 259 00:33:24,830 --> 00:33:29,690 It's the whitest and most translucent thing there is in the world. 260 00:33:29,690 --> 00:33:34,750 It's come a very long way. Porcelain is fantasy. 261 00:33:34,750 --> 00:33:43,550 It begins on the other side of the world. It can only get to Europe through the Silk Road through unimaginable journeys. 262 00:33:43,550 --> 00:33:53,270 But when it arrives in England, it's an object of desire, a material that tells you that you have power, 263 00:33:53,270 --> 00:34:00,470 that you are holding something which is very fantastical and mysterious and desirable. 264 00:34:00,470 --> 00:34:02,630 It arrives, of course, 265 00:34:02,630 --> 00:34:17,510 in Saxony and desire to comes in contact with Augustus the Strong sitting in that extraordinary series of palaces interest and he wants porcelain. 266 00:34:17,510 --> 00:34:22,700 He has, he says, Putzel. And how can the madness of porcelain? 267 00:34:22,700 --> 00:34:26,870 He has hundreds of illegitimate children. He has horses. 268 00:34:26,870 --> 00:34:36,710 He has treasures in the green vaults. But most of all, he wants porcelain, white gold, and he captures a young alchemist. 269 00:34:36,710 --> 00:34:42,830 He persuades a philosopher at the very start of the 18th century. 270 00:34:42,830 --> 00:34:53,030 And this becomes the story of how you, Dresden and Meissen and porcelain become intertwined. 271 00:34:53,030 --> 00:35:01,700 Dresden becomes a city of alchemist's, of walling up science in those vaults underneath the city walls, 272 00:35:01,700 --> 00:35:16,100 and then finally in 1788, they open a kiln and outcomes, the first piece of white earth transformed into porcelain in the West. 273 00:35:16,100 --> 00:35:20,270 It's extraordinary. It's a thing of utter beauty. 274 00:35:20,270 --> 00:35:28,640 It's so extraordinary that the person who picks it up says it is white and almost as fragrant as a narcissus. 275 00:35:28,640 --> 00:35:35,660 And you have to imagine this becomes the beginning of a whole way of thinking about the world. 276 00:35:35,660 --> 00:35:45,840 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, 277 00:35:45,840 --> 00:35:53,450 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. 278 00:35:53,450 --> 00:35:57,620 And they're chattels of porcelain and are swarms services. 279 00:35:57,620 --> 00:36:07,220 And the whole world is turned into commodities at Meyssan, where one thing after another can be made out of this purest of materials. 280 00:36:07,220 --> 00:36:15,860 And because it's pure, it's dangerous because purity is saying that the world is something you can control. 281 00:36:15,860 --> 00:36:29,810 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. 282 00:36:29,810 --> 00:36:39,260 And it starts on the outskirts of Munich in a little village where they start to make porcelain pure, 283 00:36:39,260 --> 00:36:49,730 beautiful German for the Nazi functionaries, and then because they can, they move the porcelain factory to Dhaka. 284 00:36:49,730 --> 00:37:02,010 So there is a porcelain manufacturer in Dakar with slave labour where visiting dignitaries can choose beautiful white German porcelain. 285 00:37:02,010 --> 00:37:08,380 And in 1945, in February, as we've heard, there is the bombing of the city. 286 00:37:08,380 --> 00:37:21,550 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, 287 00:37:21,550 --> 00:37:23,830 a Jewish family that collected Postnet live. 288 00:37:23,830 --> 00:37:33,580 It was then, of course, and had had their collection looted from and the collection is mostly destroyed like everything else in that city. 289 00:37:33,580 --> 00:37:40,180 And after the war, as they sift through that wreckage, they find shards of shards of put away in boxes. 290 00:37:40,180 --> 00:37:46,750 And then in 2011, these shots of rediscovered and their restituted to the Von Klemperer family. 291 00:37:46,750 --> 00:37:51,430 And they come up for auction and I buy a dinner service in fragments, 292 00:37:51,430 --> 00:37:59,500 a broken dinner service of my son plates that was once on a Jewish family table in Dresden. 293 00:37:59,500 --> 00:38:04,420 And then over several years, I ask a friend of mine, an artist, 294 00:38:04,420 --> 00:38:13,930 could my code sue me to slowly put together with Keisuke with gold and lacquer so that we can mark loss, 295 00:38:13,930 --> 00:38:25,300 not repair these Meissen plates, but actually have this great network of gold lacquer so that you can see where that damage occurred. 296 00:38:25,300 --> 00:38:31,390 And then in 2019, I open in the Spanish Alcalay, a library of exile, 297 00:38:31,390 --> 00:38:37,210 and on the walls of this library I brush porcelain slip and I write the names of 298 00:38:37,210 --> 00:38:41,680 all the destroyed libraries of the world from Alexandria all the way through, 299 00:38:41,680 --> 00:38:48,580 including the looted library of my great grandfather in Vienna and the destroyed university libraries. 300 00:38:48,580 --> 00:38:52,390 And there it sits surrounding books of exile, a nearby. 301 00:38:52,390 --> 00:38:55,180 I have these stacks of plates and as I open it, 302 00:38:55,180 --> 00:39:04,300 I only then realise that this is not only two hundred and fifty metres from the first book burning in Germany in 1963, 303 00:39:04,300 --> 00:39:10,960 but this is the same room that Victor von Klemperer set when he was allowed until he was barred 304 00:39:10,960 --> 00:39:16,180 and wrote that extraordinary series of scholarly things and diaries in that particular room. 305 00:39:16,180 --> 00:39:20,800 So here we have does is it is iterative. It is extraordinary. 306 00:39:20,800 --> 00:39:29,890 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 307 00:39:29,890 --> 00:39:36,100 he has done because I think that what he's done is take us back into a particular moment, 308 00:39:36,100 --> 00:39:44,590 interest in history, one image before I shut up, which is in those extraordinary laboratories where they made Postnet, 309 00:39:44,590 --> 00:39:51,760 they had a burning mirror where the light came in and it was forced into such intensity 310 00:39:51,760 --> 00:39:58,030 that mineral's would be turned into their constituent parts and then they could remake. 311 00:39:58,030 --> 00:40:09,160 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. 312 00:40:09,160 --> 00:40:12,520 It's hugely moving to be part of this conversation today. 313 00:40:12,520 --> 00:40:17,530 I'm shut up now. Thank you so much. 314 00:40:17,530 --> 00:40:20,850 The last thing we want you to do is to shut up. Thank you so much for what you said. 315 00:40:20,850 --> 00:40:26,740 I'd also like to bring everybody else back on the screen, please. 316 00:40:26,740 --> 00:40:32,470 So many images that the burning mirrors that concern the those. 317 00:40:32,470 --> 00:40:43,750 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. 318 00:40:43,750 --> 00:40:53,290 And then in Karen's translations, we have a couple of questions or one question about metrics already from the audience, please. 319 00:40:53,290 --> 00:41:00,670 Those who are with us to put more questions into the question and answer function, if you'd like to ask more, 320 00:41:00,670 --> 00:41:10,810 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. 321 00:41:10,810 --> 00:41:24,360 One is this relationship. Between now, between kind of contested history and the design nonetheless, to make something of it. 322 00:41:24,360 --> 00:41:29,730 And Edmund, you talked about not repairing, but marking the loss. 323 00:41:29,730 --> 00:41:38,520 And I wanted us to go back to you if you had any sense of repairing something. 324 00:41:38,520 --> 00:41:43,310 Obviously, the concern is part of the poem as well as well as marking loss. 325 00:41:43,310 --> 00:41:49,320 So I wondered if we could start with this, this double movement of repairing reparation, 326 00:41:49,320 --> 00:41:57,570 making amends, but at the same time marking that which is missing, which is lost. 327 00:41:57,570 --> 00:42:05,700 Am I making sense to you here? Well, I don't think that that can be any relief, of course, 328 00:42:05,700 --> 00:42:22,560 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. 329 00:42:22,560 --> 00:42:29,430 And this is also marked by by the word or the image of porcelain. 330 00:42:29,430 --> 00:42:37,390 Porcelain was also in many, many families. 331 00:42:37,390 --> 00:42:47,380 Through all the different, let's say, shifts of society, a very important thing there is like Sonya, 332 00:42:47,380 --> 00:42:57,250 I remember my grandmother with not much money, but she had a little collection of Meissen porcelain, which was a very rare thing. 333 00:42:57,250 --> 00:43:02,140 So when on Sundays it was used and as a child, when I came to her, 334 00:43:02,140 --> 00:43:14,680 so I had the cake was served on some plates of of of mice and porcelain with the blue onion ornaments. 335 00:43:14,680 --> 00:43:28,480 Right. And in all the families, these these items were kept and handed over to the next generation and so on and so on. 336 00:43:28,480 --> 00:43:34,960 And a lot of these things, of course, were damaged at that moment. 337 00:43:34,960 --> 00:43:44,070 So and there was from the very beginning on was this link between trust and the destruction of Dresden and this material of porcelain. 338 00:43:44,070 --> 00:43:52,060 I had a lot of a big collection of quotes or material collection around this poem. 339 00:43:52,060 --> 00:44:00,320 And one thing is I found that the BBC News right on the 16th of February, nineteen forty five, 340 00:44:00,320 --> 00:44:06,580 that means three days later after the bombing, she said there is no porcelain in Dresden anymore. 341 00:44:06,580 --> 00:44:11,980 So the equation was made very, very early, but. 342 00:44:11,980 --> 00:44:20,840 And I found that in the diaries of Samuel Beckett, he used to he visited Germany amidst the 30s. 343 00:44:20,840 --> 00:44:25,900 That means Nazi Germany went to Berlin, also dressed in Christ, and was very important for him. 344 00:44:25,900 --> 00:44:36,310 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. 345 00:44:36,310 --> 00:44:43,390 So it goes through through all the centuries, starting from the moment when when, 346 00:44:43,390 --> 00:44:54,970 as Edmund mentioned, August, the strong forced his alchemist Poetica to to to make porcelain. 347 00:44:54,970 --> 00:45:06,310 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. 348 00:45:06,310 --> 00:45:10,000 But then he was incarcerated and had some time. 349 00:45:10,000 --> 00:45:13,780 And then he intended to save his life, so to speak. 350 00:45:13,780 --> 00:45:25,240 He went to the porcelain and offers the strongest, as always said the desire for porcelain is like the desire for oranges. 351 00:45:25,240 --> 00:45:33,400 So you see, I'm amidst a fantastic dream in a fantastic world. 352 00:45:33,400 --> 00:45:39,610 And this idea of porcelain seems to connect the h.s. 353 00:45:39,610 --> 00:45:49,780 Connect people, connect collectors. And of course, one of the last touching stories is that of the Klemperer edition collection. 354 00:45:49,780 --> 00:45:56,510 So I think and this is what I try to put all these things into this poem. 355 00:45:56,510 --> 00:46:09,220 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. 356 00:46:09,220 --> 00:46:10,120 Thank you, Karen. 357 00:46:10,120 --> 00:46:19,990 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, 358 00:46:19,990 --> 00:46:25,690 because obviously one of the really striking things about this collection is that it's a collection, 359 00:46:25,690 --> 00:46:31,240 that it's that it's a long poem in one sense, but also that, as you said, there are many, 360 00:46:31,240 --> 00:46:40,330 many voices, objects, other bits of culture, shall we say, inside this poem. 361 00:46:40,330 --> 00:46:49,510 So the poem is itself a collection of of various shards, elements, etc., of history and of culture. 362 00:46:49,510 --> 00:47:00,490 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? 363 00:47:00,490 --> 00:47:12,220 There's two separate questions I want about the sort of form itself, but also the mode of transforming that collection into English. 364 00:47:12,220 --> 00:47:17,510 I'm with saying and because we don't have the books sort of in front of us, 365 00:47:17,510 --> 00:47:24,740 that the little poems are spaced out in the book and sometimes at the bottom of the page, sometimes the top of a page. 366 00:47:24,740 --> 00:47:32,780 And so they feel they feel like discrete objects with a lot of weight around them. 367 00:47:32,780 --> 00:47:37,150 It was wonderful when it comes to white animals talking about animals. 368 00:47:37,150 --> 00:47:43,490 And so it feels like shards. They feel like shards of brought together. 369 00:47:43,490 --> 00:47:48,060 I love the idea of the burning section. I think that's an image which we should think about. 370 00:47:48,060 --> 00:47:53,210 Maybe the burning glass is in the poetry or in the translation here too. 371 00:47:53,210 --> 00:47:57,590 And I suppose I could focus for a second. But the difficulties, 372 00:47:57,590 --> 00:48:06,110 because the different voices are often put together very closely and so that you get a shift of tone from classical 373 00:48:06,110 --> 00:48:18,200 pathos to absolute demotic or from very beautiful image of porcelain to a terrible image of griddled corpses. 374 00:48:18,200 --> 00:48:25,950 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, 375 00:48:25,950 --> 00:48:32,060 for the translator to resist the temptation to smooth it over and make it a whole and make it beautiful, 376 00:48:32,060 --> 00:48:39,750 because I think part of it is precisely about the the desperateness of these different things. 377 00:48:39,750 --> 00:48:48,350 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, 378 00:48:48,350 --> 00:48:51,920 which are a kind of collection, is an image of a of music, 379 00:48:51,920 --> 00:48:58,910 because a lot of the connexion as well, the voices coming together to create a great analogy. 380 00:48:58,910 --> 00:49:02,390 And I think it must be something like that. Edmondo. Yes. 381 00:49:02,390 --> 00:49:06,230 Go for it or else waving because I'm so interested. 382 00:49:06,230 --> 00:49:13,010 I mean, I of course, they sit as objects, text objects on a page beautifully. 383 00:49:13,010 --> 00:49:15,020 This is something. 384 00:49:15,020 --> 00:49:27,080 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. 385 00:49:27,080 --> 00:49:37,310 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. 386 00:49:37,310 --> 00:49:41,840 It's about to return each poem because it has the same form. 387 00:49:41,840 --> 00:49:49,850 What I feel does it's doing is saying you can't contain all of this within a single a single, tiny, 388 00:49:49,850 --> 00:49:56,630 small entity or a single lyric that it's so so you have that sense of return and return to that. 389 00:49:56,630 --> 00:50:04,280 And that surely takes you to a morning. I mean, takes you straight to what Freud understood as morning and Melancholia, 390 00:50:04,280 --> 00:50:13,160 which is that you actually that the grief is about something which actually has no resolution, 391 00:50:13,160 --> 00:50:18,800 has no lyrical sense of of of being able to be put down in any way. 392 00:50:18,800 --> 00:50:28,940 And that's what I think is at the heart of this extraordinary work, is that it is unresolved, you know, intentionally unresolved. 393 00:50:28,940 --> 00:50:34,560 And and in some ways, it's generative, it's fissile. You feel almost like entered it. 394 00:50:34,560 --> 00:50:40,550 And I thought, well, come on, does is the next time. 395 00:50:40,550 --> 00:50:47,780 And that surely is what makes this so extraordinarily rich for the reader. 396 00:50:47,780 --> 00:50:51,620 So I'm off. I'm meeting. No, no, that's that's that's wonderful. 397 00:50:51,620 --> 00:51:00,140 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, 398 00:51:00,140 --> 00:51:07,280 really in a moment in relation to the bombing campaign and the kind of details that you gave us about how the bombing worked. 399 00:51:07,280 --> 00:51:12,860 But does could you better tell us why that why you stopped what you did? 400 00:51:12,860 --> 00:51:17,960 In other words, Edmans question. Come on, where's the next poem? Is there a reason? 401 00:51:17,960 --> 00:51:25,430 Is there a sense? Is there a logic and necessity to stopping at the point that you did? 402 00:51:25,430 --> 00:51:47,090 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. 403 00:51:47,090 --> 00:51:51,620 Well, in one day I realised this is it's enough now. 404 00:51:51,620 --> 00:51:58,490 It's never been enough. But I have left a lot more of parts, but I had to arrange them. 405 00:51:58,490 --> 00:52:07,270 And when I arranged them, I found out that there will be a number which is good for for the for the purpose. 406 00:52:07,270 --> 00:52:17,180 The 49. I don't know why. Sometimes not only me per poets or novelists are playing a lot with numbers. 407 00:52:17,180 --> 00:52:24,450 Just think of Dunnington. I'm now translating a little bit of Spanish and they always this play with with numbers. 408 00:52:24,450 --> 00:52:36,920 So despite there are some more and the material is much wider, I decided to to to finish it at that point. 409 00:52:36,920 --> 00:52:45,000 So also to, to and now comes to point also to, to, to bring it to the public and to test it. 410 00:52:45,000 --> 00:52:58,640 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. 411 00:52:58,640 --> 00:53:02,870 So I know it's very controversial being receptive. 412 00:53:02,870 --> 00:53:12,860 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. 413 00:53:12,860 --> 00:53:25,030 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. 414 00:53:25,030 --> 00:53:32,480 So and I'd also like that in one of the reviews they picked up when one of the 415 00:53:32,480 --> 00:53:37,580 little pieces of this whole thing is built of elements of syntactic element. 416 00:53:37,580 --> 00:53:43,070 And one of those little pieces was dissy forms. And of course, it comes in the last poem. 417 00:53:43,070 --> 00:53:48,200 And of course, these are dissy forms and we have to discuss about that. 418 00:53:48,200 --> 00:54:01,010 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. 419 00:54:01,010 --> 00:54:14,870 It was a test and I really was interested in the also historical debates because these historical debates or the debates on right memory, 420 00:54:14,870 --> 00:54:26,060 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. 421 00:54:26,060 --> 00:54:31,130 There is another little anecdote. So I was writing a little bit about that. 422 00:54:31,130 --> 00:54:37,370 And also why I finished that is that I could go further in other texts to dressed. 423 00:54:37,370 --> 00:54:43,880 And so that the city is is always the main motive in my writing. 424 00:54:43,880 --> 00:54:47,720 So I wrote some essays and now I'm working on another book. 425 00:54:47,720 --> 00:54:52,340 So but with this series, I was finished. 426 00:54:52,340 --> 00:55:06,380 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. 427 00:55:06,380 --> 00:55:14,800 And I tried to find out and I had so many discussions with people about that in Germany as well as in England. 428 00:55:14,800 --> 00:55:21,690 And I've mostly found, I must say, the the the the English pardners, very, very fair. 429 00:55:21,690 --> 00:55:26,930 I must say, I can I can really understand the English point of this thing. 430 00:55:26,930 --> 00:55:33,820 And let me just say this. The main concern at that moment was to finish the war. 431 00:55:33,820 --> 00:55:44,380 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, 432 00:55:44,380 --> 00:55:55,150 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. 433 00:55:55,150 --> 00:55:58,870 And that's why they picked it up. The family story. 434 00:55:58,870 --> 00:56:04,390 Right. In terms of the family porcelain all the way through to the as Karen said, 435 00:56:04,390 --> 00:56:10,210 the poem of my city is is, I would say, enormously strong in this collection. 436 00:56:10,210 --> 00:56:12,730 I want to go back to Patrick, though, 437 00:56:12,730 --> 00:56:24,340 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, 438 00:56:24,340 --> 00:56:31,930 really calculation of repetition of the iterative bombing raid that the first the Americans and then the British. 439 00:56:31,930 --> 00:56:40,180 And then, you know, we need to we need to plan this very carefully, which you brought out so strongly in your presentation. 440 00:56:40,180 --> 00:56:46,780 I wonder if you want to say a little bit more about that in relation to to perhaps either. 441 00:56:46,780 --> 00:56:49,810 Well, I'll give you an either in itself, if you like, 442 00:56:49,810 --> 00:56:54,850 in the moment or in relation to this question of when will we be finished with talking about this, 443 00:56:54,850 --> 00:57:02,680 when we when will this be not something that we need to return to. 444 00:57:02,680 --> 00:57:05,530 Right. Yeah, I mean, 445 00:57:05,530 --> 00:57:15,340 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. 446 00:57:15,340 --> 00:57:21,610 The Americans on the whole, were pretty critical of this and didn't want to become involved. 447 00:57:21,610 --> 00:57:29,560 But I think it's crucial that we need to remember the Americans were involved in place and they were also involved in Hamburg. 448 00:57:29,560 --> 00:57:38,310 So in the the really destructive raids, this sort of alternating pattern of what they call round the clock bombing made a difference. 449 00:57:38,310 --> 00:57:48,550 I think at the time they felt that they just had this surprise then offensive, which they'd had to contain. 450 00:57:48,550 --> 00:57:54,760 The Germans seemed to be devising these new sort of super weapons like jet fighters. 451 00:57:54,760 --> 00:58:04,630 And so there was quite a pessimistic feeling in January 1945 when they started reviving Operation Thunderclap. 452 00:58:04,630 --> 00:58:13,660 And I think my point would be that in terms of helping the Soviet offensive, it had stopped in early February. 453 00:58:13,660 --> 00:58:19,850 Nineteen forty five. They knew they weren't trying to break through. 454 00:58:19,850 --> 00:58:27,790 So I mean, what I actually found out when the Soviet actually going to test and it's not till after the final capitulation. 455 00:58:27,790 --> 00:58:33,880 So it's not till I think it's something like the 8th or the 9th of May, 1945. 456 00:58:33,880 --> 00:58:39,220 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 457 00:58:39,220 --> 00:58:45,220 is the sense of place and space and the architecture and buildings and the history is, 458 00:58:45,220 --> 00:58:53,680 you know, built in to to the city. I mean, I first visited Dresden in January 1989. 459 00:58:53,680 --> 00:58:58,180 So it's just sort of an interesting year to visit it. 460 00:58:58,180 --> 00:59:04,570 It really struck me about how there were kind of bits of ruins still left and then bits of reconstruction. 461 00:59:04,570 --> 00:59:12,700 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. 462 00:59:12,700 --> 00:59:19,960 I'm used to seeing places with missing bits, and I taught in Coventry where there were also lots of missing pieces. 463 00:59:19,960 --> 00:59:25,720 But I'm struck by the fact that in Coventry, the cathedral, it was deliberately left as a ruin. 464 00:59:25,720 --> 00:59:28,720 And in Berlin, there's the goddess Kisha. 465 00:59:28,720 --> 00:59:37,840 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, 466 00:59:37,840 --> 00:59:44,500 you know, reconstructing it almost as a perfect replica of itself. 467 00:59:44,500 --> 00:59:52,330 But just to add on points of reparation and the Cold War, which is where I sort of first came, interested in Coventry, 468 00:59:52,330 --> 01:00:01,630 the canon of the cathedral, Paul Oestreich was one of the big kind of champions of reconciliation and after long negotiations, 469 01:00:01,630 --> 01:00:11,140 got a group of British students to go to dressed and then I think 1965 and to actually work on physical, 470 01:00:11,140 --> 01:00:16,240 you know, just sort of clearing up rubble and making some sort of atonement. 471 01:00:16,240 --> 01:00:21,340 But what was interesting was that the Stasi were deeply suspicious of what was 472 01:00:21,340 --> 01:00:26,980 happening there and always thought that there was kind of something untoward happening. 473 01:00:26,980 --> 01:00:35,200 It was being used as a cover for something else of the Cold War or was made it very difficult to to make reparation. 474 01:00:35,200 --> 01:00:40,870 Thank you. We've got about five minutes left, and that's all, I'm afraid, 475 01:00:40,870 --> 01:00:48,980 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. 476 01:00:48,980 --> 01:00:54,380 So there's a question from Erico which is said, I'd like to hear a bit more about metrics from both Dorson. 477 01:00:54,380 --> 01:00:58,690 Karen, this is also something that Edmund drew attention to. 478 01:00:58,690 --> 01:01:04,450 Is there any regular or more or less regular metrical pattern underlying the collection as a whole? 479 01:01:04,450 --> 01:01:08,830 And does this metrical pattern reappear in the English translation? 480 01:01:08,830 --> 01:01:17,290 So perhaps we can end, in other words, with the, if you like, the gold of the metrics itself in within this poetry? 481 01:01:17,290 --> 01:01:24,850 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, 482 01:01:24,850 --> 01:01:31,060 of the noise of the German and then the business of of working that across to the English. 483 01:01:31,060 --> 01:01:34,760 And then we'll end with with those. 484 01:01:34,760 --> 01:01:43,760 Yes, and I think they were wrongly read by German, which quite often we thought of them as absolutely regular and not regular. 485 01:01:43,760 --> 01:01:50,360 This is an approximation of a kind of hexameter, which often has extra bits. 486 01:01:50,360 --> 01:01:53,450 But and the rhyme isn't entirely regular either. 487 01:01:53,450 --> 01:02:00,950 But but there is this sort of gesture towards grand constructions of grand architecture, a lost wholeness. 488 01:02:00,950 --> 01:02:03,030 And but often it plays with that. 489 01:02:03,030 --> 01:02:09,980 And one of the challenges of the translation and the readers can decide whether or not was to try and replicate that in English, 490 01:02:09,980 --> 01:02:14,000 which that kind of form doesn't say in English. We use five beats. 491 01:02:14,000 --> 01:02:20,120 We're used to Shakespeare in our heads. So it already feels a little bit old and unstable in English. 492 01:02:20,120 --> 01:02:24,290 Dicey maybe, which I hope adds to the effect. But yes, very much. 493 01:02:24,290 --> 01:02:39,570 I want to try and get those breaks and lapses and false steps because I think that part of the poem. 494 01:02:39,570 --> 01:02:45,120 Where's your mute? Which one? 495 01:02:45,120 --> 01:02:47,840 Yeah, sorry. You'd think after all this time, good, 496 01:02:47,840 --> 01:02:55,070 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, 497 01:02:55,070 --> 01:03:00,260 but that it's a broken one, a kind of disruptive. 498 01:03:00,260 --> 01:03:05,630 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, 499 01:03:05,630 --> 01:03:11,060 was how well that functioned and how her limping at various kinds it was. 500 01:03:11,060 --> 01:03:15,800 And other times you were kind of leaping through so that if if metre is also a way of walking, 501 01:03:15,800 --> 01:03:23,600 it seemed to me that the sort that the walking patterns in this collection are just extraordinary in English. 502 01:03:23,600 --> 01:03:29,190 How was it for you in the German? Well, when you say walking, so you relate to the body. 503 01:03:29,190 --> 01:03:35,030 And I first of all, I always relate to to what I call the inner ear. 504 01:03:35,030 --> 01:03:46,400 So I don't actually like to speak only in technical terms about metres because the metre comes very naturally to me. 505 01:03:46,400 --> 01:03:52,740 So it starts with some lines. And I know this is a good sound and then that's my rule. 506 01:03:52,740 --> 01:03:55,370 It had to be very natural. 507 01:03:55,370 --> 01:04:10,760 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. 508 01:04:10,760 --> 01:04:23,030 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. 509 01:04:23,030 --> 01:04:28,910 And then of course and that's that's this is limiting everything. 510 01:04:28,910 --> 01:04:34,820 You come to the end of the line and then you have to think about how the line is going on. 511 01:04:34,820 --> 01:04:40,980 If you if you make an Jumpman, a break or whatever and. 512 01:04:40,980 --> 01:04:49,740 Well, and there are so many opportunities to to to jump to the nut, to another line, 513 01:04:49,740 --> 01:05:02,490 to another image, but still I had this rule just to stay in a sentence like natural like form. 514 01:05:02,490 --> 01:05:07,540 So what do you see? These are all sentences. 515 01:05:07,540 --> 01:05:18,310 Also, the ones were rather disrupted, but these are all sentences, so and that gives the whole thing a kind of stability. 516 01:05:18,310 --> 01:05:22,510 So again then is the question, how many lines should one piece have? 517 01:05:22,510 --> 01:05:26,530 So. Well, that also comes natural. 518 01:05:26,530 --> 01:05:30,130 I tried different lengths forms. 519 01:05:30,130 --> 01:05:42,490 Right. But then I realised that only this form here could work as a piece of a single memory. 520 01:05:42,490 --> 01:05:46,570 So and most of the time when I when I compose things like this, 521 01:05:46,570 --> 01:05:57,730 I walk around and I had them in mind for some months, so and I rearrange them in mind first. 522 01:05:57,730 --> 01:06:04,750 It's really well, this is this is the process. 523 01:06:04,750 --> 01:06:10,210 And and of course, it's it's it's a hidden dialogue with other poets. 524 01:06:10,210 --> 01:06:17,410 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. 525 01:06:17,410 --> 01:06:23,650 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 526 01:06:23,650 --> 01:06:28,900 they're consciously there or not in terms of the architecture of the city and the elegy and so on. 527 01:06:28,900 --> 01:06:33,780 Yes, it's also about the problem of rhyming in one of the pieces there. 528 01:06:33,780 --> 01:06:38,200 There is a term which is probably hard to translate. 529 01:06:38,200 --> 01:06:44,530 The B rhymed the one who is not rhyming any more. 530 01:06:44,530 --> 01:06:52,930 And there this is from Ceylan and he's referring to the Bundestag because for us it Mandelstam and these modern Russian poets, 531 01:06:52,930 --> 01:06:57,400 it was still natural to rhyme as it was for Brodsky, for instance. 532 01:06:57,400 --> 01:07:02,380 But for Ceylan it was not any more. In Salen, he was always referring to his mother. 533 01:07:02,380 --> 01:07:08,470 His mother taught him German and most of all, German poetry by heart. 534 01:07:08,470 --> 01:07:18,060 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. 535 01:07:18,060 --> 01:07:25,690 So and sometimes he was rhyming still. But then there came the break in silence work. 536 01:07:25,690 --> 01:07:31,810 And he was thinking constantly about this break. Probably it was the break within the culture. 537 01:07:31,810 --> 01:07:36,280 You can't rhyme anymore in the old ways. 538 01:07:36,280 --> 01:07:43,530 In the old fashion. Yeah. Yeah, we said earlier. 539 01:07:43,530 --> 01:07:46,350 Why does this collection have to end where it does? 540 01:07:46,350 --> 01:07:53,910 I'm afraid this conversation has to end now, but I would like to end with actually one of the comments, 541 01:07:53,910 --> 01:07:58,080 which is in the question and answer session, which is not a question, 542 01:07:58,080 --> 01:08:03,330 but huge thanks to all four participants for a fascinating discussion and perhaps 543 01:08:03,330 --> 01:08:08,430 it was combined for starting off such an extraordinary series of Connexions. 544 01:08:08,430 --> 01:08:16,830 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 545 01:08:16,830 --> 01:08:24,960 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, 546 01:08:24,960 --> 01:08:30,330 desire and power and collecting. So many things came up today. 547 01:08:30,330 --> 01:08:39,090 And I just want to thank all four of you really enormously for for giving your wisdom, your thoughts, 548 01:08:39,090 --> 01:08:48,300 your expertise to this discussion and to say to our audience, thank you also for being there and for listening. 549 01:08:48,300 --> 01:08:53,760 And I'll hold up the book one more time, make sure you get a copy. 550 01:08:53,760 --> 01:09:02,130 You can see the Consuegra on the cover as well as the the the buildings, the architecture that Patrick was talking about. 551 01:09:02,130 --> 01:09:08,740 Yeah, this could go on for a very long time. We have to end here. But thank you so much, everybody. 552 01:09:08,740 --> 01:09:18,240 And hopefully we can do something like this again in real life in present in a room somewhere before too long. 553 01:09:18,240 --> 01:09:20,520 Thank you all. And hopefully we'll see you in a couple of weeks. 554 01:09:20,520 --> 01:09:27,240 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. 555 01:09:27,240 --> 01:09:38,790 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. 556 01:09:38,790 --> 01:10:02,814 Have a good afternoon.