library (poem)

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library is a poem by the Austrian poet Ernst Jandl , which was written on September 20, 1977 and the adaptation of the hat was published in Jandl's collection of poems in the following year . The poem describes the library as a prison for books.

Content and form

Ernst Jandl
library
Link to the full text of the poem
(please note copyrights )

The poem library consists of twelve lines, which are combined in pairs to form sections. Jandl dispenses with rhyme , capitalization and punctuation . The beginning of the poem reads:

the many letters
that can't get out of your words

The pattern is repeated in the following six lines: the words cannot be extracted from sentences, these cannot be found in texts and those cannot be found in books. According to Klaus Jeziorkowski, the first eight lines provoke the reader to continue the scheme into more and more onion skins to infinity. This possibility of further poetry is typical of many of Ernst Jandl's poems.

The scheme is broken on the tenth line. There is dust on the books, and on the penultimate line a person appears:

the good cleaning lady
with the feather feather

The twelve lines are in a colloquial language that has been reduced to the bare essentials . which consists of fragmentary sentences throughout. Thus one finds the only verb the modal verb can four times in a subordinate clause, otherwise is completely without such.

interpretation

Despite its more conventional form, for Klaus Jeziorkowski , library is an example of concrete poetry that casts an unusual look at the library, which is generally regarded as a refuge for culture and information, but which Jandl portrays as a “onion-shawl-focused prison”, at its core the letters are locked up. In this picture, the cleaning lady becomes “the good guardian of the tomb”, who watches over the library cemetery as a kind of prison patrol and has no relation to the locked up letters, words, sentences, texts and books, but uses her frond purely externally.

Typical of Jandl's poetics is the criticism of the orderly system of conventional and outmoded linguistic usage in which he sees the letters trapped. Jeziorkowski formulates: "The letters, words, sentences and texts are to be liberated and let go of the dictatorship." That is why Jandl tries to use experimental poetry in his own work. For Jeziorkowski, Jandl is “one of our most far-reaching liberators of letters and words” and “an incredibly far-reaching let-off of sentences and texts”, who through his work made people aware of the variety of linguistic possibilities.

Beyond the language system, the library of the poem can be interpreted quite generally as a paradigm for any form of system and order that does not allow any alternatives in thinking or living. Jandl's poem calls into question their assertion of a lack of alternatives and non-changeability, which in the long run only leads to “dust on the systems”, as well as to cleaning women who try to remove this dust without breaking the cemented order itself. In this sense, Jeziorkowski sees Jandl's poem as an encouragement to overcome stagnation and to take on the responsibility of keeping the world moving.

Position in Jandl's work

Ernst Jandl published the library in 1978 in his collection of poems, the processing of the hat . Many of the poems in this volume are written in broken German, a kind of guest worker language, so to speak. This is where the deliberately simple, almost helpless language of library joins , whereby Jeziorkowski perceives an “enormous tension” between the form and the content charged with “energy and potency”, which for him stands in pleasant contrast to some “profound poetry” , in which form and content would have exactly the opposite weight.

A tone of tiredness, lamentation and resignation is characteristic of the poems from the processing of the hat and even more so in the yellow dog . That is why Jeziorkowski does not see the library simply as that kind of linguistic and content-wise harmless-friendly play on words that the poem appears to be at first glance. Rather, the complaint about locked letters and merely superficially dusted books is an expression of a deep seriousness and grief of Jandl, for whom the work and play with language in his later work have gained an increasingly existential importance.

expenditure

  • Ernst Jandl: library . In: the processing of the hat . Luchterhand, Darmstadt 1978, ISBN 3-472-86465-6 , p. 137.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Ernst Jandl: library . In: the processing of the hat . Luchterhand, Darmstadt 1978, p. 137.
  2. ↑ Klaus Jeziorkowski: On Ernst Jandl's poem "library" , p. 189.
  3. ↑ Klaus Jeziorkowski: On Ernst Jandl's poem "library" , p. 196.
  4. ↑ Klaus Jeziorkowski: On Ernst Jandl's poem “bibliothek” , pp. 190–191, 196.
  5. ↑ Klaus Jeziorkowski: On Ernst Jandl's poem “bibliothek” , pp. 191–192.
  6. ↑ Klaus Jeziorkowski: On Ernst Jandl's poem “library” , pp. 194–195.
  7. ↑ Klaus Jeziorkowski: On Ernst Jandl's poem “bibliothek” , pp. 196–197.