Verily

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Ingeborg Bachmann's poem Verlich on a house front in Leiden . Verse 1 should read: Who has never lost a word.

Truly one of the few dedicatory poems by the Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann . The poem was probably written at the end of 1964 after meeting Anna Achmatova , to whom it is dedicated. It was performed by Ingeborg Bachmann at the award ceremony for the Premio Etna-Taormina to the Russian poet on December 12, 1964 in the ancient theater of Taormina .

Classification in Bachmann's biography

Ingeborg Bachmann traveled to Sicily at the beginning of December 1964, where the “ Premio Etna-Taormina ” was to be awarded to the poet Anna Achmatova, who was “very much admired by her” . Bachmann was a member of the jury for this award. At the award ceremony on December 12, 1964 in the ancient theater in Taormina, where she presented the poem to the public for the first time, Ingeborg Bachmann surprised everyone with her appearance: “She was not hesitant and hesitant as usual, but rather confidently and clearly. Anna Akhmatova and the Russian delegation accompanying her were enthusiastic. ”It was first published in January 1965 in the magazine L'Europa Letteraria, Artistica, Cinematografica. Rome, number 1.

Bachmann had more in common with Anna Achmatova than just this poem. Her decision to leave Piper Verlag in 1967 was a protest against the fact that the publishing house had commissioned the translation of Anna Achmatowa's poems from the former Hitler Youth leader, Hans Baumann .

Structure and style

The poem consists of eleven rhyming verses divided into four stanzas . The first stanza is made up of four verses, the second of three and the last two stanzas of two verses each. The second to fourth verse are each provided with a point terminated. At the transition from the first to the second stanza there is a dash , because the sentence construction started with verse 1 “Who has never lost a word” continues in verse 5 with “he cannot be helped” and only then ends with a period. The dash replaces the missing verb, "as if it were too terrible to talk about what happens to the words that are not for true speaking."

Word level

Two linguistic levels are intertwined in this poem: the language of the Bible and the banal everyday language. On the one hand, the poem can be read as a “proclamation with a claim to truth”. This high claim "is legitimized by its design equivalent to the biblical preaching speech". This already echoes in the title of the poem and in verse 2: “Verily” and “and I tell you” make one think of verse 6.47 from the Gospel of John : “Verily, verily, I say to you: He who believes in me has eternal life. "The second level of language in the poem is everyday language," which is verbose and meaningless ". Its empty phrases and faded metaphors such as “somebody leaves the language”, “sooner or later” or “I'll sign that for you” stand in contrast to the biblical language, the two language levels “enter into an oxymoral connection”.

Sentence level

The two language levels are syntactically so interlinked that they can no longer be easily separated; they appear to be “pushed into one another”, which gives the impression of “two voices”. This is due to "the two alternating parallelisms ". One is pronoun like who , who and the initiated, the other begins with the conjunction and . At first glance, this conjunction only has the usual associative function. Verses 3 and 4 for example

“Who just knows how to help himself
and with the words "

do not show the expected logical sequence of words, but make the statement unusual and therefore ambiguous. So "the metaphors used here get their buried, original semantics back and thus not their old, but a new meaning."

Subject

The poem can be assigned to the thought poetry .

Language criticism

On the one hand, the text shows how the banal everyday language prevents the poet from using the "true language that brings help and ultimately salvation" to tell the truth:

"Who has never lost a word"

In this unusual formulation it is the everyday expression, it still struggles me to recognize the language , but with the replacement of language by words "the process of language loss came to the fore". The true word is “devious”, also knocked away by the bell of the banal everyday speech, the sound of which Bachmann calls onomatopoeia in line 9 and with children's language “Bimbam”. The poet thus has the language in which essentials can be said “no longer or not so easily available”, he has to wrestle for his medium, the texts are only created against resistance. In this verse, Horst Bienek refers to Anna Achmatova's biographical situation: One can assume that Bachmann knew about the publication ban that Achmatova had in her home country for over 20 years. Under these conditions, it is not surprising that there are verses in Achmatova's work that indicate the period between 1936 and 1960, a very long time in which she had to endure external resistance.

"To endure in the trumpet of words"

Herein lies the realization that language is not a natural tool for the poet, but that he is repeatedly forced to wrestle with clear content and linguistic positions and "inevitably" hold onto them. You have to make your own sound "audible, unmistakable".

The job of the poet

The poem is not limited to language criticism . It "requires the poet to write down at least one eternal sentence and promises salvation in return."

"Nobody writes this sentence
who does not sign. "

Horst Bienek suspects here that it is a matter of signing one's own judgment. Christine Gölz sees in these closing verses of the poem a kind of guarantee from the poet for a way of speaking that transcends banality. In the closing verses there is no longer any everyday language as in the previous lines. This suggests that speechlessness “becomes a prerequisite for the linguistically articulated art of poetry”, which appears at least possible in the closing verse. By ascribing the preaching language of the Bible to the poet, the poem brings his role closer to God, which can also be seen in the speaking situation : a lyrical self is found in only one place, namely in verse 2 . There it addresses several listeners with a phrase (“And I tell you”) that is used several times in the Bible when Jesus Christ speaks to a group of people.

Position of the poem in the work

After 1957 only very few Bachmann poems reached the public and if so, then more in readings or on the radio, hardly ever in print. Truly one of the six poems from this period that Bachmann approved for publication while still alive. What is striking about the poems that were published during this time is that Bachmann has dedicated half of them or given them a personal address. In addition to Verily , those were your words (1961) to Nelly Sachs and Enigma (1966) for Hans Werner Henze .

In Bachmann's complete works, the poem can be classified into two thematic strands. On the one hand, the concern of language criticism permeates Bachmann's writing from the start; it can be found in the poem Reklame . Second, role and task of the poet are as surely also addressed in a number of other texts, such as the Frankfurt lectures on poetics of 1959/1960. Bachmann's biographer, Andrea Stoll, described Richtlich as a “very personal poetological confession” of the poet.

Text output

  • First published in: L'Europa Letteraria, Artistica, Cinematografica. Rome, number 1.
  • Ingeborg Bachmann: Works I. Piper Verlag , Munich 1978, ISBN 3-492-02774-1 , p. 166.

Secondary literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Andrea Stoll: Ingeborg Bachmann: The dark shine of freedom. Bertelsmann Gütersloh, 2013, ISBN 978-3-570-10123-0 , p. 280.
  2. ↑ Andrea Stoll: Ingeborg Bachmann: The dark shine of freedom. Bertelsmann Gütersloh, 2013, ISBN 978-3-570-10123-0 , p. 281.
  3. ^ Sigrid Weigel: Ingeborg Bachmann. Paul Zsolnay Verlag Vienna, 1999, ISBN 3-552-04927-4 , p. 571.
  4. ↑ Andrea Stoll: Ingeborg Bachmann: The dark shine of freedom. Bertelsmann Gütersloh, 2013, ISBN 978-3-570-10123-0 , p. 295.
  5. ^ Ingeborg Bachmann: Works I. Piper Verlag , Munich 1978, ISBN 3-492-02774-1 , p. 166.
  6. ^ Ingeborg Bachmann: Works I. Piper Verlag, Munich 1978, ISBN 3-492-02774-1 , p. 166, verse 1.
  7. ^ Ingeborg Bachmann: Works I. Piper Verlag, Munich 1978, ISBN 3-492-02774-1 , p. 166, verse 5.
  8. ^ Ingeborg Bachmann: Works I. Piper Verlag, Munich 1978, ISBN 3-492-02774-1 , p. 166, verse 4.
  9. ↑ Cindy K. Renker: Lamp-seeking way. Paul Celan's and Ingeborg Bachmann's search for truth. In: Gernot Wimmer (eds.): Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan: Historisch-poetic correlations (studies on German literary history). De Gruyter Berlin, 2014, ISBN 978-3-11-033144-8 , pp. 24–41, p. 34.
  10. ↑ a b c d e f g h i Christine Gölz: On speaking and silence in Russian poetry of the 20th century. In: Heinz Hillmann, Peter Hühn (Hrsg.): European poetry since antiquity. Fourteen lectures. University Press Hamburg 2005, ISBN 3-937816-14-3 , p. 313, accessed on March 29, 2015.
  11. ↑ a b c Ingeborg Bachmann: Works I. Piper Verlag, Munich 1978, ISBN 3-492-02774-1 , p. 166, verse 2.
  12. ^ Ingeborg Bachmann: Works I. Piper Verlag, Munich 1978, ISBN 3-492-02774-1 , p. 166, verses 3 and 4.
  13. ↑ a b c d e Christine Gölz: On speaking and silence in Russian poetry of the 20th century. In: Heinz Hillmann, Peter Hühn (Hrsg.): European poetry since antiquity. Fourteen lectures. University Press Hamburg 2005, ISBN 3-937816-14-3 , p. 314, accessed on March 29, 2015.
  14. ^ Ingeborg Bachmann: Works I. Piper Verlag, Munich 1978, ISBN 3-492-02774-1 , p. 166, verse 1.
  15. ↑ Horst Bienek: If you can't speak. In: Marcel Reich-Ranicki : Frankfurter Anthologie . Fourth volume: poems and interpretations. 3. Edition. Insel Verlag, Frankfurt 1991, ISBN 3-458-15348-4 , p. 198.
  16. ^ Ingeborg Bachmann: Works I. Piper Verlag, Munich 1978, ISBN 3-492-02774-1 , p. 166, verse 9.
  17. ^ Walter Helmut Fritz: Ingeborg Bachmanns Gedichte. In: Heinz Ludwig Arnold (Hrsg.): Text + Criticism, Zeitschrift für Literatur. (= edition text and criticism. Issue 6). 5th edition. Munich 1995, ISSN  0040-5329 , pp. 29-35.
  18. ↑ a b Horst Bienek: If you can't speak. In: Marcel Reich-Ranicki: Frankfurter Anthologie. Fourth volume: poems and interpretations. 3. Edition. Insel Verlag, Frankfurt 1991, ISBN 3-458-15348-4 , p. 199.
  19. ^ Ingeborg Bachmann: Works I. Piper Verlag, Munich 1978, ISBN 3-492-02774-1 , p. 166, verses 10 and 11.
  20. ↑ a b Christine Gölz: On speaking and silence in Russian poetry of the 20th century. In: Heinz Hillmann, Peter Hühn (Hrsg.): European poetry since antiquity. Fourteen lectures. University Press Hamburg 2005, ISBN 3-937816-14-3 , p. 315, accessed on March 29, 2015.
  21. ^ Sigrid Weigel: Ingeborg Bachmann. Paul Zsolnay Verlag Vienna, 1999, ISBN 3-552-04927-4 , p. 355.