Sherry Chandler

I have been dipping into Carolyn Forché’s Against Forgetting and I wanted to share some lines from Günter Eich (1907-1972), translated by David Young. Eich was in the Wehrmacht, an American POW released in 1946. He was one of the founders of the left-wing Gruppe 47, along with Paul Celan, Günter Grass, and Erich Fried.

Geometrical Place

We have sold our shadow,
it hangs on a wall in Hiroshima,
a transaction we knew nothing of,
from which, embarrassed, we rake in interest.

And, dear friends, drink my whiskey,
I won’t be able to find the tavern any more,
where my bottle stands
with its monogram,
old proof of a clear conscience.

I didn’t put my penny in the bank
when Christ was born
but I’ve seen the grandchildren
of dogs trained to herd people
on the hills near the Danube School,
and they stared at me.

And I want, like the people of Hiroshima,
to see no more burnt skin,
I want to drink and sing songs,
to sing for whiskey,
and to stroke the dogs, whose grandfathers
sprang at people
in quarries and barbed wire….

There is great restraint in this poem, which I think allows us to look at the horror and longing for innocence that we share with the poet. It does not fall over into sentiment or ask for our pity, but reminds us that instead of finding our innocence, we continue to pile up guilt from which we rake in interest. [Updated note: I think of this interest as both financial – war can be very profitable – and psychic, as in compounded guilt.]

The following lines seem contemporary to me, they are part II of a three-part poem:

Seminar for Backward Pupils

II

Then came
mustard-skilled men,
turnip-counters,
delegates of welfare.

Wooden-eye, be watchful!

They scoured us clean
with sandpaper,
factual accounts
and politeness.

Wooden eye, be watchful!

Now we know everything:
the sun lies always before us.
We define freedom anew:
soon
we’ll be rid of it.

Wooden eye.