Barbarism in life and literature

To write poetry after Auschwitz, as Adorno famously said, is barbaric

To write poetry after Auschwitz, as Adorno famously said, is barbaric. Some commentators, understandibly enough, suggest that Adorno meant that it was only poetry about Auschwitz that was barbaric, since poetry per se continues to be written. This interpretation, though probably incorrect,would seem to make sense, because we are more likely to believe it. Poetry is never impossible, we feel, even though we might consider it to be so at certain moments, especially when we are traumatised by events.

But we are moving into the misty middle distance now, where the issue is less of taboo than of tact. There is a mass of documentary and literary material about the Holocaust, some of it very much in the public eye. The film Schindler's List was itself an adaptation of Thomas Kenneally's book, Schindler's Ark. The fact that both worked as fiction demonstrates that the experience is on the way to becoming aesthetically available. Middle distance produces landscape in a frame, a picture which soon enough becomes just another object in the museum of the strange activities of humankind.

For all that, Adorno's caveat retains some of its forbidding power. When, some 15 years ago, I began writing my own long poem, 'Metro', about my mother's removal from Budapest to Ravensbruck, I knew that I would not follow her into Ravensbruck. I had no right, no privilege: the act of imagination would, I felt, be an offence, an appropriation.

Micheal O'Siadhail is perfectly aware of Adorno's warning: he actually refers to Adorno in The Gossamer Wall: Poems in Witness to the Holocaust, one section of which consists of sonnets set inside a concentration camp. "Don't even go there" is what most people would say, "not, at least, while there are still survivors."

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But the advice is now a matter of tact. The uniqueness of the Holocaust has been and will continue to be questioned. Maybe "going there" is what the survivors themselves would welcome if only to show that they have not been forgotten, or as demonstration that the myth and fact of their suffering have finally merged and been accepted into the world of art. Certainly, O'Siadhail has supporters like Paul Felstiner, the biographer and translator of Paul Celan. Some of the poems have been read at Holocaust conferences and appreciated there. The poet has studied Holocaust literature. Maybe the humane gesture of creative identification is guarantee enough.

NEVERTHELESS, an uneasy feeling persists. O'Siadhail is a good plain-spoken, almost Larkininan poet. He tells rather than weaves or sings, and often regulates his telling with rhyme. The subject is always clear-cut, with little ambiguity.

At his best he is, and always has been, affecting, thoughtful and decent. He is not a great inventor: phrases like "A left wing lose their way . . . Communists gloat . . . A Blackshirt machine adjusts . . .", "commerce expands", "a mountain people silent, cunning, secretive" offer a kind of overview-language strung together with motifs such as Macbeth or geology. It's OK.

There are plenty of poems by O'Siadhail to enjoy. And of course there is the humane gesture, the time and effort devoted. And yet. Is it well-meaning naïvety that makes many of these poems seem like fragments of a speech to the United Nations? Is it more calculating than that: the Holocaust poem-movie? Is Humanism enough? These are terrible things to think. Then I think of a ditch with scarcely human corpses flopping into it. I know some of those people. I think I am afraid of falling in myself.

George Szirtes is a poet and translator. Two volumes of his collected poems, The Budapest File and An English Apocalypse, were published in 2000 and 2001 respectively. The third, No-Man's-Land, will follow in 2004

The Gossamer Wall: Poems in Witness to the Holocaust. By Micheal O'Siadhail. Bloodaxe Books. 128pp. £8.95 sterling