Ian Wedde. The Little Ache – a German notebook. ISBN 978-177656-426-2. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2021. RRP $NZ30. 144 pp.
The thing to ask about a burlesqued wink or a mock sheep raid is not what their ontological status is. It is the same as that of rocks on the one hand and dreams on the other – they are things of this world.The quote comes from anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s famous essay ‘Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture.’ Or rather, it comes from the notes at the end of Ian Wedde’s latest volume of poems. In the poem itself, he includes only the last 16 words, which I’ve italicised. Wedde explains the passage as follows:
The term ‘thick description’ … became, Geertz wrote … ‘a position and a slogan I have been living with since.’ I have gone on reading and admiring these essays for many years and want to acknowledge that the concept of ‘thick description’ was my passport to the state of mind I hoped this book would occupy, where ghosts could be encountered in the everyday, material world, and in the phantom fragments of language which seemed to collate its meanings. [131]There are, of course, other names for this state of mind: in a fictional context one might refer to it as ‘Magic Realism.’ But is that what Wedde means by his own methods of ‘thick description’? What exactly is it, for a start? Another of Wedde’s Geertz quotes may be helpful here:
Believing … that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning. [133]So, for example, in poem 51, Wedde sees Turkish poet Nâzım Hikmet Ran, who died in Moscow in 1963, sitting at a German café in 2014, and carefully tabulating his reactions to:
the perfect pitch of exileShades of Geertz’s famous example of the need to account for the difference between a twitch and a wink (“as anyone unfortunate enough to have had the first taken for the second knows”)! Geertz’s essay goes on to add a third actor who chooses to parody the others’ winks, and whose behaviour is therefore even more culturally layered and needful of interpretation than theirs.
a tone found somewhere in the chord combining
the demonstrators over at Wienerstraße
the expostulations of his Turkish companions
and the voice of the German coffee commentator
on the café’s big screen
during the quarter-final
between German and France. [86-87]
Wedde, a New Zealander in temporary exile from his native land, and eagerly trying to discover tendrils of ancestry in Germany, imagines – or sees (need the apparition of a ghost always be taken as pure imagination?) – the author of the epic Human Landscapes from My Country carefully modulating his own way through all these various voices and layers of cultural entanglement.
On the surface, then, Wedde’s book – which might otherwise be taken as a simple amalgam of travel notes and genealogical jottings – is actually something far more ambitious: an attempt to decode of the levels of significance to be encountered by someone of his complex background in an already immensely overwritten cultural matrix.
He has certain advantages, mind you. Some of his not-too-distant ancestors were themselves poets – one had a few poems set to music by Brahms, another was famed as ‘the founder of Plattdüütsch dialect literature’ – so their works can be interrogated with this concept of distant kinship in mind. With these advantages, however, come risks:
it’s the ghost of a smile I seeThere’s a certain amount of ‘scholarly ballast’ in this Wedde book, too: 10 pages of notes and another 3 of acknowledgments. Personally I’m inclined to think that there should be more notes, not fewer – not all of the German tags and quotations, most of them admittedly explained in the context of the poems they adorn, are actually translated, let alone referenced. That may not be every reader’s view, however.
when I read what Joseph Blos thought
of Johannes Wedde’s poems
which though ‘often very beautiful
didn’t sink in with the wider public
on account of the scholarly ballast
with which they were packed’. [45]
If there is a universal applicability to be sought in Ian Wedde’s complex web of encounters and experiences during his Berlin residency, I suppose that it comes by analogy rather than directly. Speaking personally, I find his struggles with communication in a strange land quite poignant, given my own halting German.
However, Wedde certainly gives as good as he gets to an arrogant librarian in poem 53:
Failing to find it in the loan stacksGiven that this particular book – the second volume of Johannes Wedde’s Collected Works – had not been taken out for 111 years, he feels (not unreasonably) justified in unleashing the full force of his poetic fury against ‘the thick-browed bureaucratic Nationalismus’ of this ‘bored pedant.’
I said to the narcissist of small differences
as he glared at this Ausländer
across his Ausgabeort barrier
Ich kann den Buch nicht finden
at which
having got it
he pushed the book against my chest
and jeered
Hier ist der Buch!
Books are das not der [89]
Exile and displacement are subjects much on our minds at present. 2013-14, when most of these poems were written, seems now like a distant golden age, when free travel was still permitted (to holders of the right passports, that is), and the refugee crisis in Europe – though dire – was not yet catastrophic.
There are echoes of these things – the rise of extreme nationalism in Europe, for instance – in some of the poems, but it’s to Wedde’s credit that he hasn’t allowed second thoughts to distort the clear mirror of this particular experience.
This book appears 50 years after his first, Homage to Matisse (1971). What a career it’s been! Wedde has always been one of the most internationally focussed of New Zealand poets (witness his translations from Arabic poet Mahmoud Darwish, also published in the early 1970s).
There’s a (much-quoted) phrase in Anna Akhmatova’s Poem without a Hero: “the bitter air of exile.” Wedde knows better than to borrow such an expression for his own voluntary sojourn abroad, his own constituting merely a “little ache.” These letters from exile do, nevertheless, remind me of their distant prototypes, Ovid’s Sad Poems and Letters from Pontus, written from his own place of official banishment on the shores of the Black Sea to the centre of culture in Rome.
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(1-3/8/21)
Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 2022. ISBN 978-1-991151-11-7 (March 2022): 353-56.
[1104 wds]
Joanna Forsberg: Ian Wedde with Pete
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