Recalculating

by Charles Bernstein

Long anticipated, Recalculating is Charles Bernstein’s first full-length collection of new poems in seven years . As a result of this lengthy time under construction, the scope, scale, and stylistic variation of the poems far surpasses Bernstein’s previous work. Together, the poems of Recalculating take readers on a journey through the history and poetics of the decades since the end of the Cold War as seen through the lens of social and personal turbulence and tragedy.

 

The collection’s title, the now–familiar GPS expression, suggests a change in direction due to a mistaken or unexpected turn. For Bernstein, formal invention is a necessary swerve in the midst of difficulty. As in all his work since the 1970s, he makes palpable the idea that radically new structures, appropriated forms, an aversion to received ideas and conventions, political engagement, and syntactic novelty will open the doors of perception to exuberance and resonance, from giddiness to pleasure to grief. But at the same time he cautions, with typical deflationary ardor, “The pen is tinier than the sword.” In these poems , Bernstein makes good on his claim that “the poetry is not in speaking to the dead but listening to the dead.” In doing so, Recalculating incorporates translations and adaptations of Baudelaire, Cole Porter, Mandelstam, and Paul Celan, as well as several tributes to writers crucial to Bernstein’s work and a set of epigrammatic verse essays that combine poetics with wry observation, caustic satire, and aesthetic slapstick.

 

Formally stunning and emotionally charged, Recalculating makes the familiar strange—and in a startling way, makes the strange familiar. Into these poems, brimming with sonic and rhythmic intensity, philosophical wit, and multiple personae, life events intrude, breaking down any easy distinction between artifice and the real. With works that range from elegy to comedy, conceptual to metrical, expressionist to ambient, uproarious to procedural, aphoristic to lyric, Bernstein has created a journey through the dark striated by bolts of imaginative invention and pure delight. 

Genres: Poetry

208 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

Charles Bernstein is an American poet, theorist, editor, and literary scholar. Bernstein holds the Donald T. Regan Chair in the Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He is one of the most prominent members of the Language poets (or L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets). In 2006 he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2005, Bernstein was awarded the Dean's Award for Innovation in Teaching at the University of Pennsylvania. He has also been a visiting professor at Columbia University, Brown University, and Princeton University.

Bernstein's highly anticipated new work, All the Whisky in Heaven, will be published in Spring 2010 by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Also to be released in the upcoming year is a Companion to Charles Bernstein, which will be published by Salt Publishing, the winner of the prestigious 2008 Nielsen Innovation of the Year award.

Reviews

[Christopher · Rating 3 out of 5]

This 2013 collection contains some of Bernstein’s own recent poems plus translations of work by the Brazilian poet Régis Bonvicino, Osip Mandelstam, Catullus, and others.

Of course, with Bernstein sometimes the English rendering of the foreign poet is not a translation at all: he often rewrites the sounds of the foreign poetry with corresponding English words, instead of translating the actual meaning. I was familiar with this odd trick from his libretto for Brian Ferneyhough’s opera Shadowtime (where Bernstein subjected Heine’s “Lorelei” to this technique), and here we find it applied to, for example, Paul Celan’s classic and haunting “Todtnauberg” where the German original grapples with a visit to Heidegger and reads:

Arnika, Augentrost, der
Trunk aus dem Brunnen mit dem

Sternwurfel drauf,

in der
Hütte,

die in das Buch
—wessen Namen nahms aufvor dem meinen?—,
die in dies Buch
geschriebene Zeile von

einer Hoffnung, heute,
auf eines Denkenden
kommendes
Wort
im Herzen

which in a straightforward English translation, here by Scott Horton, would read:

Arnica, eyebright, the
drink from the well with the
roll star die on top,

in the
cabin,

written in the book
—whose name did it receive
before my own? — ,
the lines written
in this book about
a hope, today,
for the words
to come
in the heart
of a thinker

in Bernstein’s rendering becomes something surrealistic and no longer connected to the author’s original message:

Arnica, hold-in-trust, tear
Trump out dim Bruise admit dim
Stern waffled drought,
indigo
Hut,
die in that Bush
—lesson Naming nouns off
where dim mines men—
die in die’s book
gust’s ribbons fail one
I’m an huff-none, hurt
Oaf I’m a dunken den
commends
Wart
in heart’s end

Bernstein does this too with the Finnish poet Leevi Lehto, whose title “Sanat tuovat yölla” (‘The words come at night’) becomes “Sane as tugged vat”, and so forth.

All in all Bernstein’s poetry is something that I can respect and it occasionally raises a smile, but the linguistics games can get tiring. Not that Bernstein is entirely uninterested in real-world concerns, as he does include a good amount of lines dealing with politics, violence, literary society, etc. Here, however, the problem is that these turns to the real world are uninspired as poetry and come across as just scattered musings in prose.

[Tato Changelia · Rating 5 out of 5]

პერმამენტულად დავუბრუნები ამ შედევრებს, დაკვირვებით ჩავყურებ ამ პოეტიკურ ენობრივ მონსტრს. თამამად შემიძლია ვთქვა, რომ მსგავსი პოეტური კრებული არასდროს წამიკითხავს. შედევრია. ეს კაცი, ბერნსტაინი კი თანამედროვეობის ყველაზე უნამუსო და შესაბამისად საუკეთესო პოეტია (ვინც კი წამიკითხავს მათ შორის, რასაკვირველია)

[pozharvgolovu · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is a good book. Complex if you're not familiar with language poetry. It's a mix of translations and poems y Bernstein. If I understand correctly it is his first poetry collection after seven years of relative silence.

[dc · Rating 3 out of 5]

meh. some of it was awesome. some of it was ... not.

[Kaitlyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is such a fascinating collection. There is a ton to pore over. I know I'll be revisiting it when I have the time to devote to it that it needs.