Songs in Flight: The Collected Poems of Ingeborg Bachmann

by Ingeborg Bachmann, Peter Filkins (Translator)

Ingeborg Bachmanns Ruhm als eine der größten Dichterinnen der europäischen Moderne. Sämtliche vollendeten Gedichte, von der frühen Lyrik bis zur »Anrufung des Großen Bären«, bilden den Kern ihres facettenreichen Werkes und gehören zu den großen dichterischen Leistungen des 20. Jahrhunderts.

Genres: Poetry, German Literature

372 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 1995

About the author

“What actually is possible, however, is transformation. And the transformative effect that emanates from new works leads us to new perception, to a new feeling, new consciousness.” This sentence from Ingeborg Bachmann’s Frankfurt Lectures on Poetics (1959-60) can also be applied to her own self-consciousness as an author, and to the history of her reception. Whether in the form of lyric poetry, short prose, radio plays, libretti, lectures and essays or longer fiction, Bachmann’s œuvre had as its goal and effect “to draw people into the experiences of the writers,” into “new experiences of suffering.” (GuI 139-140). But it was especially her penetrating and artistically original representation of female subjectivity within male-dominated society that unleashed a new wave in the reception of her works.

Although Bachmann’s spectacular early fame derived from her lyric poetry (she received the prestigious Prize of the Gruppe 47 in 1954), she turned more and more towards prose during the 1950’s, having experienced severe doubts about the validity of poetic language. The stories in the collection Das dreißigste Jahr (The Thirtieth Year; 1961) typically present a sudden insight into the inadequacy of the world and its “orders” (e.g. of language, law, politics, or gender roles) and reveal a utopian longing for and effort to imagine a new and truer order. The two stories told from an explicitly female perspective, “Ein Schritt nach Gomorrha” (“A Step towards Gomorrah”) and “Undine geht” (“Undine Goes/Leaves”), are among the earliest feminist texts in postwar German-language literature. Undine accuses male humanity of having ruined not only her life as a woman but the world in general: “You monsters named Hans!” In her later prose (Malina 1971; Simultan 1972; and the posthumously published Der Fall Franza und Requiem für Fanny Goldmann) Bachmann was again ahead of her time, often employing experimental forms to portray women as they are damaged or even destroyed by patriarchal society, in this case modern Vienna. Here one sees how intertwined Bachmann’s preoccupation with female identity and patriarchy is with her diagnosis of the sickness of our age: “I’ve reflected about this question already: where does fascism begin? It doesn’t begin with the first bombs that were dropped…. It begins in relationships between people. Fascism lies at the root of the relationship between a man and a woman….”(GuI 144)

As the daughter of a teacher and a mother who hadn’t been allowed to go to university, Bachmann enjoyed the support and encouragement of both parents; after the war she studied philosophy, German literature and psychology in Innsbruck, Graz and Vienna. She wrote her doctoral dissertation (1950) on the critical reception of Heidegger, whose ideas she condemned as “a seduction … to German irrationality of thought” (GuI 137). From 1957 to 1963, the time of her troubled relationship with Swiss author Max Frisch, Bachmann alternated between Zurich and Rome. She rejected marriage as “an impossible institution. Impossible for a woman who works and thinks and wants something herself” (GuI 144).

From the end of 1965 on Bachmann resided in Rome. Despite her precarious health—she was addicted to pills for years following a faulty medical procedure—she traveled to Poland in 1973. She was just planning a move to Vienna when she died of complications following an accidental fire.

Joey Horsley

Reviews

[Jason · Rating 4 out of 5]

the sprained two-step of Emily Dickinson, but with more of a condemning slight. Not so much a dreamer as an imaginer of dreams past, full of dread, lost hopes and wonder. Like from "Salt and bread":

You, in fever-white vestments,
Gather the exiled and tear,
From the flesh of cactus, a thorn
--symbol of impotence
To which we meakly bow.

In order to enact this history, she steps out of her person, becomes. She plays a character to invite the engagement of a pervading atmosphere:

In the papers I read about the cold
And its effects, about fools and dead men,
About exiles, murderers and myriads
Of ice floes, but little that comforts me.
Why should it be otherwise? In the face of the beggar
Who comes at noon I slam the door, for we live in peacetime
And one can spare oneself such a sight, but not
The joyless dying of leaves in the rain.

the austerity and bleak depth of a troubled national history, carries over into a universal tome. A slate of subdued tragedy always existing, like in "Message":

Out of the corpse-warm foyer of the sky steps the sun
There it is not the immortals,
But rather the fallen, we perceive.

And brilliance doesn’t trouble itself with decay.
Our Godhead, History, has ordered for us a grave
From which there is no resurrection.

She is a dreamer in a dreary parthenon, history built on its slaves and victims. She emerges as one could emerge cognizant, but not proud. Limber, rattled:

Lonely are all bridges,
And fame is as dangerous for them
As it is for us, yet we presume
To feel the tread of stars
Upon our shoulders.
Still, over the slope of transience
No dream arches us.

I wish she wasn't dead. I would really like to shake her hand. For most people, i wouldn't care. But i want to feel this woman's hand. I bet it's like touching the soft root of a still-young tree.

[Kate Savage · Rating 4 out of 5]

Harder days are coming.
The loan of borrowed time
will be due on the horizon.
Soon you must lace up your boots

I don't know what to say of Ingeborg Bachmann except that she saw a world empty of hope. And then she put it into poems. If that sounds like your jam, then enjoy this final poem she ever published before she gave up on the genre:

No Delicacies

Nothing pleases me anymore.

Should I
fit out a metaphor
with an almond blossom?
crucify the syntax
upon an effect of light?
Who will rack their brains
over such superfluous things -

I have learned an insight
with words
that exist
(for the lowest class)

Hunger
Shame
Tears
and
Darkness

With unpurged tears,
with despair
(and I despair in the face of despair)
about so much misery,
the many sick, the cost of living,
I will get by.

I don’t neglect writing,
but rather myself.
The others are able
God knows
to get by with words.
I am not my assistant.

Should I
arrest an idea, lead it off
to a bright sentence cell?
feed sight and hearing
with first-class word morsels?
analyze the libido of a vowel,
estimate the collector’s value of our consonants?

Must I
with a battered head,
with the writing cramp in this hand,
under the pressure of the three hundredth night
rip up the paper,
sweep away the scribbled word operas,
annihilating as well: I you and he she it

we you all?

(Should? The others should.)

My part, it shall be lost.