Letters to a Young Writer II

Dear Republic,

We continue our series of Daniel Kraft’s translations of Yiddish writer Aaron Zeitlin.

-ROL

LETTERS TO A YOUNG WRITER: MEANING AND MEANINGLESSNESS

Let me tell you a secret. Rules in art, including literary art, are like rules in law. Just as a good lawyer can find cracks in the law in order to subvert it, so too can the true artist use rules in order to subvert them, and to create in their place rules which might not serve anyone else, but which, for him, for his aims, are invaluable.

I know: You will wonder about a word like aims. How do aims relate to creativity? An aim, after all, can lead, God help us, to didacticism, and then to who knows what else.

I want to tell you another secret. There is no such tedious thing as “pure” poetry, “pure” prose, or any other such purities. Consider poetry. Never has poetry been as “pure” as in our impure time. Wherever a talentless person produces poetry that is purely devoid of meaning, the only ones who take it seriously are pedantic snobs who want to pass as connoisseurs, and literature professors who love puzzles, because they provide an opportunity to amuse themselves with word games.

The truth is that absurdity has now been elevated to the level of a worldview. But absurdity remains absurdity, and absurd literature is not transformed into high art on the “basis” that everything is absurd. This is what the coffee house existentialists, the black-nailed beatniks, and similar trendy bores clearly thought. They formed a logical inference: Given that literature reflects its modern moment, literature must offer a particular reflection of absurdity, and if it does not, it is — may the God of absurdity protect us — not modern. And what could be worse than not modern?

Do not let yourself be seduced, my friend, by all this babble. The author of Macbeth — that brilliant illustration of our commandment, “Do Not Murder” — is less modern than some scribbler of puzzles and diagrams in the form of poetry, or of a pornographic vulgarian who thinks that obscenity is the first and last word of pseudo-artistic writing, because it’s all doggerel anyway. The “artists” of bathroom graffiti have conferred and decided that they can transform literature into a toilet stall, can sully literature and thereby wear the crown of the most modern artist, the genuine avant-gardist, and climb the best seller list.

If there are still rules, then I have a rule for you. Be yourself, and nobody else. Be, in other words, unique, just as every single thing in the world is unique (even leaves on a tree are “individuals”). You will then, necessarily, be modern, if being modern has anything to recommend it, anything like originality. Keep in mind what Edgar Allen Poe understood: Absolute originality is in principle irrelevant. If you want to be “absolutely” original, you must invent a private Esperanto, and write not sentences but riddles, or, like the polyglot Joyce, squeeze words from hundreds of languages together, and call it the stream of consciousness. Or walk on your hands, and let your feet end up in heaven. Critics will write books about your inane insights, snobs will read you if you are fashionable, although they will not be able to stifle their yawns while they read, and your name will enter literary history. There it will remain, like a taxidermied bird, within a flock of other taxidermied birds that are mistaken for eagles. But to read — I mean to read with a spiritual yearning — people will return to Ivan Karamazov’s arguments on God, which are eternal arguments of the entire human species. People will read this because it means something, it has something to say.

Of course the greats are original and individual, but within their national contexts they are also universal; they are, in a sense, in the public domain. They never create some “original” Esperanto that, like the great wall of China, separates them from the rest of humanity, as do the professional literary shockers, the eternal pseudo-avant-gardists. Because they go nowhere, these pseudo-avant-gardists are not avant-garde; they are boring, because they do not stop trying to surprise you, even for a moment. They try to trick you, as if they were cheap magicians. They judge each of their lines for its supposed distinctiveness, which turns them into an indistinguishable herd. Their nominal newness comes from their originality, which screams: Look how banal I am! All their lines together do not impress a single particular phrase or lingering image on you, unless you have a memory for comic curiosities like, for example, Apollinaire’s snow angels, one of whom is “dressed” like a chef, plucking geese, and the second of whom is dressed like a police officer.

A true writer will always say something that remains within you. A Dostoevsky, a Tolstoy, a Chekhov, will always write words and sentences and scenes that can accompany you for your entire life. The same with a Shakespeare. When I read, on the other hand, a Nabokov, I see a cunning craftsman, a literary chess player, who wants me to marvel at him. As soon as I close his book, I forget it all. Sometimes you sit at the movie theater, you see a film, you are interested, even moved, but you go out into the street and cannot recall what the film was about. The same is true with books of poetry. When you read, it seems that there is something there, but what kind of something remains elusive. As soon as you shut the book, that something and its mystery and your opinion about it are gone. They cease to exist. One trifle delighted you, while the meaning of true artistry said nothing. But you will not forget Bialik’s lines: “No such revenge — revenge for / the blood of a small child — has yet been devised by Satan.” This is a language that enters eternity.

Let us consider a different poet. Let us consider Verlaine. Who can forget his deeply lyrical expression of human desolation: “Tears rain in my heart as rain falls on the town.” This is artistic language; Verlaine utters Words. This is meaning clothed in its perfect form.

It doesn’t matter in the slightest what the contemporary international “poetic” scribbling, in order to defend its own pointlessness, has decided to call that poetry which actually says something, poetry which is not just standing on its head in order to surprise the naive consumer of all this “absolute originality,” which is to say, “absolute talentlessness.” It doesn’t matter, I insist, that the international poetscribblers have decided to call true poetry “the poetry of statement.” This is a terrible sin, because a “statement” says something, it necessarily has a meaning, while his majesty the absurdist makes a virtue out of poverty, and demands “pure, absolutely original” poetry, which is meaningless throughout, so that the greater the meaninglessness, the greater the poet. Does this make any sense? Perhaps it does, according to a backwards world.

When we go beyond the greats of poetry — greats, of course, of varying levels — to the greats (again, of varying levels) of prose, we find that they are united by the fact that they say something, united by meaning.

Among the great prose writers we sometimes find even a didactic meaning, or a moral lesson. Sometimes there is covert didacticism, which the reader himself must uncover after the artist has hidden it. This is what Goethe, in his time, taught: He said that when art teaches something, it is didactic, but the reader himself must infer the didacticism. And sometimes, sometimes, as in Tolstoy’s Lucerne, and The Death of Ivan Ilytch, high art is shamelessly, brazenly, openly, didactic. With Dostoevsky there are entire pages of didacticism: He does not want just to show instead of telling; he becomes a theologian (in his own way, of course), and a preacher. This does not diminish his art. The same is true of Balzac. Even Chekhov becomes a preacher in Ward Number 6.

For didacticism to not diminish artistry — this is a problem in poetry as well. The fable, which is seldom attempted in contemporary writing, is a poetic form. The old Russian master Ivan Krylov never forgets to serve us a moral at the end of a fable, and the moral is often no less polished than the story itself.

In our times, Eliezer Shtaynberg has renewed the fable. Does his incisive didacticism limit his artistry?

Why does the purely aesthetic writer not consider the fable a poetic form? Because of the misconception that poetry is limited to the lyric mode. There is no doubt that lyric poetry is, or should be, poetry, but poetry is not exhausted by lyricism alone. What is Ibsen’s drama When We Dead Awaken if not the loftiest symbolic poetry? What is Peer Gynt? Is a folk epic like the Kalevala not poetry? Is it not prose which is poetry from beginning to end?

I spoke earlier about poetry, and I meant lyric poetry. Habit is worse than a disease.

People tremble before intellectualism. As Heine wrote in a love poem: “I still want your body, / That body young and true, / They can bury your soul, love, / I’ve soul enough for two.” (Translated by A.S. Kline.) Similarly, the intellectual says to the poet: Lord poet, I need the image! I have more than enough intellect.

I do not know whether the intellectual knows the exact meaning of an inner idea like intellect. But let us assume that, by intellectualism in the literary arts, he means, more or less, something like invention. Invention is useless. Reflection has very little to do with invention. Even the deepest, the most irrational, the most mystical and occult aspects of a person, if they want to be clothed in form, in order to be expressed, must go through the stage of reflection. True reflection includes an image.

When a poet undertakes to provide only images, he becomes a purveyor of florid, archaic affectations. Ninety-nine percent of the images which the snob grasps and the literary scholar interprets are not images or metaphors, but are intellectual activity in the worst sense, intellectual activity that is active without being intellectual. Botched literary craftsmanship. When Tolstoy says, in “Alyosha the Pot,” that his hero, before dying, smiled, this is an image that engraves itself in you: You see it. When Eliot writes that “the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherized upon a table,” this is perhaps a little bit forced, but at least it provides an image. In general Eliot’s images and metaphors are strained. Incidentally, the entirely barren Ezra Pound is worse: He writes poems, or as he calls them, Cantos, as if he were a scholar of Chinese. Dylan Thomas is lavish with images, but there is no point trying to follow them: They are not scenes, they are just the scattered associations of an alcoholic. The entire topic of image demands a rigorous study.

But overall: If you want to truly be original, learn from what is outdated more than from what is fashionable, which is not so much new as it is in style. Learn from yourself, more than from anyone else. But in order to learn from yourself, you must first of all have substance.

In the final summary, everything comes down to one thing: Personality. A great poet is a great person who writes poetry. A great prose writer is a great person who writes prose. Are there not many small people who are supposedly great writers and poets? Yes, this is true, but either they are not really small, and are instead complex and misunderstood, or else the small person’s greatness as a writer is a delusion, a lie, a consequence of tastelessness and marketing.

Oh, and PS. Consider Edgar Allan Poe’s practical advice:

You should never confuse obscurity of expression with expression of obscurity.

Learn to express the obscurity of your being and of the world without any obscurity of expression, which can express only one thing: Nonsense.

Daniel Kraft is a poet, translator, and educator living in Richmond, Virginia. His work has been in many places including the Kenyon Review, Poetry Ireland Review, Jewish Currents, Slate, and leading Yiddish studies journals like In Geveb, and he’s been supported with a Translation Fellowship from the Yiddish Book Center. His newsletter of Yiddish poetry translations can be found here; it’s semi-dormant due to parenting responsibilities, but will restart next month, and his debut poetry collection is forthcoming from Slant Books.

The essay is reprinted by permission of the Congress for Jewish Culture.