|
Introduction
Lissa Tyler Renaud
Editor, “Kandinsky Anew” series
The world of early 20th
century experimental
poetry was lively
indeed. The
Cubo-Futurists caused a
scandal in St.
Petersburg, Russia in
1913; the Dadaists
caused a scandal in
Zurich, Switzerland in
1916. The Italian
Marinetti, later the
German Schwitters, and
a host of other
individual poets,
painter-poets,
sculptor-poets,
musician-poets,
dancer-poets—all
these wanted to
challenge conventional
language in one way or
another within a few
years of each other.
They variously
stretched, dissolved,
fractured, fragmented,
abstracted, condensed,
purified, sped up and
tore down words, their
meanings, their sounds,
their rhythms, and
more. They each had
strategies, priorities,
philosophies that were
different from, the
same as, overlapping
with, or all or none of
these. They each
started earlier than
some and later than
others.
But Kandinsky stands
alone. His poetry
influenced countless
others but he was most
influenced by his own
inner voice—a
voice he experienced as
having far more reality
than most people
experience theirs.
Whatever it was, what
he called his inner
voice has now been
widely heard for over a
century, not least
through his singular
poetry.
The poems appear here
in English for the
first time, in
translations or
renderings done for
this entry.
*
Peace and War: Some Unknown Poems by Kandinsky
Jelena Hahl-Fontaine and Lissa Tyler Renaud
I. A NEW POETRY
Kandinsky wrote poetry
that was new when he
wrote it and is still
new now. He approached
the matter of breaking
ground in language from
a variety of
directions, some of
which we highlight
below.
*
Between 1909 and 1911,
Kandinsky wrote a
series of 38
groundbreaking poems,
to appear with 56
woodcuts, together
creating a
“musical”
unity. These were
entitled Zvuki.
They were meant to be
published in Russia in
1911, a publication
that has been described
as
“ill-fated.”
The Russian title for
the volume was
translated to Klänge for
the 1912 German
version, published in
1913 with the final,
more
“abstract”
poems added. This is
the version we have
come to know, in the
title’s English
translation, as Sounds.
Here is one of Kandinsky’s daring prose poems from Sounds,
a remarkable departure
from Russia’s
19th century
“Golden
Age” verse
poetry. Already he is
looking for language
that will do something
other than
“generate
eaning.”
THE SOFT
Everyone lay on his own
horse, which was
unsightly and indecent.
It is in any case
better if a thick bird
sits on a not-his
skinny twig with the
little trembling living
leaf. Anyone can kneel
(whoever cannot, learns
how). Can everyone see
the spires? Open the
door! Or the
tissue-fold will blow
the roof off!
In the following final section of a longer poem in Sounds,
“Chalk and
Soot,” we see one
example of
Kandinsky’s
experiments with the
repetition of a word.
In his 1910
treatise, On the Spiritual in Art, he
famously noted that
“the frequent
repetition of a
word… deprives
the word of its
original external
meaning.”
CHALK AND SOOT
[…]
How slowly he walks.
And every spring the
violets grow. Scented,
scented. They always
have a scent.
Will they never stop having that scent. Or they will?
Would you prefer it if
he had a white face and
black lips, as if they
had been smeared,
drawn, made up with
soot? Would you, prefer
that?
Or is there someone who
will say to the man, is
perhaps already saying:
Faster, faster, faster.
Faster, faster, faster, faster, faster.
*
It is interesting that
later this
“scent”
returns, with
Kandinsky’s clear
allusion to
Baudelaire’s 1857
“Les Fleures du
Mal” (“The
Flowers of
Evil”). In what
appears to be the
outline for a new poem
cycle, the first line,
“Flowers Without
Scent,” is
followed by five words,
each underlined.
Flowers Without Scent
Franknesses
Taciturnity
Imprecisions
Two-voiced
Free (style)
Kandinsky did not
publish or date the
following three short
poems, but they were
certainly all written
in early 1914. They
were published in
Russian and German for
the first time in 2007 (Gesammelte Schriften,
Munich). Here he is
playing with the non
sequitur and the
enigmatic.
BASIS
It’s not wise if
everything is wise.
Something has to be
wrong there. And when
everything is right,
then it is certainly
not wise. Many people
stand while
walking.
QUESTION
To open a door is easy.
To close a door is difficult. Especially
when there is a draft.
And when is there no draft?
THE MEASURE
From here to there three and a half.
From there to here four and one-eighth.
Oh, the pain! The pain of it!
Why measure the sun?
From here-in to there-in seventy-nine and three-elevenths.
*
In other experiments:
there is a
“poem” with
the nonsensical,
alliterative title,
“Umestny
um,” which
features an
accumulation of Russian
words all with the
first letter
“u.” They
make up such a
cockamamie sequence
that one can only
imagine how much fun
Kandinsky had selecting
and combining them.
Later in 1914, he
mirrors in language the
same
“reduction”
he employs in his
paintings of the time:
words become syllables,
then single sounds. In
one poem, we find
several words with the
“s”
sound—mässig,
Essig, and so
forth—and then
the last line is
nothing but a single
“s.”
We have two examples of
his taking words apart,
under the title
“Syllables.”
We are quoting the
first one in German,
but it serves very well
as a “sound
poem”—that
is, enjoyable without
knowing what it
“means.”
SYLLABLES
Ei! Eichhörnchen! Ei - eich - Hörnchen.
Ei - ei ! - ch - - h - örn - chen!
Ei - ei - ch - h. - örn - ch - en!!
In English, it would be something like this:
Sq [Sk]! Squirrel! Sq – squir – uirrel!
Sq! – sq! – uir - - r- rr- rel!
Sq – sq - ui - r- rr - e - l!
In the second poem, the
words are almost
identical in German and
English, so it needed
only a slight
adjustment to make it
an English version:
Lily! Look: a Lilliputian!
Lily! Lilli - putian!
Lily - Lilli - pu – tian.
Lily ! Do you guess “pu” lily? Tian?
Li - li - li - li - pu! - tian!!
An: n - n - n - n - n …….. !!!
II. POEMS IN DARK TIMES
It is clear from poems
Kandinsky wrote in the
months leading up to
World War I that he
felt the threat of some
catastrophe. It is
little known that, in
the spring of 1914,
Kandinsky threw his
weight behind a group
of people working to
influence leading
political and cultural
figures to prevent war.
Central to the group
were the Serbian
Dimitri Mitrinović and
the German Erich
Gutkind (pseudonym
“Volker”). In
her magnum opus, Kandinsky (Rizzoli
1993), our illustrious
co-author, Jelena
Hahl-Fontaine, quoted a
July 1914 letter
Kandinsky wrote to drum
up support for this
organization,
“committed to
peace and international
understanding”:
… Mitrinović is
planning a widespread
international
association—not
in any officially
recognized sense of
course—with the
aim of putting
important people in
touch with each other;
those who live in the
present but are
concerned about the
future, whose souls
and minds are fixed on
“tomorrow.”
All the forces that
have achieved
something
significant…
should be involved in
this great and
organically founded
effort.
Kandinsky goes on to
describe the
group’s plans for
an almanac,
conferences, lectures,
and a journal to be in
French, German, and
Russian. Just days
later, in another
letter, he wrote saying
“the whole of
Europe [is] under the
imminent threat of
war.”
Around that same time,
Kandinsky wrote poems
that have a current of
tragedy coursing
beneath the words. He
dated these poems with
more than usual care,
even recording the
exact day for poems he
wrote between February
and May 1914.
In the “Three
Rooms,” here in
English for the first
time, there is a
palpable sense of
dread, but the source
of it is unknown or
unstated. A cat sleeps
as if dead; a canary is
caged in a room with an
overturned table; a
mouse is in a room with
a crippled table,
frightened for its life
in a trap:
THREE ROOMS
In one room, in the
middle, stood a square,
heavy kitchen table.
Lying on it was a
gray-yellow striped
cat, with her legs
stretched long as if
stuck into her body.
She slept as deeply as
if she were dead. In
another room next to
it, hanging high from
the ceiling, a small
cage where a canary was
sitting. He fluffed
up his feathers
and looked like a ball.
In front of the window
a table varnished black
was lying on its back.
Next to it in the third
room was a light
mahagony table leaning
against the wall on
three legs. The fourth
leg was lying not far
off. In the middle of
the room stood a
braided mousetrap. In
it was sitting a mouse,
totally still, wet with
the sweat of fear.
*
When the war started in
the hot summer of 1914,
as a Russian citizen in
Germany, Kandinsky
became an enemy alien.
Like all foreigners at
the time, he was given
48 hours to leave the
country. Specifics of
his ordeal have not
made it into the
Kandinsky literature,
but we have one
anecdote from what
occurred, recorded by a
witness: Lyubov
Gurevich was a longtime
friend and editor
traveling with the
illustrious theatre
pioneer, Konstantin
Stanislavsky, who was
on tour in Germany with
his company. When war
was declared,
Stanislavsky’s
entire group was
forcibly ejected from
Germany at gunpoint. In
Elena
Polyakova’s Stanislavsky (pub.
in Russian 1977, in
English 1982, USSR),
Gurevich tells this
story of the harrowing
ordeal that
Stanislavsky and
Kandinsky endured
together:
The train slowly
meandered from the
Eastern border to the
Southern—Swiss—border,
where there were yet
more grueling delays,
more questioning,
searches, a meeting
with a group of
Russians detained
there which included
the abstractionist
Kandinsky, a long-time
resident of Munich. As
the Russians were
about to be dispatched
by ship to
Switzerland, a dapper
pastor had the
embarkation canceled
by holding forth to a
German officer about a
dinner for thirty
ordered on behalf of
the Russians, which
would be wasted if
they left as planned.
As the precise Germans
could not allow food
for thirty to go
uneaten, the departure
was postponed. It
transpired that the
pastor, a friend of
Kandinsky’s, had
invented the meal on
the spur of the moment
so that the Russians
would be transported
not on a German boat,
which the Swiss might
reject, but on the
neutral Swiss vessel
that followed.
Knowing that this
experience was on
Kandinsky’s
horizon makes this next
poem, “Secret
Meaning,” even
more prophetic in its
tragic tone, written as
it was just months
before the war
inflicted panic and
disruption on the
hordes of people who
were displaced. Orders,
tears, gatherings,
preparations and
provisions on the fly,
“trembling in
clumps,” general
uncertainty,
disorientation and
dehumanization—these
are the world of this
unsettling work:
SECRET MEANING
Thousands of worms gave
in to the way one did
things. They obeyed the
new order with tears.
Here some of them move
in pairs to the right
and left and also up
and down. Many gather
in sausage-like masses
for the walk. In long
sausage-like masses
others are able to make
many circles in the air
and grab some
necessities. And not so
many tremble in clumps
and measure time in
beats. And the others,
not so numerous, grind
good nourishment into
sackforms. They like to
do that. They do not
care what they make.
Whither leads them the
pressed new order. Is
that the crown or the
prison?
III. POEMS AS ART
Kandinsky’s
support for
Mitrinović’s
peace group was
important and
meaningful, but it
would be misleading to
suggest he was overall
very politically
involved. He was a
citizen of a historical
moment in which
heightened political
awareness was an
unavoidable given, but
the nature of his
struggles remained in
the realms of art and
the spirit. His brief,
three-part poem
“Springtime”
in Sounds ends
with this glimpse into
battles not fought on
the battlefield:
Dip your fingers in the boiling water.
Boil your fingers.
Let your fingers sing of pain.
In December of 1913,
Kandinsky sent a
painting to collector
Sir Michael Sadler, who
named it “War in
the Air.” Theda
Shapiro quotes Sadler
in her 1976 Painters and Politics: “A
year later, by which
time we had got only
too familiar with bombs
and fighting planes, I
wrote to Kandinsky in
Sweden to ask whether,
when he painted the
picture, he had
foreboded war.
‘Not this
war,’ he replied,
‘I had no
premonition of that.
But I knew that a
terrible struggle was
going on in the
spiritual
sphere…’”
When the painting was
later bought by Arthur
Jerome Eddy, Kandinsky
said again that the
sense of violence in
the picture
“could probably
be explained by the
constant war talk that
had been going on
throughout the
year.”
He struck the same note
in a letter to
Mitrinović about his
increasingly tenuous
participation in the
peace initiative
activities. In
Hahl-Fontaine’s Kandinsky:
“A few things
have become clear to
me. This
‘becoming
clear’ about
being an artist has
little to do with
reason. It belongs in
the domain of the
spiritual life, which
needs the most
favorable environment
so that what has
‘become
clear’ can become
corporeal. Otherwise it
is a waste of time and
reduces the artist to a
criminal.”
Underlining his point,
he wrote: “My
inner voice will…
let me know what I have
to do.”
Ultimately, the wars
that Kandinsky fought
were carried out in the
non-material world, the
landscapes and textures
of which we find
expressed in his
utterly unique poems.
* * *
NOTE
Poem translations by Hahl-Koch and Renaud.
“Flowers Without Scent,” translation by Philip Gerstein with Hahl-Fontaine.
The last two poems benefitted from consultation with Lee Edgar Tyler.
|
