German Literature 3: Museum of Modern Poetry

Catalog description

This course is about theory, practice, and making of modern German poetry. We will use, as our guide through the poetic history of the 20th century, Hans Magnus Enzensberger's groundbreaking anthology Museum of Modern Poetry, first published in 1960. The Museum was a collection of 351 poems, each printed in its original language and in German translation and organized into 10 categories (places, oceans, graves, laments, figures, etc.). Among the poets and translators were Wallace Stevens, Emily Dickinson, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Octavio Paz, Langston Hughes, Nazim Hikmet, Aimé Césaire, Fernando Pessoa, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Léopold Sédar Senghor; Ingeborg Bachmann, Paul Celan, Nella Sachs, and Marie Luise Kaschnitz. Enzensberger aimed to document the history of modernist poetry and manifest its ongoing influence as part of artistic and readerly practice. The museum is thus a paradox: like all guides to the future it is composed entirely of ideas from the past, which is why Enzensberger recommended, in his preface, thinking of the book as an "annex to the artist's workshop." We will read a small selection of German poems and: 1) explore the difference between a poem as an object of history and a process of meaning-making, and historicize the idea that there might be a difference; 2) translate the poems we'll read into different languages (and/or dialects; we can discuss what we want "language" to mean), using translation as a museum practice and as a mode of reading. As part of the course, we will produce our own museum of modern poetry. Paradoxically, no knowledge of German is required.