Singing in the Dark Times

...In"Barbara," Jacques Prevert deplores World War II by recalling a single prewar memory: his glimpse of a young woman's joyous face as she rushes to meet her lover in Brest...

...Many now eschew this kind of writing altogether...

...Even if that is so, some poets will not give up...

...Dan Pagis, included in the Holocaust section, was born in Bukovina when it belonged to Austria...

...My own journey began in 1980, upon my return from El Salvador...

...Her second book of poems, The Country Between Us (1982), expressed her outrage at the brutality she had seen—and drew immediate fire for mixing politics with an art that, her detractors insisted, ought to remain purely personal...

...In "September 1, 1939," he warns that "We must love one another or die...

...If not trivial, these flaws are nevertheless outweighed by the anthology's breadth and scope, and by the excellence of most of its entries...

...What a shame, therefore, that as rendered by Robert Bly, their linguistic devices are practically identical—identical, that is, to the shopworn mannerisms of Bly himself...

...its vitality depends on these very elements...

...A LEAF, treeless," inquires: What times are these when a conversation is almost a crime because it includes so much made explicit...

...asks Czeslaw Milosz...

...Digested in several sessions, this moving and powerful volume is testimony to the extraordinary resilience of the human spirit...

...In large doses its accumulated images of suffering and evil tend to numb the senses...

...One of them, titled "Cservenka, 6 October 1944" (a few weeks before his death), reads: Nine kilometers from here the haystacks and houses are burning...

...The Romanian Jew Paul Celan struggled to remove the "Nazi taint" from the German in which he wrote...

...Poetry, of course, suffers more than any other genre when it loses the exact sounds, nuances, rhythms, and cultural associations of its original language...

...Although every selection is informed by that mark, not all address it directly...

...Gradually Forche realized that a great many notable 20th-century writers, from a long list of nations including our own, have testified to the anguish of the silenced...

...For example, two of the most innovative modern poets to write in Spanish, Federico Garcia Lorca and the Chilean Pablo Neruda, are unique in their native tongue...

...She explains that the anthology "is the result of a 13-year effort to understand the impress of extremity on the poetic imagination...

...Later in his childhood it became part of Romania...

...Other poets, however, find everyday expression and logic inadequate to their tasks...

...Yet their lyrics "are as much 'about' language" as any composed for purely esthetic aims.The col-lection that has emerged from Forche's research provides "a poetic memorial to those who suffered and resisted through poetry itself...

...Nor does the biography always provide a clue...

...And for some reason, Forche's otherwise informative introductory notes on each poet fail to mention the original language employed...

...Thus problems arise in virtually every collection where the majority of entries must be reproduced in a new tongue, and this one is no exception...

...no longer make sense, or only make sense if they are allowed to invert themselves...

...for in fact much of his verse contains forceful reactions to the tragic events of his times...

...sitting on the field's edges, some scared and speechless...

...Survivors and victims of the Shoah, African-American civil rights protesters, Poles who defied Communist censorship, Israelis and Palestinians, Central American exponents of Liberation Theology—all have used scriptural stories, from the first murder in Genesis to Revelation's "War in Heaven," to communicate the plight of their peoples...

...Question: Did he compose in German, Romanian, Yiddish, English, or Hebrew...

...The last guess is the correct one, but I had to consult other sources to find out...

...Elsewhere writers bring the empathetic wisdom a past conflict has taught them to bear on a later one...

...Can it be anything beyond "a connivance with official lies," an art form for dilettantes who fiddle while Rome burns...

...Biblical imagery recurs throughout Against Forgetting...

...This re-creation of the happy past, "of which there is nothing left," condemns by implication the obscenity of battle, the destruction of cities...

...What is poetry that does not save/Nations and people...

...His mysterious images seem to convey something beyond conscious speech, as in the opening of "Death Fugue": "Black milk of daybreak we drink it at evening/ we drink it at midday and morning we drink it at night...

...Brecht's fines remind us that there will always be those who sing in the dark—in it, and against it...

...Or can poetry, as Milosz believes, enlarge compassion, and move the living to honor the dead not by recalling them in guilt but by building a just and peaceful society...

...And he answers: "Yes, there will be singing./ About the dark times...

...Some probe historical conflicts to comment obliquely on the present...

...Auden, often blamed for depoliticizing English poetry, is included here too...

...She began studying the works of Anna Akhmatova, Paul Celan, Fed-erico Garcia Lorca, and others who had experienced the terrors of war, or of oppressive governments slaughtering their own people—and who, speaking out against the horror, also reshaped the literary forms of their cultures...

...Every so often, he gives some hint of his method...

...Each of the 145 voices represented here was a witness to at least one of 15 devastating struggles in this century, from the Armenian genocide beginning in 1909 to the student demonstrations in China's Tienanmen Square...

...As Forche puts it, their rejection of common sense "indicates that traditional modes of thought...

...Forche occasionally has made poor choices from among available translations...

...As the slaughter continues in Bosnia, discouragement may lead us to conclude that modern civilization is incapable of absorbing such lessons...

...Those lines are the epigraph to Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness (Norton, 812 pp., $35.00), edited and with an Introduction by Carolyn Forche...

...Against Forgetting preaches the hope that humanity, after a century of unparalleled bruality met largely by helplessness, can finally learn to mend its ways...

...Verse that so much as hints at a political perspective arouses uncomfortable associations with the fascism that occasionally tainted Ezra Pound's "Cantos," the populist vulgarity of Carl Sandburg, and the vacuous propaganda of Archibald MacLeish's worst efforts...

...Miklos Rad-noti, a Hungarian, kept a verse journal while imprisoned in a Yugoslav labor camp during the Nazi occupation...

...Eventually the marchers were executed and buried in a mass grave...

...where I had worked as a human rights activist...

...In an effort to justify her approach, Forche sought "the solace of poetic camaraderie" among foreigners...

...For survivors, clarity itself has irrevocably become dangerous...

...The worst way to tackle A gainst Forgetting is by reading it straight through, as I first did...

...From 1946 until his death in 1986, Pagis lived in Israel and the United States...

...What all in this anthology share is a love for humanity so profound that it defies fear, hatred, even death...

...A wrenching example by Dan Pagis, a Holocaust survivor, is simply titled "Written in Pencil in the Sealed Railway Car," and runs in its entirety: here in this carload i am eve with abel my son if you see my other son cain son of man tell him that i "The poetry of witness frequently resorts to paradox," Forche notes, "to the invocation of what is not there as if it were, in order to bring forth the real...

...Both Howard Nemerov and Gal-way Kinnell drew upon their memories of World War II combat to decry the waste of Vietnam...

...Auden's overquoted dictum, "For poetry makes nothing happen," and lectured on Art for Art's sake...

...A writer may feel—as the French and Spanish surrealists did—that a language poisoned by advertising, propaganda and Newspeak must be purified by poetry...

...The reaction reflected a powerful bias in contemporary American literary circles...

...Radnoti's widow exhumed his body in 1946 and discovered the poems, stained with his body fluids...

...the ruffled sheep flock at the water drinks from clouds, bending over...

...poor folk are smoking...

...Poets who dare to venture into it are chastised with W.H...

...Forche strikes an ideal balance between well-known and relatively unfamiliar writers...

...Alongside selections from the likes of Wilfred Owen, Osip Mandelstam, Nelly Sachs, Langston Hughes, Zbigniew Herbert, and Yehuda Amichai, one discovers the compelling works of voices rarely available in English, such as the pseudonymous Chilean poet Teresa de Jesus, or the Armenian Vahan Tekeyan...

...Here a little shepherdess, stepping onto the lake still ruffles the water...

...In "Waiting for the Barbarians," Constantine P. Cava-fy—whom Forche calls the "greatest of modern Greek poets"—greets the advent of a new millennium with a grim, allegorical vision of a civilization collapsing, as the late Roman Empire did, under the weight of its own luxury...

...As his captors force-marched him and his fellows back to Hungary, just ahead of the Red Army, Radnoti recorded his sense that the normal world no longer existed, describing in "postcard" vignettes the horrors he witnessed against the backdrop of serene woodlands and meadows...