The poetry of Avrom Sutzkever, or the temple of breath

Some years ago, I had tried to grasp the way in which Imre Kertész had drawn on the philosophy of Nietzsche, of whom he was a translator, in order to write Être sans destin (Fatelessness)¹: the German philosopher’s “metaphysics of the artist,” in positing the bond between life and aesthetics, makes the relation to art a condition of existence, and thereby renders every life and every survival inseparable from artistic creation — whether that of the writer, the reader, or the ordinary person — as an answer, at the very level of the foundations, to Adorno’s famous line. Now, in Kertész, aestheticization as the radical condition of existence plays itself out at ground level in what he calls the “step by step” of survival, sharpened to the point of the unbearable moral stridency of the victim’s quasi-complicity.

At the opposite pole of this strategy, in which the ontological angle makes minimalism possible, Sutzkever’s poetry overwhelms by its gesture — a more Nietzschean gesture still, by virtue of its stronger affirmative tone than Kertész’s purely theoretical construction; the latter would turn, in good logic, to Kant, in so far as his position was indeed a “critique” of aesthetic reason, a reflection on the joint “conditions of possibility” of life and of art, adding, in a way, the beautiful to space and time.

Far, then, from the linearity, even the constrained adherence, of the “step by step,” ending in a prose of post-Flaubertian “subjective realism,” what is striking in Sutzkever’s poems is, one might say, the “august gesture” of lyricism. As if “annihilation” had not managed to pollute the very source of life. Far from an economy of running dry, we feel ourselves always within the dimension of surging, in the welling of the source, if you like. The force of creation seems intact. This miracle is no doubt to be explained by age — Kertész is only fifteen when he is deported to Auschwitz by the Hungarian and German Nazis; Sutzkever, at the same moment, is already close to thirty. The reader of the anthology of an entire life, given by Rachel Ertel, cannot help but see in Sutzkever’s first poems, in the wonder of the snow, as it were the stratum of unfading splendor that will forever render inoperative the barbaric attempt to depress the geniuses, in addition to decimating the families. The poet had had time to take a breath; he seems to have lungs full of Siberian air. This resistance, the deepest of all, omnipresent in this poetry, he expresses through the traditional metaphor of breath, to which he often returns and to which he gives a new youth — for everything is jouvence (the fountain of youth) in these poems in answer to annihilation, everything is the countersignature of courage and joy. Nothing is more explicit than these lines from “Jewish Street”:

I vowed in the night of the marshes not to let the tempting serpent cut off my breath (p. 154).

It is not, moreover, only a matter of rebound and resilience, but also of a promise of reconstruction, rooted in the inexhaustible oxygen, by a demiurgic breath². The unusual but wholly beautiful union of the image of the breath of life — inseparable from that of poetry — with the image of the temple makes it possible to grasp the stubborn power of recovery:

I did not take the time to build a temple of my breath. (“Twin Brother,” p. 388)

It is on life as breath, in its motion and its ungraspable materiality, but also its very fragility, that the poetic monument paradoxically rests — in a delicate rewriting of Horace’s imperial emphasis and his famous exegi monumentum aere perennius. That breath should relay the word is a shift rich in sense. By linking the two topics of breath and temple in a vision at the frontier between word-alloy and miraculous alliance, Sutzkever does still more: he weaves the bond between past, present, and future, between the temple of the origins and the one of the pioneers and the promises, between the first thread of life, the panting of the victims³ and the great breath of history in reconstruction. One could let oneself be carried for a long time by these two motifs, the breath and the temple, throughout the collection⁴, and observe their constant link with the lever of abundant survival set in motion before — and within — destruction, while at the same time admiring their constant oscillation between intimate metaphor and shared, patrimonial reference. At times it is the tender image of the breath that appears:

the silences exchange glances, and I have hidden my face so as not to trouble them with my breath. between spread fingers I see: motionless a serpent with a silver head (“Silences,” p. 169)

At others, the temple is the wound which, still warm, seems to hesitate between atom of memory and first stone, the metaphor then incrementing in a single gesture both solidity and referential dimension:

from the burned temple to this day I have kept a hot ember in a hidden wound (“Mirrors of the Rocks,” p. 164 sq.)

The constructing element, joining metamorphosis-by-gaze and construction-by-word, was already present, like the snow of the origins, before destruction itself, as in “Sylvan Songs”:

and in the metamorphosis of nature I weave a whole house of knowledge. in everything is revealed my creator deep and great. (p. 25)

Which is to say how ancient is the instinct to build, and how it has only grown stronger with the trials of time — true also is “what does not kill me makes me stronger.”