Poems after Auschwitz by Erich Fried are published in Albanian

The book of the Jewish poet of Austrian origin, Erich Fried, "One of those who survived: poems after Auschwitz", has been published by the publishing house "Armageddon". The book was translated by the translator Ismet Daci, who also wrote an afterword for the book, which you can read below.

Erich Fried, wonderful, clear, modern

Erich Fried was born on May 6, 1921 in Vienna. He started writing poems and stories in 1930. So, he was only nine years old. What he wrote at that time was prompted by the political events of the time: the demonstrations of June 1927, the persecution and exclusion from the social circle of the Jews in early 1934.

Fried's parents are arrested in 1938, after Hitler's troops march into Austria. His father dies as a result of the torture inflicted on him by the Gestapo forces in Vienna. Meanwhile, Fried manages to emigrate to London. There he did heavy physical labor in the black. With the money saved, he bought travel visas to England for his mother and about seventy other immigrants.

Until 1968, Fried worked as a commentator for the BBC.
At the end of his life, Fried lived in London with his third wife, the Englishwoman Catherine Boswell. From London in the late 70s, he published almost a collection of poems every year. His love poems achieved great success. Taking into account the number of copies of books of love poems sold up to 1994, Freud was the most widely read contemporary poet in the world.

Shakespeare's short stories and translations also constitute an important moment in his creativity.

Although Fried's lyricism, in the classical sense of the word, does not belong to descriptive creativity but, on the contrary, is often at odds with it, many motifs of his poetic engagement, if not his entire manuscript, have at their foundation content from everyday life.

In permanent exile

Fried's earlier poems are conventional in form, rhythm, choice of scenes. The encounter with the literary baroque and the English lyric, the influence of Rilke, Kafka and early modernism encouraged Fried to introduce a personal color in the form of "seriousness towards the word". This is exactly what made a "post-Auschwitz lyric" possible, which directs the reader's feelings and mind. A language that is not only the servant of the event, but very often its conductor.

After the war, i.e. after 1945, Fried never returned to Austria.

Fried followed political and social developments in Germany. In 1958 and 1960, his first two works were published: a collection entitled Poems and the novel A soldier and a girl.

In the full sense of the word, Friedi gained wide popularity with the summary Even Vietnam and then? published in 1966. The contents of this compilation soon turned into demonstration slogans and pamphlets, song lyrics, many of them being reprinted in student magazines. This turned Fried into a "political spokesman" of the movements against the war in Vietnam and found and associated his name with the "political lyric" paradigm.
The fact that Fried later wrote love lyrics did not change much in this regard. This aspect is important and represents an operational field which cannot be included either in the scope of poetry defined as "pure lyric", nor in the designation "political lyric".

Anti-rhymes, grotesque, warning rhymes

Friedi named the reprint of his own poems in 1968 Liberation from flight. This was a summary of counter-rhymes written over and against much of his earlier published poetry. TITLE Liberation from flight and the notion counter rhyme talk about a thesis, about a program; for the new German-speaking lyric that Fried, like Rymkorf and Enzesberger, sees as an escape from reality. He criticized the friction of his earlier poetry with folklore and the Romantic tradition. World War II, the desolation of cities, the growing threat of nuclear weapons, had changed everything in the world. In Fried's case, the themes, form and rhythm of the poem.

An example of Fried's departure from the conventional form of earlier creativity is, among others, the poem Since, rewritten in 1958. In the first version, the post-war period "dipped poison" in the form of "burnt cities". Using motifs from nature, where the wind becomes the subject, or mythological, where the tree plays the role of the lover... break from this poem the first two stanzas:

Then come the oysters
From the burning cities
In their clothing
The wind breaks through the bushes

And some of them choose the tree as a lover
And some animal
Animals are slaughtered
Strange

The counter rhyme is called Does life go on? This poem does not have the last stanza. Friedi deleted the comforting look (And the mountains stretch back to the sea). In this case, the poetic grotesque of reality is much more powerful:

Maybe everything will be different:
They will remain Galician
With fused eyeballs
In what will be an excess of cities
And they will forget what love was
And they have to bark after food
In the remaining reserves
Beneath the decaying corpses

From the impression of such foreshadowings there is no going back – to the conventional lyric. Friedi creates these images by bringing back the lyrical self. To live or to live, where Fried makes use of the experience with the Holocaust, the systematic declaration of being worthless to live, in the first place, of the Jews, followed by the equally systematic destruction of all declared "foreigners". From the past he is left alone Somewhere he is still living / Until he's dead. The future is determined by Hatred against death and awareness that life is no longer the same And that I'm no longer living at all/ As long as she somewhere/ Lives... the text is stronger than "I". It overshadows the subjective hatred of death in the name of a more humane future. The second stanza ends like the first: Until he's dead, uniting in one life the two types of life, the one before and the one after Auschwitz. In many poems, Friedi uses paradox by playing with the reader's preconceived notions.

For Fried, the tendency towards a solution at a time when it is not in sight is important. His warning poems elaborate this tendency also from the formal side. Poems breakthrough it is constructed as a paradox, simultaneously using the cyclical form ("kyklos", the repetition of the first line at the end), a closed form, which makes it impossible to get out of the poem.

There must be a way out
From superstition
That always believes that
There must be a way out

Many aphoristic poems, due to their (short) length, also called laconic, use such figures known from the rhetorical tradition. Warning rhymes are to be understood as self-conscious exaggerations that hope to be contradicted or overthrown from without. Fried's lyrics are almost ablaze with the belief that this is possible. His sarcasm and irony are more a warning against rudeness than a capitulation to it.

When the stones
They told you
Be humane
The stones answered
We are not yet
Strong enough

Life lessons, poetry after Auschwitz

Writing poems after Auschwitz is barbarism the great philosopher Theodor von Adorno declared in 1951, a statement he changed a few years later. This discussion, also linked to the names of Paul Celan and Bertolt Brecht, whether or not poems can be written after Auschwitz, Friedi avoids by turning it into a paradox: Don't wish me luck / For luck / That I'm living. The central formula The guilt of innocence uses paradox as a formula that does not allow for peace, that at the same time attracts and repels and from which misunderstanding is always reborn, regardless of how many times and how the content is understood. In an article entitled My dead, Friedi, 24, reflects on her own survival: I know most of them are dead. I don't know who exactly is dead, so I'm very rich with dead people. Too rich. (…) I want to raise a memorial to my dead with words. I only know a small number of graves and most of them I will never know. I don't want to live with my dead...
Formula and shadows of life at the same time, the title of the collection of poems published in 1981, questions the statement that "the world is for the living".

The summary closes with the poem A bad student. The consequence that Friedi drew from this situation, to live and write poetry even after Auschwitz, is expressed in the title of the poem Where we learn to live? – asks Friedi, saying, at the same time, that efforts cannot end with Living learning, where we learn. This attitude of Fried made the young people his ardent admirers.

Commitment and critical form

Where evil becomes everyday, opposition becomes obligation - say Bible, but also Bertolt Brecht in the poem For posterity:

We know that:
The face contorts
Even from hatred of evil
Even the bitterness for the injustice
Makes the voice hoarse.
Ah, we
From above the ground we wanted to plant
Friendship
We couldn't even be friendly ourselves

He says it Bible and Brecht says it, but not Fried. Fried's position knows no tolerance for "justifiable violence". He rejects any commitment that turns into violence for the sake of an ideology. In his summary Among the side enemies (1970) he satirizes the struggle of the right and left political wings, calling any form of the orthodox program barbaric. The summary opens with the poem:

Busy with my fight
Against the main enemy
I was killed by my enemy
side
Not suddenly or later
As his main enemies claim
But from the side
Where he had long been positioned

Despite his commitment to "life", in Friedi's poems there is no agitation or propaganda for him, just as there are no moments of prediction. Typical is the ductus – (the end of the poem) Freedom of power, where Fried uses a form of expression that is self-denouncing as a mistake or a lie. Posting as a condition a critical awareness of the reader towards language, I leave the solution to the end: Freedom does not rule.

Summary Even Vietnam and then? transformed Fried in the eyes of the public into a political poet, into a leading figure of the non-parliamentary opposition, a role he accepted. Poems letdown it is written as anamonia, a linking technique where the last word of a line is repeated first in the following line. This form carries with it the gift which the one at the beginning of the poem he wanted to sing turns her into a killer at the end of it. Always looking back and not allowing separation, the past colors the present to the extent that at a certain moment they merge into one, no longer distinguishable from each other. The poem is also directed against one-sidedness, for the sake of the past Question about Israel, a poem that by no means created only friends and applause for him, and especially not only in Israel.

Poet of linguistic reality

Fried's play, with the language and figurative forms he uses in his poetic creativity, tries to arouse the critical attention of the readers. Even the traditional claim for the exclusion of function in art is part of his program. Friedi confronts the autonomy of aesthetics with a short text entitled Failure to achieve meaning in art. In poetry, meaning meets a dead end, the tautology of this word creates nothing but emptiness.

Erich Frid very quickly departs from the "canon" of the form, building new rhyming samples, which are largely inspired by rhetorical figures. His lyrical creativity can be formally described as "peace between rhetoric and poetry". In the American lyric tradition, p. eg, this moment of peace is not rare. The strict separation of these two forms of expression was more a feature of the German-speaking space. An important place in Fried's lyrics is also the belief that language is a large part of our reality that is expressed through it and can be interpreted in text form. A lyric based on Speeches, Prepositions, Postpositions (as seen in the work of Brecht, Enzesberger, Rühmkorf and Fried) is much closer to reality than any party slogan, Longing for words.

Taking dialogue as a basis, Fried's poems often make us doubt the patterns that reality has taught us. This moment he named it Builds, where the subject, being largely composed of language, is in no way its master.

Love rhymes gain great intensity in verse With closed eyes to wait from the poem Miracle training mediating the feeling that life also has components that cannot be mediated by language. The tautology used cannot be understood as a mistake, language poverty or lack of imagination, but a rejection on the part of the author of the event in question and an attempt to reduce the pain by turning it into "words". In this way, Fried defends the purification of the naming of the unnameable, the description of the indescribable. Maybe, just like the girl in Picasso's painting The child with the dove protects the bird, with its fragility. The poem is also written in a similar form Ty.

This form of expression can be named with Fried's principle of "linguistic reality" and the rejection of metaphor as a descriptive tool. You are like a bud to me as it was in the traditional lyric.

The titled poem biography, written on the eve of his approaching death, Fried turns it into an obituary in the present tense, except for the beginning and the end where the simple imperfect and the future tense are used, in both cases, as a negative form for "ductus ” poetic description: I was neither stone nor cloud / nor bell nor bell / And I will never be stone / neither cloud nor bell. This denial of the outdated practice of metaphorical comparison is a consequence of a poetic morality that, moving away from the metaphorical painting of images and leaving room for things to be otherwise, presents a poetic and vital concept of the engaged humanist, the moralist politician, uncompromising lovers of peace, equality and freedom, connoisseurs and brilliant translators of Shakespeare's works and, finally, without any doubt, one of the most consequential modern poets, Erich Fried.

Erich Fried died on November 22, 1988, at the age of 67, from cancer. His body rests in the "Cansel Green" cemetery in London. His literary legacy is administered by the Archives of the National Library in Vienna.