This Place of Poetry: Writing, Displacement, and the Poetics of the Mother Tongue in H. Leyvik, Paul Celan, and Sargon Boulus.

Abstract

This study examines the ways in which poetry written by displaced poets in their mother tongues becomes captivated by competing desires and how these desires are transformed into the capacities of the text. More specifically, this study uses close reading to illuminate how writing in the mother tongue, regarded here as an expression of the displaced poet’s rootedness (real or imagined) in his culture of origin, becomes a site of a phantasmatic return to an “origin” which is itself outside language or discontinuous with it, and which is therefore a threat to writing. The condition of displacement, I show, stirs in the poet’s natural (or naturalized) linguistic milieu a desire for an “origin” that transcends symbolic representation. And yet this desire seeks reconciliation within the boundaries of the text and is confined to the capacities of poetry’s formal and thematic devices. How the desire for the “origin” inflects and undermines writing and how the poem negotiates its relation to the “origin” lies at the center of this study, which portrays the ways in which an unattainable source is incorporated in the poem to create a new understanding of writing’s limitations and contingencies.

Chapter 1 reads H. Leyvik’s transitions between Hebrew and Yiddish in "ממעמקים" (“Mima’amakim,” Hebrew for “from-the-depths”) as the multilingual poet’s inquiry into the mother tongue’s capacity to become the language of psychic exploration in a modern world in which tradition lost its allure. Chapter 2 explores poetry’s capacity to voice a trauma by questioning its locus between the unfathomable reality of the Holocaust’s aftermath and the darkness inhered in the German language as manifested in Paul Celan’s “Tübingen, Jänner” (“Tübingen, January”; in German). Chapter 3 reads Celan’s establishment of the human as Hebrew’s source of sacredness and of prayer as a speech-brought-back-to-its-divine-source as a word of indictment, this in “Mandorla” (“Mandorla”), “Hawdalah” (“Havdalah”), and “Die Schleuse” (“The Lock Gate”). Chapter 4 discusses Sargon Boulus’s poem “Ṣandūq, ‘Arūs, fī al-Fajr, Ilá Mīnā’” (“A Trousseau, a Bride, to a Seaport, at Dawn”; in Arabic) as an exploration of the gains and losses implicated in poetry’s attraction to its origins.