2020 NPM #21: Second Creation (and more) by Silke Scheuermann
Poetry is made up of several components. The better these components are assembled, the more effective, and more memorable the poem becomes. Among the major components are the imagery or metaphors used, the rhythm, the rhyme and other use of sound, the vocabulary, and of course, how well a story is told, or an observation is made.With poetry in translation, you generally lose several of these things.
Our focus today is on a quartet of poems by German poet Silke Scheuermann (1973- ), as translated to english by Robert Lemon. The four poems are: To the Previously Most Common Bird in the World, The Extinct, Second Creation, and Dodo. All four poems can be found HERE at No Man’s Land, a site that focuses on translating present-day German poets.
And while translation generally loses the sound of a poem, and negates many of the tools a poet uses to reinforce the point or the story, a good translator, with some effort, can still bring out the meaning, and find a vocabulary and a structure that is faithful in many ways to the original. Thomas Merton, I think, did this well with the Ernesto Cardenal poem featured last week.
These four poems by Scheuermann, written in 2014, are interesting in several respects, but in part because they do something that is often difficult in art: they talk about sciencey stuff in an effective way. They speculate on extinction and perhaps reinvention in the age of CRISPR. They also focus, in a different way, on Hayen Charara’s metaphor of change, and that, though inevitable, it is painful.
Scheuermann looks at that from several perspectives in To the Previously Most Common Bird in the World, an ode to Martha, the last passenger pigeon. I have actually been to Martha’s memorial. Once upon a time, her species would form flocks so enormous they would darken the sky for days as they migrated past. This speculation is about loneliness after being one of billions:
To be the last of one’s kind what a strange mission When you once had different notions of confinement and wide open spaces
The Extinct speculates on a world where we have let plants go extinct, in our haste to make way for development of one kind or another:
Those that made way for new developments, beltways, and power plants, in the parallel universe they smell wonderful, but in this one they just smell of paper and lists, a bad conscience, and high profits.
For those of you of a certain age, that should bring to mind a certain Joni Mitchell song about paving paradise.
The next one, Second Creation is a different take: instead of humankind as the destroyer, it is we who are the new inventors (CRISPER, etc.) making mini mammoths and who knows what else:
Call it war, call it madness: this is the freedom of love: to create new beings, to set them aside for ourselves. This is the freedom of our species, to create other species. God gave us the gift of a construction kit.
Yes, there is hubris there. But in Dodo, Scheuermann envisions us not as crazy mad scientists, but apologetic ones:
God gave us rage, that strong feeling without direction or utility, and an appetite. You, Dodo, then vanished quickly into that other world, in which Alice is forever trying to learn Wonderland games from you.
. . .
Dodo, you will be reborn like the sunlight at the break of day. I promise you: You will be among the first that we make.
These have been common themes in science fiction forever, but especially in the last decade as cloned or designer animals (and perhaps people?) with unknown implications are created.
This is, I admit, a touchy subject, as the world is dealing with the implications of just one organism right now. Probably not created by humans, but certainly released from the biological well in which it was captive, and spread by humankind. Yes, there is plenty of hubris there.
--Steve Spanoudis
