Nomad Poetics and Linguistic Primitivism: Gerald Bruns on Göran Printz-Påhlson

Rejoice!  The latest issue of the Notre Dame Review is out, with work by all manner of worthies, including the great Gerald Bruns’ “The Plain Sense of Things: Göran Printz-Påhlson’s Vernacular Modernism,” an essay in the form of a review of Letters of Blood and Other Works in English, a volume of Printz-Påhlson’s poetry and prose I edited.  It begins like this:

In The Elsewhere Community, a series of radio talks delivered in 1998 for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the critic Hugh Kenner described 20th-century literary modernism as follows: “Two sorts of writers dominated it: Irishmen, often self-exiled, and Americans who lived abroad”…. Meanwhile, someone looking at things from a European perspective would cite the Dadaists in Zürich, Thomas Mann in Los Angeles, Paul Celan and Edmund Jabès in Paris, not to mention the creation of this country’s first Comparative Literature Program at the University of Iowa in the 1940s by the Viennese exile René Wellek. And then there are poets and translators like Pierre Joris (b. Strasbourg, 1946), who want to extend this itinerant modernism into a Nomad Poetics that “will cross languages, not just translate, but write in all or any of them. 

If Pound, Joyce and others have shown the way, it is essential now to push this matter further, again, not as ‘collage’ but as a material flux of language matter, moving in and out of semantic and non-semantic spaces, moving around and through the features accreting as a poem, a lingo-cubism that is no longer an ‘explosante fixe’ as Breton defined the poem, but an ‘explosante mouvante.’ It seems to me that people (like me) know very little about Scandinavian modernism, but this volume of writings by the Swedish poet, translator, and critic Göran Printz-Påhlson (1931-2006) may help to improve matters. Printz-Påhlson was certainly at home in the “elsewhere community.” He studied for a doctorate at Lund University in Sweden, then taught at Berkeley and Harvard before settling in England at Clare Hall, Cambridge, in 1964, where he taught in a department devoted to the study of Scandinavian, Russian, and Finno-Ugrian languages. And Letters of Blood offers a nice example of “nomad poetry”...

Bruns goes on to contrast Printz-Påhlson’s poetry with that of J.H. Prynne, and compare it to that of John Ashbery (whose work Printz-Påhlson translated into Swedish), before making a case for Printz-Påhlson as a “comic modernist.”

Later, Bruns discusses Printz-Påhlson’s critical and theoretical essays, in which he notes the influence of “linguistics, semiotics, Prague Structuralism, and French readings of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud.”  Bruns notes that the work “of principal interest, given what has been said so far about his own poetry in English, is Printz- Påhlson’s inquiry into… linguistic primitivism, a term that cov-ers a number of efforts to rescue poetry from the conventions of ‘poeticalness.’”

Bruns’ essay can be read in its entirety here, and is a good introduction to an important European modernist and poetic theorist largely unknown in the English-speaking world.

Letters of Blood is available here in hardcover, paperback, or as a Kindle edition.  A full preview of the entire text is available online here.

Letters of Blood

Letters of Blood and Other English Works, by the late, great Swedish poet and critic Göran Printz-Påhlson is just about to hit the presses, and you can now pre-order the book at the publisher's website.  


Printz-Påhlson is not as well known in the English-speaking world as one might expect, given the scope of his achievement and his distinguished career at Harvard and Cambridge.  But he will, according to the English newspaper the Independent, "...go down in history as the author of some classic poems… and one of Sweden's most learned, innovative and sharp-witted literary critics.” He was a prodigy, introducing a generation of Swedish writers to European modernism in his early study The Sun in the Mirror, and was one of the founders of the Lund school of poetry, a movement based in the ancient university town of Lund in the very southern tip of Sweden.  He was a scholar of enormous range, and the current volume includes a series of important lectures, "The Words of the Tribe," on the nature of poetic language (he treats linguistic primitivism, linguistic reductionism, the materiality of language, and the political elements of diction in detail).  He was also a prolific translator, and managed to put the works of John Ashbery into Swedish, a task for which he had exactly the right sensibility: erudite, attuned to pop-culture, musical, and wry.  You can learn more about him here, in the Guardian.


Here's the publisher's statement about the book:

This collection brings together for the first time works in English by the major Swedish modernist poet and critic Göran Printz-Påhlson. It was Printz-Påhlson who introduced poetic modernism to Scandinavia, and his essays and poems delve deeply into English, American, and continental modernist traditions. 

As well as Letters of Blood, the collection includes the full text of "The Words of the Tribe", a major statement on modern poetics, in which Printz-Påhlson explores the significance of primitivism in Romanticism and Modernism, and the nature of metaphor and literary materialism. The collection also includes essays on style, irony, realism, and the relationship between historical drama and historical fiction, as well as studies of American poetry. Printz-Påhlson’s poetry in English continues to explore these themes by different, often surprisingly innovative, means.

It was an honor to meet the man a few years before his death, and a privilege edit this book of his works in English.  I hope it will bring Printz-Påhlson's poetry and critical writing to an Anglo-American audience, for whom his concerns are startlingly relevant.

Primitivism and Speech in European and American Poetry

Lately I've been spending my Fridays in the dull duty of an editor, working on an edition on the uncollected English works of the late, great Swedish poet and critic Göran Printz-Påhlson. I had the privilege of meeting him back when I used to teach at Sweden's Lund University in the 1990s, and he was living nearby in Malmö. He'd had a long career teaching in the U.S. (Harvard) and U.K. (Cambridge), and seemed to possess an encyclopedic knowledge of English-language poetry and poetics, as well as a deep understanding of European poetry in several languages. He'd also been a mentor to the Swedish writers I admired most, notably the amazing poet Jesper Svenbro.

Going through anyone's unpublished works is a bit like trying to clear out the Augean stables, and if your scholarly patience is anything like mine, it can feel a bit like trying to clear those stables out with nothing more than a worn-out Swiffer. But there are some serious rewards, from time to time. The jewel-box hidden in the mire, in the case of Printz-Påhlson's work, has been the discovery of decent drafts of a series of unpublished essays from the 1980s called "The Words of the Tribe: Primitivism, Reductionism, and Materialism in Modern Poetics." My faith in American literary xenophilia is weak enough that I don't foresee these making a huge splash when the book appears, but my faith in Printz-Påhlson is such that I'm convinced they should produce some serious waves. I've just about knocked the first one, "Linguistic Primitivism in Modernism and Romanticism" into publishable shape (a few missing citations aside). Printz-Påhlson takes on various ideas of primitive language, eventually concentrating on the idea of common speech as a medium for poetry. He's not an advocate of it, though — more of an critic taking a cold, hard look at theories of simple language and speech as a fit medium for poetry. He looks at Romantics, notably Wordsworth (who believed in the language of the poet as the language of "a man speaking to men") and the young Ezra Pound, with his strictures about "no hindside-beforeness, no straddled adjectives (as ‘addled mosses dank’), no Tennysonian-ness of speech; nothing — that you couldn't, in some circumstance, in the stress of some emotion, actually say." He concludes with some sweeping statements about European vs. Anglo-American poetic traditions:

Linguistic primitivism has put its distinctive mark on modernist poetry in the whole Anglo-American tradition. When we look at modernism in a wider or European setting, we find very little that corresponds to it. The voices of modernist poetry in French or German poetry, from Hölderlin to Celan, Baudelaire to Bonnefoy, speak defiantly in another dialect, lofty, vatic, solemn, sermo sublimis rather than sermo humilis. Paul de Man has in a masterful and pregnant early essay traced the primary vocabulary of that dialect to its sources in figurative language of great simplicity, “The Intentional Image in Romantic Poetry.” In this essay he reminds us that whatever the demands of the language, of the social world or the sensual world, or even the ontological primacy of the natural object, words are used in poetry not as signs or names, but in order to name, in an Adamic act. He is quotes the words of Mallarmé (from his epitaph on Poe) “donner un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu.” Is this to be taken, with the English poet, as an act of social acquiescence in the face of the intractability of language, or with the continental poet, as a defiance of social demands in order to reach the silences behind the words? Those are the questions that will be present for us in further investigations of these problems in this series of lectures. Let me conclude here with a quotation from Wordsworth’s third “Essay Upon Epitaphs,” which marvellously comprises both views in two sentences: “Words are too awful an instrument for good and evil to be trifled with” and “Language, if it do not uphold, and feed, and leave in quiet, like the power of gravitation or the air we breathe, is a counter-spirit, unremittingly, and noiselessly at work to derange, to subvert, to lay waste, to vitiate and to dissolve.”

Like all sweeping statements, what's swept away are the moments when actual practice doesn't line up with the large theory. But still — there's much to think about here. Pound, Olson, Oppen, and in a different way much in the New York school (Printz-Påhlson was Ashbery's Swedish translator) — all have an affinity for speech, and the affinity became so strong in American poetry that Robert Grenier had to break with it, making his grand declaration "I HATE SPEECH." And the dominant English poetic tradition (in whose shadow the large, adventurous experimental crowd still stand) seems interested in maintaining a kind of continuity between the norms of spoken language and poetry (think Auden, think The Movement, think Andrew Motion et al). The question of just what this distinction from the more radically anti-speech Continental traditions can mean, especially socially, is fascinating. And it's the pull of that question that keeps me editing. On to the next three essays in the series! Excelsior!