One thing is certain: the going is tough for pathos in German-language poetry. The Pathos Laboratory, held as part of the Lyriktreffen Münster, took a closer look at why.

By ALIDA BREMER and AURÉLIE MAURIN

While in most other European and non-European literatures ‘the pathetic’ is seen as virtually synonymous with the lyrical, in German there seems to be a kind of aversion to pathos. Do German-speaking translators tend to bring pathos-laden poems back down to earth? And are supposedly sober German-language poems more likely to be lifted in tone by their translators? During a Pathos Lab held at the LCB, these questions and others were addressed by Hannes Bajohr, Alida Bremer, Ann Cotten, Michael Ebmeyer, Christian Filips, Dagmara Kraus, Olga Radetzkaja and the artistic directors of the Lyriktreffen, Aurélie Maurin and Ulf Stolterfoht.

Aurélie Maurin talked with Alida Bremer about the Pathos project at the Lyriktreffen Münster.

Alida Bremer: When I learned about the Pathos project in the run-up to this year’s Lyriktreffen in Münster, I was very taken with it—even before I was invited to participate. Your invitation pleased and moved me greatly, since I not only live and work in Münster, but I am the translator of a poet from Croatia who consciously chose pathos as a gesture of resignation and revolt for his poetry. He was a punk in the nineties, before the war – punk also conceals a variant of pathos in it. After the war, he became a melancholic lyricist. The Pathos project excited me for several reasons: as is often the case with original and good ideas, I wondered why it hadn’t occurred to me to think about the cultural differences that exist in relation to pathos; I also realized that there was great theoretical and emotional potential in this topic. Most importantly, I could see that your questioning of pathos is based primarily on experiences of translation. Translators do not only translate texts; thanks to their skills they have a very special insight into parallel linguistic and cultural realities. So, my first question is: Where did this idea come from? How did you arrive at it? And how did you manage to win so many enthusiasts for this topic in the rather sober and unemotional city of Münster?

Aurélie Maurin: My interest in pathos was sparked by observations from the practice of translation. For many years I led the VERSschmuggel project of the Haus für Poesie in Berlin, as part of which poets from different languages were invited to translate and freely render each other with the help of an interlinear version. In the process, I noticed time and again that elements of pathos were almost automatically filtered out or avoided in translations into German. And this occurred with completely different source languages. Often there was a translational hesitation, a caution, or even a fierce resistance. Since this scene played out constantly—whether in translations from Spanish, from Persian, or from Russian—and it was reasonable to assume that German poetry had developed a ‘pathos intolerance’ in recent decades. Nothing seemed more difficult to smuggle across the border of the German language than goods containing pathos. A highly sensitive detector tracked down pathos at every boarding. And ‘translating pathos’ into German became synonymous with ironizing, putting a damper on, toning down, redeeming, keeping at a distance. The Münster poetry meeting, which I co-chaired this year for the first time with Ulf Stolterfoht, is a seismograph of its genre. So, it seemed to me an ideal place to bring different positions into the field – and to think together about the (un)translatability of pathos, about idiosyncrasies and positive forms of rhetorical overpowering.

Alida Bremer: Thanks to this inclusion of the art of translation into thinking about poetry, I think we can clearly see that, if only taken seriously enough, translations can change our understanding of literature in general and poetry in particular. In the run-up to the poetry meeting, there was a preparatory meeting – a Pathos Lab – at the LCB in March (I joined from my hotel room in New York with a 6-hour time difference, but it all worked out beautifully): Can you tell us some more about it?

Aurélie Maurin: We gathered experienced translators, some of whom are also authors themselves: Hannes Bajohr, Ann Cotten, Michael Ebmeyer, Dagmara Kraus and Olga Radetzkaja. The project manager was the lyricist Christian Filips, who does not shy away from using lofty tones as a rhetorical device in his works. Ulf Stolterfoht and I also participated. We wanted to bring together different affinities to pathos and different language worlds, and also to introduce some experimental positions into the field. In the run-up to the lockdown, there was a website with a pathos gallery, in which poets and translators explored their difficult relationships to pathos. In this gallery, Nora Gomringer raised a question that accompanied us as a refrain throughout the lab: “Does the blazing German fear of pathos really exist?”

Alida Bremer: And does it?

Aurélie Maurin: Does it ever! Pathos has the effect of a stop sign! German-speaking critics are surprisingly unanimous, sounding the alarm as soon as they sense too much pathos. Freedom from pathos, by contrast, counts as a sign of quality. When there is talk of pathos, people prefer to keep their distance. Recently, for example, the poems of Amanda Gorman were suspected of pathos, as were those of Nobel Prize winner Louise Glück. Ulrike Draesner, Glück’s translator into German, had to justify her decision to retain the pathos of Glück’s poems in translation. In our gallery, she also shows how translation can overcome this pathos angst.

Alida Bremer: This topic moves at the interface between aesthetics and society, poetics and politics. In what seems a neutral space, judgments are made about artistic values, through presumably historical reasons lurk behind them. Amanda Gorman draws on a tradition of American poetry, such as the hymn-like, lofty tones of a Walt Whitman. But this tone causes unease in the German poetry scene. Why?

Aurélie Maurin: Not for nothing does it react with great unease to this pathos, which is often perceived as too patriotic. Through German history, there is a political dimension to the concept of pathos that has given it a bad rap. After the Nazi era in Germany, public speeches were certifiably pathos phobic; and the renunciation of pathos in politics is still present today. West German culture seems to have emerged from a sort of de-pathetization – a tabula rasa of pathos in which collective emotionality was met with suspicion. Pathos was equated with bathos, which is the ancient Greek term for a miscarrying of pathos… Otherwise, it’s only captured via antonyms like ethos, the grotesque, the sublime, antipathos or kitsch … Pathos polarizes!

Alida Bremer:What specific subjects were investigated in the Pathos Lab? Can you give us a few examples?

Aurélie Maurin: A wide range of topics was covered! All of them were reported from their concrete practice. Hannes Bajohr and Ann Cotten asked the question whether pathos can be programmed and how it relates to artificial intelligence. Michael Ebmeyer used Leonard Cohen’s „Take this Waltz,“ an adaptation of Federico García Lorca’s poem „Pequeño Vals Vienés,“ to demonstrate how effects of pathos – and of bathos –are generated through translation into another cultural space. And in the process, he also touched on questions of cultural appropriation. Olga Radetzkaya demonstrated how, in poems by Maria Stepanova and Marina Tsvetaeva, pathos and anti-pathos are related to the idea of Russian heroism. Dagmara Kraus read us examples of her translations of the Polish poet Zuzanna Ginczanka, who arrays a whole catalogue of situations of pathos. And you introduced us to Delimir Rešicki’s world of melancholy angels. Rešicki, who, a figure of post-punk, evokes the dead of the Yugoslav war, you consider the most pathos-laden poet in Europe.

Alida Bremer:I distinguish between intentional pathos – intentional because consciously used as a stylistic device – which I can get a lot out of, and bad pathos – bad because it is unintentional and unaware, but nevertheless used. Delimir Rešicki is cognizant of his poetics of pathos. For example, in his poem ‘Ethno counting rhyme’ he speaks of the ‘pathetic frozen petals of wild cherries’. Wasn’t he the most pathos-laden of all?

Aurélie Maurin: The competition was stiff! That fascinating thing was indeed how these variations of affinities to pathos resulted in a journey through different political situations and traditions, in an endless chain reaction of pathos and antipathos … The defensive reaction to pathos can also express itself in an exaggeration of pathos – a kind of first aggravation before immunization… In this case, pathos is deliberately overloaded, all the better to break with it. … In our gallery there is also a beautiful contribution by Olga Radetzkaja about the varieties of pathos and anti-pathos, consisting in a video about Maria Stepanova, who has overcome the pathos of the mysterious – among others of a Rainer Maria Rilke – that has solidified into kitsch – and plays her game with it…

Alida Bremer: I found this exchange so extremely interesting for all it taught me about other traditions of pathos. As I was in the US while the discussions at the LCB were taking place, I was able to reflect on the pathos of nation-building among Americans, with the Statue of Liberty and the many US flags that are to be seen, and discuss it with our group. At the time, Michael Ebmeyer translated the poem ‘The New Colossus’ by Jewish-American poet Emma Lazarus, which is engraved on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. Both the poem and Michael’s fitting translation are marked by this American pathos, but considering the subject and the era – both the Statue of Liberty and the poem salute the tired, the downtrodden, and the homeless who yearn for freedom – this pathos has its justification. I was convinced that we were all on the trail of something very big and important, but I pictured a study or an anthology of theoretical texts rather than a presentation on stage. And yet, as the new curators of the Lyriktreffen Münster, you both decided to present the results publicly in an event format. How did this come about?

Aurélie Maurin: From the outset, we wanted publicly to present the fruits of our pathos harvest at the Lyriktreffen – which should not preclude our continuing the gathering of evidence in the form of a publication. Our project manager, Christian Filips, led the proceedings, basing himself on the finding that the relationship to pathos in German-language discourse is currently undergoing radical change: the post-heroic age is over. The pandemic celebrates heroes again; the rhetoric of war has forced a return of emotive, or pathos-laden speech … pathos-enthusiasm, pathos-polemics and pathos-resilience all have new relations to and against one another, and must be freshly diagnosed. The day after our pathos lab at the LCB, the newspaper Der Freitag was headlined ‘Benebelt von Pathos’ (‘Woozy from Pathos’). It was not about our group, of course, but about a diagnosis of the current times of war. Our two presentations in Münster took place in a cinema; of all places the cinema is perhaps the place where one is still allowed to live out one’s pathos-lust uninhibitedly. The statements and readings were accompanied by a theatre organ. The projector showed expressions of pathos from film history. The analyses of poetic-pathetic rhetoric formed a kind of sober counterpoint to it. Ann Cotten, Olga Radetzkaja and Hannes Bajohr unearthed formulas of pathos on the basis of concrete textual examples. How does one sense pathos triggers? What are the mechanisms that indicate a hypersensitivity to pathos in translations? When does this pathos detector intervene, such that it filters pathos out? Such questions became concretely tangible.

Alida Bremer: Can the problem of pathos be solved through translation? After all, we translate not only from different languages, but also from different cultures with all their historical, social and emotional context – the reception is also influenced by the context in which the readers find themselves. If we assume that pathos is frowned upon, especially in German literature, what happens in translation? Is the pathos avoided or do the translators assume that the aversion to pathos alters through the confrontation with a different cultural context?

Aurélie Maurin: We explored precisely this question in the second event in Münster, which you also participated in. The panel, made up of Dagmara Kraus, Michael Ebmeyer and yourself, dealt with the question of the translatability of pathos using examples of texts and images. Pathos will always be hard to convey when references, connections, equivalences, and contexts are missing. Pathos draws heavily on a collective memory and presupposes participation. If gaps open up and there are no forms of equivalence, the pathos comes to nothing. Good translations, however, achieve exactly this transfer, because in a certain way they simultaneously invent the contexts! By the way, the event ended with you making a vehement statement, pointing out to the audience how hypocritical and woodenly pathetic is the formula, so popular in Germany, of the oath to peace ‘Never again war’ (‘Nie wieder Krieg’), and notably, in view of the wars that have occupied Europe and its surroundings after the collapse of the old post-war order. A case in point is the war in Yugoslavia, which was simply left out of the picture. It was important for you to emphasize that the German public does not realize at all how pathetic this formula ‘Never again war’ is.

Alida Bremer: Yes, when something is expressed so solemnly and pompously, but is factually false, then for me it is an example of bad pathos. Bad pathos is pathos that is ill-considered and made to sound important. Above all, it does not perceive itself as pathos. To my mind, then, bad pathos is unthinking, unaware, and unintentionally used. For example, during his visit to Moscow on February 15, 2022, the German chancellor said, ‘For my generation, war in Europe has become unthinkable, and we must make sure it stays that way’. The sentence struck me as distastefully pathetic. As someone who comes from a country that went through one of these wars, and completely independent of the fact that a German generation imagined war as unthinkable, I found this sentence problematic. This way of talking about war as an impossibility amounts to a German self-centred wishful thinking, for there are people living all over Germany who have fled to here from various wars. Thus, a strange discrepancy of experiences and perceptions emerges. To the ears of people affected by more recent wars, the pathos of the old phrase ‘Never again war’ seems unintentionally ironic and almost cynical. But at the Pathos Lab, the current political situation or Germany’s coming to terms with the past, which results in a transfiguration of European history after 1945, were not the only things that were examined for expressions of pathos. The pathos of the new media was also examined: what about the pathos of algorithms? Are they capable of emotion?

Aurélie Maurin: Hannes Bajohr responds that pathos can only come about behind the backs of machines. It arises ‘as a complex statistical dependency from sufficiently extensive corpora, like fog rises above the decay process of a bog, as the exhalation of dead matter’. When you let the algorithm generate pathos, however, a whole lot comes to light. When asked what sort of pathos it knew about, the machine responded with a long list: ‘the pathos of boredom, the pathos of construction, the pathos of lawn trimmers, the pathos of pretension, the pathos of hammer drills, the pathos of inscrutability, the pathos of swivel disks, the pathos of transience, the pathos of heterosexuality, the pathos of friendship…’ all the way to the pathos of objectivity, of matter-of-factness, which is a possible synonym for German pathos…

Alida Bremer: And what might your favourite pathos be?

Aurélie Maurin: The pathos of stuttering! Or also: the pathos of parrots… and the kind of pathos that both parrots and Patti Smith have in common, you will learn here from Hans Thill!!!