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A Night With Hamlet. Vladimir Holan. Translated by Jarmila & Ian Milner. Oasis Books. 1980.
Guide to the Underworld. Gunnar Ekelöf. Translated by Rika Lesser. University of Massachussetts Press. 1980.
The Waste Land -was the 'guide to the underworld' of Europe between the wars. Despite the favorable international exchange rate of Eliot's poem into other languages (including acclaimed versions by Ernst Robert Curtius, George Seferis and others, and the group of Japanese poets calling themselves "Arechi" after the title of the Waste Land), perhaps the most concise manifestations of the impact of The Waste Land have been epiphanic collage-like realizations of new poems. Like Piranesi, Eliot made ruins attractive again. The modern threnody has become the (small) book-length poem, meditating on the ruins of a civilization. Essential contributors to the mode are Seferis, Neruda, Paz, Martinson, Ritsos, Holan and Ekelöf, among others. Of all of these, Holan's A Night With Hamlet is the darkest: it is a true rumination, the heavy cud of an herbivore destined to become meat.
In Holan's poem the symbolist darkness acquires its most swollen midcentury visage. While his volumes of short poems appear to be alleviated of the symbolist aesthetic in proportion to the encroachment of political blackness, A Night With Hamlet retains in the figure of Hamlet that lechery for the infinite and the souring of Romantic exhilaration into morbid reverie and melodramatic exclamation that characterizes symbolism. It is easy to misread the poem if one doesn't attend to when Hamlet is speaking and when he is spoken to, for the melodrama is conscientiously sustained in the poem as an attribute of Shakespeare's hero, while the deeper disillusionment that permeates the entire text is not melodramatic at all, but rather the tragic realization that art like any institution can be an instrument of political oppression.
And then that astonishing pause,
recalled during the entire score,
it is the simultaneous creating the continuous,
a vegetative continuity and therefore dancing,
but already tired as if thinking of truth
could be pteceded by feeling fot a lie
The specific weariness here is Hamlet's, who is constantly in danger of being disembodied by his status as a. literary character, "so locked in himself that all immortality / could fit inside him." "He got...