Is it actually possible to distinguish poetry from prose with this author?

Wasn't everything poetry that Allen Ginsberg, the guru of beat poets, typed, sang in public places, said to himself intoxicated or half asleep?

You might think so, but Ginsberg himself distinguished between genres.

About the origin of his epochal poem Howl, he once wrote that the first part was not intended as poetry.

"I began typing, not with the idea of ​​writing a formal poem, but stating my imaginative sympathies, whatever they were worth." From these "imaginative sympathies" or rather antipathies, the anger-Suada against a as stuffy, bigoted and repressive perceived America that has misled and thus destroyed the "best minds of my generation".

Jan Wiele

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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However, "Howl" was continued and concluded with the performance of a poem - and the performance of it in October 1955 in San Francisco made Ginsberg famous overnight.

It became "The Poem that Changed America" ​​- the not at all exaggerated title of a volume in which fifty years later its fundamental effects on poetry, pop music, literary studies and society were recorded.

Like many others, Vivian Gornick sees it as a continuation of Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass", as a poem that, in the spirit of Ezra Pound, has completely renewed the language with its staccato phrases, wild juxtapositions, sometimes with the poet's voice, then with that of the Performed by hipsters.

Two Germans in leather jackets

In Germany, too, as the editor of the two volumes at hand points out, “Howl” quickly took off and paved the way for enthusiasm through beat poetry – because two German writers in leather jackets made a detour from Amsterdam to Paris.

This visit by Günter Grass and Walter Höllerer to the legendary “Beat Hotel”, where “Ginsberg, Burroughs, Corso and at times Kerouac lived together in a very small space”, ensured, according to Michael Kellner, “that Beat literature was already in the in German in the early 1960s".

"Howl" was first translated by Wolfgang Fleischmann and Rudolf Wittkopf as "The Howl".

More influential, however, was the later translation by Carl Weissner, who became the German voice of Beat literature as well as the prose of Charles Bukowski and whose importance for a certain sound and style of contemporary language can hardly be overestimated, not only around 1968 but even today .

Therefore, one may also ask the question whether, after Weissner, a new translation of “Howl” was necessary at all.

Of course, when it comes from the Austrian writer and poet Clemens J. Setz, things get interesting, because the current Büchner Prize winner is himself a peculiar translator, as was recently heard in Darmstadt.

At the beginning he hardly differs from Weissner.

"I saw the best minds of my generation, destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical and naked": It's almost identical, except that Weissner said it was "emaciated".

The “angry fix” that these people are looking for is turned into a “miserable shot”, which is perhaps more elegant and fits better than an “angry syringe” (Weissner), whose “Negro streets” are turned into “black districts”.

All in all, he cannot and does not have to surpass Weissner in the attempt to reconcile the “longing for jazz or sex or soup” – at best, differences such as “vision of the perfect fuck” (Weissner) and “last fuck spasm” are interesting (set).

Both tend towards coarse translations, even if the language in the original is sweeter.