The long poem marsyas, umkreist (marsyas, encircled) from Anja Utler’s volume münden—entzüngeln (merging—untonguing, 2004) evokes and reinvents a mythological protagonist’s execution by gradual skinning. According to classical Greek mythology, the satyr and flute player Marsyas challenges the god Apollo to a musical competition. They agree that the winner will have full control over his antagonist’s life. Changing the rules to his advantage, Apollo wins and punishes Marsyas’s hubris by having him flayed alive.

In a notebook entry from 1911, Franz Kafka, who published some of his early texts in the literary magazine Marsyas, laconically alludes to Raphael’s fresco Apollo and Marsyas (1509–11). While Raphael’s fresco presents a triumphant Apollo mocking his immobilized victim Marsyas before the torture begins, Titian’s oil painting The Flaying of Marsyas (1575–76) shows the cruelty of the slow murder and the enthusiasm of its spectators and bystanders.

Utler’s marsyas poem, a radical rehearsal of the spoken word as a form of perceptive survival, not only forms fruitful tensions with pictorial traditions and literary predecessors from Alcaios to Zbigniew Herbert’s Marsyas poem (1957), but also suggests intermedial correlations with musical Marsyas adaptations, including Patrick Bebelaar and Frank Kroll’s jazz composition Apollo & Marsyas (1997).

The poem is divided into seven parts. Five of these begin with different programmatic subtitles whose verbal tensions announce a struggle for physical and emotional survival, for example, “beschattet—umklammern” (shaded—clasping), “durchtasten—erinnert” (groping—remembered). Referring to the poem’s epigraph, a quotation from a linguistics handbook, occasional phonological abbreviations for inverse sounds are inserted into the text, indicating painful breathing.

Utler’s text explores the permeable boundaries between nonverbal sounds of pain and fragile attempts at speech during dying. Throughout the poem, violence is conveyed phonetically through dense reiterations of consonants and prefixes.

In the penultimate stanza, the mouth is defined as an inhabitable zone of obliteration, where intimacy, vulnerability, articulation, and silence are inextricably interwoven: “diese stürzende wunde / der mund” (this falling wound / the mouth). In this poem Utler juxtaposes poetological reflections on the writing process with botanical, anatomical, or rather forensic, descriptions. The process of dismemberment and dissolution is mostly rendered in the present tense. Rhythm and metrical design evoke various temporal suspensions, ruptures, and accelerations.

While for the most part rendering the text in a careful manner, Tony Frazer’s translation occasionally reduces a verse’s artful ambiguity to a one-dimensional logic. For instance, “vom entsetzen entbunden,” which can be simultaneously read as “released/unbound/delivered by” and “released/abdicated/delivered from horror,” loses its fertile semantic tension of birth as trauma, liberation, and exposure in Frazer’s verse, “delivered from horror.”

Another example of a reductive translation can be found in Frazer’s decision to use “in silence” for the German “im stillen,” which thus loses its indispensable alternate meaning, “while breastfeeding.”

As Utler emphasized at a public reading in Bremen in May 2005, during which she delivered a precise and moving performance of marsyas, umkreist, Marsyas’s death can be read as a mode of metamorphotic survival. Marsyas is transformed into a river that originates (Utler uses “entspringt”—an echo of, and homage to, Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies) and “springs forth” from his own blood.

Having become an ear and eyewitness to an execution, the reader gradually encounters what the French language aptly calls a nature morte, a still life void of dissenting voices, a posthuman pastoral whose dissolvent utopian potential needs to be explored further.

Bibliography
Utler, Anja. “marsyas, encircled.” Translated by Tony Frazer. In From Mouth to Mouth: Contemporary German Poetry in Translation, edited by Thomas Wohlfarth and Tobias Lehmkuhl, 252–265. Newcastle, Australia: Giramondo, 2004.

Categories: British Literature, German Literature, Literature, World Literature

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