During an unpublished conversation in Cologne, Germany, in 2003, two years before his premature death, Thomas Kling, who had visited New York City briefly a decade before and who planned to visit the United States for a series of poetry readings in the near future, emphasized that New York was the most central city in his imagination, a polysemic myth and inexhaustible intercultural network of voices.
A few days after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, Kling wrote Manhattan Mouthspace Two as a literary monument to the victims who died in the Twin Towers, an elegy whose textual disintegration traces their dying. Kling’s text, which consists of 21 numbered segments, was first published in the influential literary magazine manuskripte in 2001. One year later, it became the opening part of his poetry volume Sondagen (Soundings).
Together with W. S. Merwin’s moving apostrophic poem To the Words (2001), manhattan mundraum 2 (Manhattan Mouthspace Two) remains the most complex lyrical articulation of mourning in the context of the killings. While Merwin’s elegy (a grieving, gentle apostrophe to language itself) refrains from rearticulating the grim details of the deaths, Kling forces the reader to reconstitute the presence of suffering.
The poem is a spontaneous sequel to an earlier manhattan mundraum by Kling, which is organized along ludic correlations with Federico García Lorca’s poetry cycle Poeta en Nueva York (written 1929–30), incorporates images of the Museum of Natural History, and fuses an urban landscape with an x-rayed anatomy of Manhattan as a mouth whose teeth are the towering buildings.
Biblical rhetorical elements, variations of a psalm and gospel song, alternate with explicit insertions of Islamic terms and are contrasted with fragmented quotations from the trapped victims’ final cell-phone calls while the ceilings are coming down. Kling creates a moving approximative mimesis through rhythm. Ashes, “todtnmehl” (flour of death/of the dead), permeate the poem.
As Kling highlighted during a private dialogue, the text’s graphic design not only thematizes but also performs a self-implosion and becomes visibly fragmented. As in many of his poems that perform the process of mourning, manhattan mundraum 2 simultaneously reflects on the installation of the dead as part of an exhibition (for example, in his elegy Retina Scans, first published in 2000, where a recently exhumed prehistoric young female body is mourned and at the same time displayed as being displayed).
Kling’s lyrical reporters are at the same time emotionally involved and capable of assessing the costs of visual representation. The specular “I” conducts a self-as-media-critique. Far from being mutually exclusive, emotional immediacy and a sustained awareness of visual arrangements of victimhood support and amplify each other in Kling’s poem, as they do in his challenging and indispensable entire work.
The poet Michael Hofmann’s concise translation was published in Thomas Wohlfahrt and Tobias Lehmkuhl’s groundbreaking bilingual anthology of works by young German poets.
Bibliography
Kling, Thomas. Manhattan Mouthspace Two. Translated by Michael Hofmann. In Mouth to Mouth: Contemporary German Poetry in Translation, edited by Thomas Wohlfahrt and Tobias Lehmkuhl, 18–13. Newcastle, Australia: Giramondo, 2004.
Categories: British Literature, German Literature, Literature, World Literature
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