This poem (Världens tystnad före Bach) appeared in Swedish in Lars Gustafsson’s poetry collection of the same title in 1982, at the mid-point of the poet’s literary career to date. Over the past 50 years, Gustafsson has experimented with many poetic styles, from longer, epic-style poems to ballads to didactic verse, and he perceives all of his poetry as creative manifestations of his intellectual work as a philosopher.
This poem is characteristic of Gustafsson’s shorter, didactic poems that employ sensual imagery to raise existential questions. For Gustafsson, “poetry is not feelings; rather, it is the intellectual’s visual work and a trying on of masks,” literary critic Mikael van Reis wrote recently in the newspaper Göteborgs-Posten. “Like a master graphic artist, Gustafsson forces stillness and the metaphysical feeling up to their maximum. . . . In The Stillness of the World Before Bach this plays out in a kind of phenomenological study where his landscape images can float in a translucent state of balance and vacancy, but where in the tranquility there is simultaneously a deep, sometimes cavernous, ambivalence.”
Gustafsson begins his poem with a deceptively simple question: “what kind of world” existed prior to Johann Sebastian Bach’s music, composed in the 17th and early 18th centuries. He then imagines that such a world—“world” here perceived as only Europe, a geographically and intellectually delineated world—must have been characterized by a stillness that we who live in a post-Bach, and more demonstratively complex and truly global world, can scarcely fathom.
Gustafsson’s poem cites some of Bach’s groundbreaking works, Trio Sonata in D, A-minor Partita, Musical Offering, and Well-Tempered Clavier, as testaments not only to the ways in which Bach reinvented Europeans’ relationship to music, but also to the ways in which his music has fundamentally altered our experience of the world.
The poem then evokes a deceptively nostalgic pre-Bach world through a sequence of sounds and images that suggest through contradiction both vacancy and presence. The absence of Bach is depicted in “Isolated churches / where the soprano line of the Passion / never in helpless love twined round / the gentler movements of the flute.”
The presence of a stiller, pre-Bach world is imagined in “broad soft landscapes / where nothing breaks the stillness / but old woodcutters’ axes.” This is followed by other vignettes of a tranquil, pre-Bach world: dogs barking, ice skates cutting into ice, “swallows whirring,” and the sound of the sea in a shell held to a child’s ear.
But Gustafsson stops short of sentimentality in evoking these images of a stiller, simpler world; rather, he makes it clear that something vital is missing: “and nowhere Bach nowhere Bach / the world in a skater’s stillness before Bach.”
In the end, Gustafsson suggests that it is impossible for a postmodern human to imagine how it was to live in an early-modern world. He also implies that it is meaningless to evoke nostalgia for a simpler, more peaceful time and place, when we can understand such “stillness” only in relationship to the “loudness” of our contemporary world.
Bibliography
Gustafsson, Lars. “The Stillness of the World Before Bach.” Translated by Philip Martin. In The Stillness of the World Before Bach: New Selected Poems. Edited by Christopher Middleton, 95. New York: New Directions, 1998.
Van Reis, Mikael. “Lätt förklädd äldre herre” [Easily Disguised Elderly Gentleman]. Göteborgs-Posten, 17 May 2006.
Categories: German Literature, Literature, World Literature
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