How literature, especially poetry, can it account for the tragedies, disasters collective disasters in history ;? A formula incisive Theodor Adorno: " The critique of culture is confronted in the last stage of the dialectic between culture and barbarism: to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric, and this affects even the knowledge that explains why it is impossible today to write poems. "(Theodor W. Adorno, Critique of Culture and Society , 1949), reproduced and discussed ad infinitum, poets respond with their works. If the awful period that saw Auschwitz and other places where horror has territorialized calls into question the very existence of arts, literature and poetry, it is understandable that the philosopher wrote "shocked" how to think the unthinkable, the unspeakable name? Adorno later return to that article and qualify the content, in Negative Dialectics , for example. The words seem to have lost their power, and the world to devote himself to silence. The beauty is no place ... But that we reduce poetry to its aesthetic function? This conception of poetry is certainly very widespread very simple, based on his Orphic aspect - it is true that it seems almost consubstantial lyricism. The poem does he voice to him who gives birth, or can he do that resonate with strangers, anonymous victims of private speech?
The authors sometimes are witnesses or spokespeople, but the gap between evidence and put in poetic form which opens a questioning Charles Reznikoff responds subtle, masterful and poignant. Before him, already, the writers chose to step aside to preserve full scope of evidence: Karl Kraus in the last days of humanity , 'apocalyptic drama than 800 pages "(Lucien Goldmann), uses quotes read in the press that spreads war propaganda between 1914 and 1918. Later, William Carlos Williams recorded his poetry in a political process, bringing it through a keen eye on American society of his time. "No ideas purpose in things" ("No ideology, but of concrete") he writes in "A kind of song "(1944). Frank Smith, in 2010, places this phrase as an epigraph to his magnificent Guantanamo ... But in the meantime, in line with Williams and current modernist and objectivist, others reflected on the role of poetry, which they use to testify, depriving it affects the poet Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen and Charles Reznikoff, arguably the most famous of them. The latter, in 1965, publishes Testimony - The United States 1885-1890, based on records of U.S. courts. "In Testimony , the protagonists of which I use all testify about what they truly lived. Their testimony is that of someone who testifies in court - not a description of how they felt, but what they have seen or heard. What, me, I wanted to do is, when making a choice, make an assembly, punctuating the words they used, and create a mood or feeling. (...) One critic wrote that rereading Testimony he saw a world of horror and violence. I did not invent this world, but it what I felt. "(interview given to the journal Europe, 1977, quoted in his preface to Auxeméry Holocaust). Then precisely in 1975, this work seems extraordinary and painful Holocaust , composed from the testimony of survivors at the Nuremberg trials. And this long poem, organized into twelve chapters (Deportation I., II. Invasion III. Research, IV. Ghettos, V. Massacres, VI. Gas Chambers and Gas Trucks, VII. Work Camps, VIII. Children IX. Entertainment, X. Mass graves, XI. Marche XII. Evasions) managed to transcribe some of this reality human, that horror of these individual dramas fitting into the collective disaster, more than names on a monument, even if this testimony all remain anonymous. She filed in each player a little "this all-or burn the whole story flared" (Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the disaster , 1980), marking it forever a scar bright ...
This is the third "song" of the fifth Part of the work, entitled "Massacres".
"Jewish women were lined up by the troops
charge of German territory,
forced to undress,
and they were standing in his underwear.
An officer, who watched the row of women,
stopped to watch a young woman -
tall, with long braided hair, and eyes
admirable.
He continued to look, then smiled and said,
"A step forward."
Dazed - as they were all - she did not move
and said again: "A step forward!
You do not want to live? "
She took a step forward
and then said:" What damage
put so much beauty in the world!
Go!
But do not look back.
You have the street to the boulevard.
Am there. "
She hesitated
and then began to walk as he had said.
The other women looked -
probably with some envy -
she walked slowly, step by step.
And the officer took out his revolver
and shot in the back. "
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