Showing posts with label Prison literature. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Prison literature. Show all posts

Sunday, 28 April 2013

Immured mustard field. Found.

Last night, reading for the first time that classic of prison literature, Die Zelle, by a distant kinsman of mine, Horst Bienek, I stumbled upon a specimen of poésie trouvée no less poignant than any love poem composed by Neruda, yet this was a prose fragment (my line-breaks as original punctuation, page 54), and all the more powerful in its intensity for being written out of four years of confinement in a Siberian forced labour camp ... a vibrant memory for the prisoner that persists to shimmer in the dark.


The Field of Mustard

We lie down in a field of mustard,
the yellow blossoms sway before our eyes,
we look at each other,
we do not say anything,
I bend over her,
once I push my tongue between her teeth,
she draws back,
I write my wishes on her face with my breath,
she answers me with her breath,
for a long time we talk with one another
in a language no one speaks ;
next evening I wait for her,
she does not come.

Horst Bienek (1930-1990). Distinguished award-winning German novelist and poet. He was a student of Bertolt Brecht at the Berliner Ensemble. In 1951, he was arrested on political grounds by the NKVD and sentenced by a Soviet military tribunal to twenty-five years of forced labour in the notorious Vorkuta, a gulag. He was released due to an amnesty in 1955. His first novel, Die Zelle (The Cell, 1968, filmed under his own direction in 1972), focuses on a prisoner who, in the isolation of his cell, fights for mental and physical survival in the face of sickness, torture, and an uncertain fate. A first person narrative, it uses stream of consciousness to agonizing effect. The truly excellent English translation is by Ursula Mahlendorf.

For more found poems see: