His theme, Charles Simic wrote in one of his as if weightless over an invisible abyss, floating of poems, the soul: “too Difficult to talk about it, Because it is invisible / Silent and often absent”. Simic remains to her in the most unlikely places on the heels, not in silence, contemplation and solitude, but in everyday life, when the soul has no time for poetry, but in a hurry, busy, distracted, self is neither aware of nor certain. And it could be just this day is the last.
Hubert Spiegel
editor in the features section.
F. A. Z.
As a sixteen-year-old Simic was born in 1938 in Belgrade, came to the United States and has rapidly begun poems in the language to write his new home. Long ago, he is one of the most important poets of the English-speaking world. His poetry is “from the American daily life soaked through and through”, like to be the first German Translator Hans Magnus Enzensberger has noted, however, Simic describes the everyday life, as Edward Hopper can hold him, maybe in his paintings would have, if he had read Lichtenberg. The poet Jan Wagner has expressed similar thoughts much easier, as he said, Simics Humor was mixed with meta-physics: “Like a fine Smile in the direction of the sky”.
still live in the hangover
“So” is a poem about an ordinary day, a day full of contradictions, coincidences and whims. This day is a long day, probably a little more difficult and power-consuming than others, a day in which much has happened and little has been achieved, the hopes frustrated, and once again have been renewed, if only half-heartedly. It is especially the word “half-hearted”, with the Simic in the first of the four four-line the resigned mood of the poem stanzas nails. Something has come to an end, expectations were not met. The day is over, now the night before. How are you supposed to be grown with half a heart?
It is not a night that is celebrated. What is the fireworks display still left for sale, will be sold at a loss. A still life in the hangover. The everyday game from the Come and Go, for now, is over, and anyway it was only in the mirror, at a distance, as a reflection of reality. The vagaries of chance, extend the time. She no longer emerges from the progress of reliable regularity, but drags sometimes stronger, sometimes weaker in the hands of the Church clock. Wiebke Meier’s Translation speaks in derogation of the “church clock” of the original of a bell, but bells have no hands.
