{"id":290,"date":"2006-10-23T03:49:00","date_gmt":"2006-10-23T11:49:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=290"},"modified":"2006-10-23T03:49:00","modified_gmt":"2006-10-23T11:49:00","slug":"pastior-prize-interview","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/pastior-prize-interview\/","title":{"rendered":"Pastior Prize & Interview"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>Rosmarie Waldrop & Oskar Pastior<\/span><\/div>\n

<\/p>\n

Oskar Pastior (see my post of 6 October 2006<\/a>) was posthumously awarded the B\u00fcchner Prize this past weekend. On the occasion the German paper Die Welt<\/span> reprinted an interview with Pastior which you can read in full here<\/a>. Below, a few excerpts, all too rapidly translated by yours truly:<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n

\n
WELT.de:<\/b> How did you become an experimental poet?<\/p>\n

Oskar Pastior:<\/b> That is related to the relative multilinguism with which we grew up and learned to think in Siebenb\u00fcrgen. Besides the mother tongue we learned to think through the other languages; what do the Rumanians, or the Hungarians or the ideologues \u2014 the latter are indeed a special human species \u2014 hear in what I am saying?<\/p>\n

WELT.de:<\/b> So did your poetry also arise from a sceptical stance toward language?<\/p>\n

Pastior:<\/b> Yes. It turns sceptical nolens volens. Especially when one had the experience of a world completely shattering in 1944\/1945. Shattered also a whole range of cocnepts that had seemed completely solid.<\/p>\n

WELT:<\/b> How is that caesura mirrored in your work?<\/p>\n

Pastior:<\/b> The whole of my work is tributary to those life experiences. I don’t know if whithout them there would have been a life’s work. If I would have wanted to write. Or what would have happened if I hadn’t been deported at seventeen, but instead had had to enlist in the army and been killed in the war.<\/p>\n

WELT.de:<\/b> Your deportation to the Soviet Union in 1945 was a terrible experience \u2014 as well as your salvation.<\/p>\n

Pastior:<\/b> That’s it. It is Stalin who decreed that the Germans from Romania, Hungary, Yugoslavia and Chekoslovakia be deported, for forced labor. We were chosen as germans, not as Romanians. And so if here I am called a poet of romanian descent, then they rob me of those five years that I spent there in the Ukrane, also as the recognition of collective guilt. And we were chosen because we were german, not romanian. I helped pay off that guilt. That’s how I experienced it.<\/p>\n

…..<\/p>\n

WELT.de:<\/b> Isn’t it a refiguration of language that interests you? A refiguration of language and thus also of our expectations?<\/p>\n

Pastior:<\/b> That too. There’s also the problem that our European languages are in something like a pre-Newtonian state. Our language cannot realize the insights of modern physics, as it is still caught in the subject \/ object opposition.<\/p>\n

WELT.de:<\/b> Does language hobble along or is it completely stuck?<\/p>\n

Pastior:<\/b> It hobbles along. What matters to me is that poems should teach<\/span> language. What syntax do I have to use to be able to think transitively and intransitively all at once? The realisation that light is both wave and particle cannot be reconciliated and unified via a dialectics \u00e0 la Brecht. It has to be shown, but how do you show simultaneity? <\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Rosmarie Waldrop & Oskar Pastior Oskar Pastior (see my post of 6 October 2006) was posthumously awarded the B\u00fcchner Prize this past weekend. On the occasion the German paper Die Welt reprinted an interview...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-290","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=290"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=290"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=290"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=290"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}