Darkness Spoken

For someone who spent her life wrestling with the enormous and existentially brain-warping problem of language’s inability to provide adequate means of expression, Ingeborg Bachmann made brilliant use of the twenty-six letters afforded her. Austrian by birth, Bachmann grew up during World War II, and her objection to fascism became central to her writing. In her early twenties Bachmann found camaraderie within Gruppe 47, a band of left-wing German writers (including Paul Celan and Günter Grass) who concerned themselves with the futility of language and the rebuilding of German literature after World War II. While she worked in other literary mediums, such as fiction and radio plays, her first serious foray into writing was as a poet, and Darkness Spoken gathers the sum of this endeavor: her two published books of poetry, Borrowed Time and Invocation of the Great Bear, and numerous uncollected works.

The fuse that runs through these powerful poems is the powerlessness of language, its continual failure to measure up: “Between a word and a thing / you only encounter yourself, / lying between each as if next to someone ill, / never able to get to either.” At times, communication remains downright impossible. In “[I’ve misplaced my poems]” Bachmann admits to writing of pain that “I know only that it cannot be spoken of,” and “Your Voice” is an explanation to her lover that “even if you say everything, I will never grasp it.” However, even in its inadequacy, language can provide painful salvation: “I again learned to speak and I wept / when a word escaped me.”

Fascination with language is constant throughout Bachmann’s work, but the style and content of the poems noticeably shifts over the course of her career. Elaborate yet restrained, the early work draws on fairy tales (“Coins fall from the sky”) and mythology (“Like Orpheus I play / death on the strings of life”), spinning dark worlds not unlike those of the Brothers Grimm: “Rose Red smeared tar on my forehead / and hair, someone had strangled / her snow-white sister.” Filled with poisonous blossoms, steel feathers, and beheaded angels, these poems burn with a sinister enchantment that complicates Bachmann’s discussion of human suffering.

In later work, her focus shifts to interior landscapes and personal grief. After her 1962 breakup with novelist and playwright Max Frisch and subsequent hospitalization, Bachmann’s writing takes on a raw, hungry quality...