Burkart Halter house closeup
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Erika Burkart
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Erika Burkart Office
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Photos by Marc Vincenz
Marc Vincenz is British-Swiss, was born in Hong Kong, and has published seven collections of poetry: The Propaganda Factory, or Speaking of Trees; Gods of a Ransacked Century; Mao’s Mole; Behind the Wall at the Sugar Works (a verse novel); Additional Breathing Exercises (bilingual German- English); Beautiful Rush and This Wasted Land and its Chymical Illuminations. His eighth collection, Becoming the Sound of Bees, is forthcoming with Ampersand Books.
Marc is also the translator of numerous German-language poets, including: Erika Burkart, Ernst Halter, Klaus Merz, Andreas Neeser, Markus Bundi and Alexander Xaver Gwerder. His translation of Alexander Xaver Gwerder’s selected poems, Casting a Spell in Spring, is to be released by Coeur Publishing in 2015. He has edited various anthologies and selected works of other poets, including Hugh Fox’s last and posthumous collection, Primate Fox. He has received several grants from the Swiss Arts Council, ProHelvetia, for his translations and a fellowship from the Literary Colloquium Berlin (LCB). His work has been translated into German, Russian, Chinese, Romanian and French.
Marc is the publisher and executive editor of MadHat Press, MadHat Annual (formerly Mad Hatters’ Review) and MadHat Lit. He is Coeditor-in-Chief of Fulcrum: A Journal of Poetry and Aesthetics, International Editor of Plume, and serves on the editorial board of Open Letters Monthly. He is Director of Evolution Arts, Inc, a non-profit organization that promotes independent presses and journals.
Erika Burkart: Fragments, Shards, and Visions by Marc Vincenz
Swiss poet Erika Burkart (1922–2010) has been compared to the likes of Ingeborg Bachmann, Friedericke Mayröcker, and Rainer Maria Rilke. During the latter half of her lifetime, the Swiss literary establishment perceived her not only as the grande dame of Swiss-German poetry, but also as an elusive, metaphysical, at times eccentric enigma of contemporary German-language literature.
Born in Aarau, Switzerland, Burkart published over 24 collections of poetry and nine prose works, writing for the most part in the house of her childhood (the former summer residence of the Prince-bishop of Muri), Haus Kapf in Althäusen, Aargau, which was run as a tavern by Erika’s parents.
Burkart received numerous literary prizes during her lifetime, including the Conrad-Ferdinand-Meyer-Preis (1961) and the Gottfried-Keller-Preis (1992). To date, she is the only woman ever to have been awarded Switzerland’s highest literary prize, the Grosser Schiller (2005). Friedrich Dürrenmatt and Max Frisch were also recipients of this prize (1960 and 1973 respectively).
When I first informed a member of the Swiss literary community that I was planning to translate Erika Burkart into English, there was a pause of silence followed by a wry smile. “Ah, the fay, the sprite, the fairy poet,” she said. Over the years, film and photo footage of Erika in her family home and garden show her as a wistful, light-spoken woman in flowing dresses with daisies woven in her hair — a veritable child of nature. On this subject, Ernst Halter, Burkart’s husband and literary partner for more than 40 years, tells me, “This was a myth that grew out of public misunderstanding that lasted for most of the time we were together. The myth had several sources: a few early poems, her delicate and soft-spoken personality, her strong connection with nature, and above all else her dresses! There are literally closets and closets full of them and she designed most of them herself.” Pirmin Meier, author and contemporary of Burkart’s, once noted: “Erika Burkart was not the nymph from Haus Kapf in Murimoos — where she lived most of her life — she was an observer and rational thinker with an extraordinary depth of vision.”
Burkart’s poems often begin with tactile images of nature in Haus Kapf’s flowering garden (which she adored), the view across the moor and into a distance of gently rolling hills. The landscape, the seasons, the temperamental weather, the flourishing flora and fauna of this corner of Aargau feature in much of her verse. At first glance many of her poems appear to be concise and straightforward lyrical testaments to the natural world — yet, behind her trees, birds, snowflakes, and flowers, there is something far-reaching and transcendental at work. Oft-recurring protagonists include the cloud, the flake, and the tree. The cloud in particular is an important motif in Burkart’s writing, a symbol of transformation or metamorphosis. In her poem “Reden und Schweigen” from Geheimbrief, 2009 (“Speak and Hush” from Secret Letter), the last book she saw published in her lifetime, she compares her thoughts to migrating, ever-transforming, churning clouds:
Lonely talk, written,
conversations with the dead; thought-conversations,
thoughts like clouds churning,
black birds out of thin air,
the white dove out of a dark cave.
Perhaps, as Pirmin Meier has suggested, “…with her word-magic she was attempting to repair that broken thread between man and nature. (…) I see in her poetry a late attempt — possibly in the last hour — within a world of suffering, brutality, aggression, and destruction, to read nature’s signatures with awe and admiration.” There is another “broken thread” that appears repeatedly in Burkart’s writing, however, and it may well constitute the source of her approach to natural imagery: namely the unbridgeable divide between human perception and language’s ability to convey it in its entirety. Erika’s poems are compelling in their evocative language and their imagery, not only as testaments to the subtle power of nature, but also to the way that sensory information “approaches” elucidation. At times there is a sense that the poet is mistrustful, almost regretting the use of “human” words to approximate the glory of nature — and yet, there is also an acknowledgment that there are few ways available to capture some part of what will soon be lost. Over and over, Burkart demonstrates how language, thought, and that fleeting moment of observation are all one aspect of the natural process and are inextricably intertwined. An example of this poem-as-process is a personal favorite from the collection Geheimbrief, 2009 (Secret Letter), “Vogel. Ein Dank” (“Bird. A Thanks”). Here is the last stanza:
I let you take my soul
as you swooped by the window,
Bird, thought
that writes with feathers in the sky,
that wavers on wings,
luster and shadow,
sketching and measuring in flight,
a word that evades me.
The image of a bird drawing a word in the sky — a word the poet is trying to locate but cannot — suggests that Burkart regarded the natural world itself as a language, a compendium of phenomena consisting of interwoven patterns whose structure and sense is “legible” to us in varying degrees. In a linguistic sense, her poems correspond to a process of converting fleeting impressions into words. Yet the inverse of this idea is equally applicable in this context: the notion that language itself is a natural process among processes, and thus subject to the same set of principles. Burkart seemed to be searching for a golden mean between the word and the interconnectedness of all things — between nature, the cosmos, and human history; between the passage of time, the finiteness of life, and the phenomenology of human perception. Her quest was to define and locate her existence in the universe through poetry.
As Ernst has informed me, Burkart never defended her work against critics: “She was, in fact, entirely disinterested in what they thought about her; she was even mostly disinterested in her audience.” Burkart lived for her poetry; so much so, in fact, that a number of her contemporaries have said they believe the only reason she managed to live to the ripe age of 88 (she’d had a heart condition all her life) was because she never stopped pushing the boundaries of her unique and subtle form of verse. One might say that through her poetry (and a lifelong endeavor to reinvent and hone her craft and ideas), she sought to illuminate a metaphysical connection between the duality of life and energy, of the inner and outer nature of things; of how fragments and shards (fleeting snatches of memory, of images, of myths and legends) expressed through the imprecise medium of words are the only clues we have to puzzle together a semblance of what the world is / may be.
A critic once asked her why she wrote. “Why do you breathe?” she asked him in return. To Erika Burkart, writing poetry was the breath of life.
* * *
What follows is a Sunday conversation with Ernst Halter at Haus Kapf over tea, cake, and the occasional jigger of malt whiskey. While Burkart was still alive, she and Ernst had made their “tea hour” a period of daily reflection and meditation. It was a time of the day they would catch up on each other’s projects and discuss anything of interest. As I enjoy this “tea hour” with Ernst, Burkart’s writing desk sits to my left, in the corner of my eye.
MV: Had you heard of Erika before the two of you met? How did you meet?
EH: I had read some of her work, but had no idea she was living here in this particular house. I had come to Haus Kapf because I had heard that there were these very old and fascinating frescos on the walls. On that Friday evening on the 23rd of June 1967, I walked up the steps, and there she was standing at the top looking down. I was astonished. We walked up together and she showed me the frescos. We talked for two hours that seemed like two minutes — and that was it: we both knew that we had found our soul mate.
MV: Erika was never really interested in living abroad then? She loved to be at home here in the house of her birth?
EH: Early on she had lived for about six months in Milan, but she never got along with the city. For one thing she had an awful sense of direction. She once told me the only way she could navigate around Milan was to try and recall landmarks — she had no idea about roads or avenues, she simply couldn’t figure these things out in her head. She was in her element here, overlooking the moor.
MV: So how and where do you see Erika’s place in German-language literature?
EH: As a lyrical poet of the post-war period, writing over sixty years, her place in German-language poetry is utterly unique. In my opinion, there is no other poet writing in German during that period with a similar development. Her many publications stretch from 1953 through 2011, and through all those years, from book to book — up until the very last day — her work went through phenomenal transformations.
MV: We both know that Erika’s mythos in Switzerland is mostly of a soft-spoken, shall we say, metaphysical or hermetic nature poet. What is it that makes Erika’s poetry unique?
EH: The uniqueness of Erika’s poetry is based on a “lived and innate” conviction of the process of metamorphosis — the relationship, even the “parentage” of every organic and inorganic creature, plant, or substance. What is separated on the surface can be perceived and understood as being one with its roots; a kind of metamorphosis à rebours (lived backwards). Here’s a passage from her notes:
To recognize something one has to look with both the material and the spiritual eye at the same time. One helps to see the other; the image forms when looking. In order to understand what you see, you require a third eye.
What she means is: her poems work (function in) “the metamorphic way” from the material (the body) moving in to the spiritual.
MV: And here’s a quote from one of your essays, Ernst, regarding Erika’s view of the duality of all things:
Here is there, there is here. Even eternity is encapsulated in time despite the fact that time is voided through eternity. What appears to be hidden is visible — what appears to be visible is hidden.
Can you tell me how her interest in nature, cosmology, mythology may have influenced her work? There has been some talk of her being influenced by the writings of Paracelsus.
EH: More important for Erika were perception and grounded science — she wanted clarity. She was very well read in biology and later, physics and astronomy — which she studied from all periods of history. She was extremely curious.
MV: And her almost mythical belief in the power of the word?
EH: The “word” for Erika was her first instrument of perception (how she loved foreign words!), but she knew that “the word” is not the “final” thing. Here’s a citation from her notes:
When studied in a certain infinitesimal detail, every word imbues meaning — (a reference tension) — concerning the “basso ostinato,” the theme of a love melody. For that reason: the polyphonic character of our existence.
MV: What of Erika’s perception of the place of the individual in the scheme of nature and the cosmos — the socio-critical element of Erika’s work?
EH: Erika’s love of nature came about in her childhood. Basically, she could go where she wanted and do as she liked. Mother had no time. Father had no interest. Just outside her front door was Swiss nature at its purest. She really had a wonderful youth from that point of view. Her parents never told her she had to be back at a certain hour. They basically let her run wild. Erika was very critical of man’s role in nature from the very beginning — in particular as far as her own immediate natural world was concerned, the ecology and environment that she had adopted as her “other” sibling, her ally.
MV: What would you say was her most prolific period of political writing?
EH: After 70. All through her work, starting with about the third published collection, there are political poems; but it’s not outspoken politics, it’s more like an insight into what occurs. There is, for example, one poem where she sees a man somewhere on a little road and she imagines what moves this man to be there, and what will come out of his actions. It’s a political poem, but not outspokenly so.
From Transparenz der Scherben, 1973 (The Transparency of Shards), “Orientierung” (“Orientation”):
Traffic accident dead. War dead.
Casualty coincidence crime.
(It could just as easily
have taken you or me):
When I read the newspaper,
those lovers of roses look suspicious.
I’m a gardener with a guilty conscience.
It seems difficult to deal with people who
enjoy poetry,
climb mountains,
attend concerts,
water radishes,
who talk about rights, guilt and justice.
I lose
all sense of orientation.
In place of words I see fists,
gestures, faces, isolated faces.
I see everyone alone with himself:
an almost harmless person,
just because he’s sad or he’s happy.
I fear the man whom nobody misses.
At a single blow he forces us
to picture him.
There’s nothing yet
about this man in the newspaper.
One knows him on sight.
It’s now too late to love him.
…….
Every day
the Bridge of San Luis Rey collapses.
We’re badly informed
because it tires us quickly --
in a burst to precisely follow
the flight of a single flake.
“Their manes flowed like a snowstorm,”
Black Elk said of the sacred horses.
Who killed the sacred horses?
The red? the black? the white men?
It has been said the grass grew over them.
— We
kill them now.
Invocation revocation obituary.
Men shrivel to names.
Names are words. Words flake.
Black flurry. Alphabet snow.
Holding on to the empty margins,
I hear
the growing
of grasses.
* * *
At the turn of the century, before a “relatively” sedentary life at Haus Kapf, Walter Burkart, Erika Burkart’s father, had been a hunter and adventurer in the wilds of South America. He appears over and over again in Burkart’s poetry and prose, mostly as a foreboding, sometimes terrifying figure. Even in Geheimbrief, 2009 (Secret Letter), Burkart’s father makes an appearance. Here’s an excerpt from the poem “Evening Parlor”:
…we bring
picture after picture into the winter parlor,
now you can talk, now you’re free
from quarrels with Mother,
now I’m free of my Father-fear.
EH: Walter Burkart was no Bruce Chatwin figure, no gentleman adventurer with a monocle and hardhat and a merry band of luggage-wielding natives. He was a tooth-and-nail, gun-toting, rough-and-ready survivor. Eventually he made his living hunting herons for their feathers in Argentina, but started out in Brazil panning for gold. For eighteen years he struggled in the wilderness of Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, and Bolivia. It was a hard life, but he adored every minute of it. When he finally decided to get married and settle down here in rural Switzerland with Erika’s mother, Marie Glaser (who until that time had been working as a governess in Ireland), he took up the bottle — and, let me tell you it was no avocation, it became his substitute bed-partner. He could have borne the risks of malaria, yellow fever, gangrene, leeches a thousand times over, but he couldn’t tolerate life here in quiet, rural, domestic Switzerland. He missed his pumas and caiman and howler monkeys and herons (and his Indio wives…). Ernst smiles. He shows me Burkart’s father’s cabinet of curios, a collection of stuffed Amazonian animals and bones, including a caiman skull and the largest armadillo I’ve ever seen.
MV: He published a book, Der Reiherjäger vom Gran Chaco (The Heron Hunter of the Gran Chaco), which became an instant bestseller.
EH: Yes, just the one — it kept him occupied in the early years of the marriage; apparently, he wrote it from beginning to end with virtually no edits or corrections.
At first you still know what month it is, but soon you lose your bearings and you stop counting. Finally, you understand how the wild Indians feel, the fact that they don’t know how old they are, and in fact, are even not familiar with the concept of time. Perhaps this is the reason that they are happy children of nature since there is no haste or stress in regards to tomorrow or the day after tomorrow.
He writes somewhere in his book that whenever you had a wound in the jungle, you should quickly pour gunpowder over it and ignite it. You could see the scars on his hands. He had a very close relationship with the indigenous people and assumed the role of midwife innumerable times. He knew a little more about basic medicine than they did. He always said, never dabble with the local women, but Erika was firmly convinced she had some stepbrothers and stepsisters somewhere on the Grand Chaco.
MV: He never managed to settle into life back in Aargau?
EH: The locals were not interested in his fantastical adventures — who knows if they even believed him. Walter frequently swore to Erika’s mother: “I’m going to sell. I’m going to sell.” That’s why Maria was always present in the tavern. With his signature he could have sold the house, but somehow she always managed to prevent it.
MV: How old was Erika when Walter’s book came out?
EH: His book was released in 1934 or 1935, so Erika would have been around twelve. Walter was never a real father to Erika. She writes in her memoirs that he only gave her a gift three times in her life. Once it was a pack of VIP cigarettes, once an eggshell, and once it was his book. That was it, nothing for birthdays or Christmas. He just didn’t care. Erika writes that she believed she was a lovechild. She was born just 12 months after Walter and Marie got married, her sister came two years later. It was only during the last years of his life that Walter finally became peaceful. He would lie in bed all day and reflect upon his former life. He used to say, “Ich gehe in die Jagdgründe.” Which means he went back over there, back to his jungle. I regret I never had the chance to meet him. In me he would have found someone who would have been interested in his past. Possibly one of Erika’s most poignant and direct poems about her father, “Mein Vater” (“My Father”), comes from the collection Die Zärtlichkeit der Schatten, 1991 (The Tenderness of Shadows):
A good hunter. An awful father.
In death he went back west
to the Indios whom he loved.
His urn has a crack --
now you’re laughing, Father,
you who never laughed;
death was your friend --
in his shadow
we loved you.
You always hit the mark, Father,
us too,
in our hearts.
MV: Did Walter have any literary influence on Erika?
EH: Not directly — not really, other than appearing frequently in her works; but of course, his book was highly lauded in its time. In some strange way, Erika inherited his talent. Walter always said he never wrote about the most awful things. He simply couldn’t write them — or perhaps he didn’t want his family to know. Erika told me later that one of the most terrible things that happened to him over there was during Christmastime — and therefore, every Christmas, he was utterly intolerable. He never let on what had happened. A dark cloud cast its shadow over everything. Once in a while, when he was really drunk, he said he would shoot the whole family. Maria and the two girls would cower in one of these rooms with the doors locked. He’d stand in front of the door with his gun, and bark over and over: “Open, and I’ll shoot you.” These fears never left Erika; a demon lived in this house.
MV: A demon that had wrestled with crocodiles and panthers… And Maria, Erika’s mother, was she interested in literature?
EH: Mother was the only place Erika could go. Maria was the first to appreciate her daughter’s gift. Without Erika’s knowledge she sent some of Erika’s early poems to editors in Zurich. Brichner, a big literary figure of the time, recognized her talent immediately. He helped her publish her first small volume of poems in 1958, Der Dunkle Vogel (The Dark Bird).
MV: Of course, it was rhyming poetry.
EH: Yes, most of Erika’s poetry was written in rhyme until the early eighties. In the beginning she wrote mostly nature poetry in the vein of Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, much later she moved on to free verse — though she never stopped rhyming completely, and she always had a strong sense of meter and cadence.
MV: And in those early days the family struggled financially?
EH: Erika’s childhood was fraught with hardships and poverty. It’s one of the reasons she was forced to become a high-school teacher. She would have loved to get an advanced degree, but it simply wasn’t possible. With her teaching job she managed to keep up the household for twelve years — and then suddenly, when she was about thirty years old, she had a heart attack. At this stage, her mother took up teaching again after having been out of that field for over twenty years. Every month they struggled to pay the bills.
MV: You’ve said before that although Erika couldn’t make a living with her writing, she did eventually achieve notoriety.
EH: In the end — but actually it wasn’t something she yearned for. All she really wanted to do was write. And although she was obliged to occasionally appear in public, she had great difficulties reading to an audience. Here’s a short piece from her many unpublished notes and journal entries where she talks about it:
My voice sounded like it didn’t belong to me. As soon as they were spoken out loud the words seemed foreign … When the audience claps at the end, I stand here as if I’ve been scattered in ashes. I then stand off to one side and don’t feel like talking to anyone.
Erika had the broadest literary knowledge of anyone I’ve ever met. Our mutual appreciation of literature is really what drew us to each other and bound us together.
MV: So tell me about Erika the poet versus Erika the prose writer.
EH: Of course, Erika was more poet than prose writer, but she was well accomplished in both forms. When Erika wrote her first novel, Moräne, 1970 (Moraine), the general reaction in the press was: “Lo and behold, our great poet has written a novel.” Later there was a reprint, and I wrote a foreword. The book is pure deconstructionism avant la lettre and it’s the very best prose book she ever wrote, but nobody realized that at the time. Generally, Erika’s prose is highly lyrical and imagistic, but she always struggled with getting the dialogue right.
MV: What was her process regarding moving between writing the two forms?
EH: If you are really immersed in a prose book, you normally don’t write poetry. Your thoughts are completely absorbed in that novel you’re writing — at least that’s the way it was with the two of us.
MV: Was there a conscious decision to write a prose book?
EH: It wasn’t a decision; it was a necessity. There was a deep-seated urge to write a novel or a collection of short stories. We spoke about this many times: while you continue on your daily regimen of writing poetry, the prose book or novel is building itself in an intensity. One day you can’t stand it anymore, and you have to sit down and write “the Book.” I know it was precisely like that with Erika’s novel Die Vikarin, 2006 (The Lady Vicar), and it was like that with my own last novel too. As soon as I’m sure I can write a book — and it was the same with Erika — it’s like a boat trip on a lake at night and there are these buoys in the water somehow linking the novel together. The buoys are sentences or phrases. In the darkness I have to navigate from one buoy to the other. But I know precisely when I have reached the last buoy. Then I write straight through for six or seven months.
MV: And those buoys? Are they somehow sketched out on paper like a kind of map, so to speak?
EH: No, not at all. They’re in my head, in my subconscious. And I know the precise sentence that must fall somewhere, and now I have to make the way to this sentence, and then I have to find my way to the next, which I already know precisely. So, in the end they turn out to be a kind of map, but not until the novel is complete. Very strange, I know.
MV: You’ve mentioned that you were convinced that Erika had “spiritualist” abilities.
EH: I’m firmly convinced that Erika was a medium, but she intensely disliked that idea. She frequently foresaw things that had not yet occurred, or she dreamed things that happened later. Erika’s first husband, Yanosh, was an orchestra conductor. In her notes she actually prophesizes his death — but she would never have admitted it.
MV: Of course, many marriages with poets have tragic endings. Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes come to mind.
EH: We were very lucky. When I think of Ted Hughes and Sylvia, it may be that those two were too close in their personality. Erika and I were quite different from each other; we had divergent interests. For example, Erika was a great botanist. I came more from physics and astronomy. Of course there were difficult times, and I had to have a strong personality to withstand when she went too far. Erika had many lovers, and they all left her sooner or later. None of them had the personality or patience or strength to withstand her tempers — she could be as terrifying as she was ravishing. I do believe my patience with her saved our marriage, and I firmly believe she was grateful to me for that. Many people prophesized that our marriage would end in disaster, but it worked perfectly.
MV: Did you know about Erika’s illness from the beginning?
EH: Yes, I knew that Erika’s heart was half the size of a normal heart. She was born like that, so she couldn’t do much strenuous exercise, but she did still become 88 years old in spite of everything. Her health really started to decline seriously after 2000. She didn’t want to die. She knew I would survive her — she was angry at me for that. The true farewell for me now has been the editing of her notes and memoirs. In the last years of her life (until she had to go to the clinic), she spent all the time in these two rooms, writing, resting, and looking out of these windows. She could barely sleep and was in great pain. Writing her poetry was the only thing that kept her going. Many of the last poems were written in the early morning and late a night. Those years were awful. I always had the hope, when she was in the clinic (the morphine helped her recover slightly)... I always hoped I could take her back to the old house, but it was impossible…
MV: Erika wrote until she couldn’t write anymore, until the words failed her.
* * *
In her very last posthumous poems, “Nachtschicht” (“Nightshift”), from the collection Nachtschicht / Schattenzone, 2011 (Nightshift / An Area of Shadows), in her battle against her loss of words (as Ernst explained to me), Erika once again reverted back to rhyme. Apparently this was the only fashion in which she could recall the words from her failing consciousness. In the second section of the book An Area of Shadows, fellow-poet Ernst Halter bids farewell to his companion and deepest friend for more than forty years. From An Area of Shadows by Ernst Halter, the poem “Your final thousand-and-first photo”:
on a blister pack
with the tablets rustling inside
for the last of your nineteen weeks
in this hospice of the dying.
Two to be taken in the morning, one in the evening,
the window, Monday 7-9,
has broken through.
The telephone call when they asked where to let you die
came at three-thirty in the afternoon.
Terror and laughter contort your face,
imprecise, zero contrast, the eyes buttons,
even the red shawl,
your guardian and comfort: blur.
Pillows prop you,
in the right hand, a pencil twitches,
last weapon
for defense against such imposition.
A mug shot on room twozerofour,
so you wouldn’t be confused
with an insane person.
Previously published in the Hyperion Journal
Marc is also the translator of numerous German-language poets, including: Erika Burkart, Ernst Halter, Klaus Merz, Andreas Neeser, Markus Bundi and Alexander Xaver Gwerder. His translation of Alexander Xaver Gwerder’s selected poems, Casting a Spell in Spring, is to be released by Coeur Publishing in 2015. He has edited various anthologies and selected works of other poets, including Hugh Fox’s last and posthumous collection, Primate Fox. He has received several grants from the Swiss Arts Council, ProHelvetia, for his translations and a fellowship from the Literary Colloquium Berlin (LCB). His work has been translated into German, Russian, Chinese, Romanian and French.
Marc is the publisher and executive editor of MadHat Press, MadHat Annual (formerly Mad Hatters’ Review) and MadHat Lit. He is Coeditor-in-Chief of Fulcrum: A Journal of Poetry and Aesthetics, International Editor of Plume, and serves on the editorial board of Open Letters Monthly. He is Director of Evolution Arts, Inc, a non-profit organization that promotes independent presses and journals.
Erika Burkart: Fragments, Shards, and Visions by Marc Vincenz
Swiss poet Erika Burkart (1922–2010) has been compared to the likes of Ingeborg Bachmann, Friedericke Mayröcker, and Rainer Maria Rilke. During the latter half of her lifetime, the Swiss literary establishment perceived her not only as the grande dame of Swiss-German poetry, but also as an elusive, metaphysical, at times eccentric enigma of contemporary German-language literature.
Born in Aarau, Switzerland, Burkart published over 24 collections of poetry and nine prose works, writing for the most part in the house of her childhood (the former summer residence of the Prince-bishop of Muri), Haus Kapf in Althäusen, Aargau, which was run as a tavern by Erika’s parents.
Burkart received numerous literary prizes during her lifetime, including the Conrad-Ferdinand-Meyer-Preis (1961) and the Gottfried-Keller-Preis (1992). To date, she is the only woman ever to have been awarded Switzerland’s highest literary prize, the Grosser Schiller (2005). Friedrich Dürrenmatt and Max Frisch were also recipients of this prize (1960 and 1973 respectively).
When I first informed a member of the Swiss literary community that I was planning to translate Erika Burkart into English, there was a pause of silence followed by a wry smile. “Ah, the fay, the sprite, the fairy poet,” she said. Over the years, film and photo footage of Erika in her family home and garden show her as a wistful, light-spoken woman in flowing dresses with daisies woven in her hair — a veritable child of nature. On this subject, Ernst Halter, Burkart’s husband and literary partner for more than 40 years, tells me, “This was a myth that grew out of public misunderstanding that lasted for most of the time we were together. The myth had several sources: a few early poems, her delicate and soft-spoken personality, her strong connection with nature, and above all else her dresses! There are literally closets and closets full of them and she designed most of them herself.” Pirmin Meier, author and contemporary of Burkart’s, once noted: “Erika Burkart was not the nymph from Haus Kapf in Murimoos — where she lived most of her life — she was an observer and rational thinker with an extraordinary depth of vision.”
Burkart’s poems often begin with tactile images of nature in Haus Kapf’s flowering garden (which she adored), the view across the moor and into a distance of gently rolling hills. The landscape, the seasons, the temperamental weather, the flourishing flora and fauna of this corner of Aargau feature in much of her verse. At first glance many of her poems appear to be concise and straightforward lyrical testaments to the natural world — yet, behind her trees, birds, snowflakes, and flowers, there is something far-reaching and transcendental at work. Oft-recurring protagonists include the cloud, the flake, and the tree. The cloud in particular is an important motif in Burkart’s writing, a symbol of transformation or metamorphosis. In her poem “Reden und Schweigen” from Geheimbrief, 2009 (“Speak and Hush” from Secret Letter), the last book she saw published in her lifetime, she compares her thoughts to migrating, ever-transforming, churning clouds:
Lonely talk, written,
conversations with the dead; thought-conversations,
thoughts like clouds churning,
black birds out of thin air,
the white dove out of a dark cave.
Perhaps, as Pirmin Meier has suggested, “…with her word-magic she was attempting to repair that broken thread between man and nature. (…) I see in her poetry a late attempt — possibly in the last hour — within a world of suffering, brutality, aggression, and destruction, to read nature’s signatures with awe and admiration.” There is another “broken thread” that appears repeatedly in Burkart’s writing, however, and it may well constitute the source of her approach to natural imagery: namely the unbridgeable divide between human perception and language’s ability to convey it in its entirety. Erika’s poems are compelling in their evocative language and their imagery, not only as testaments to the subtle power of nature, but also to the way that sensory information “approaches” elucidation. At times there is a sense that the poet is mistrustful, almost regretting the use of “human” words to approximate the glory of nature — and yet, there is also an acknowledgment that there are few ways available to capture some part of what will soon be lost. Over and over, Burkart demonstrates how language, thought, and that fleeting moment of observation are all one aspect of the natural process and are inextricably intertwined. An example of this poem-as-process is a personal favorite from the collection Geheimbrief, 2009 (Secret Letter), “Vogel. Ein Dank” (“Bird. A Thanks”). Here is the last stanza:
I let you take my soul
as you swooped by the window,
Bird, thought
that writes with feathers in the sky,
that wavers on wings,
luster and shadow,
sketching and measuring in flight,
a word that evades me.
The image of a bird drawing a word in the sky — a word the poet is trying to locate but cannot — suggests that Burkart regarded the natural world itself as a language, a compendium of phenomena consisting of interwoven patterns whose structure and sense is “legible” to us in varying degrees. In a linguistic sense, her poems correspond to a process of converting fleeting impressions into words. Yet the inverse of this idea is equally applicable in this context: the notion that language itself is a natural process among processes, and thus subject to the same set of principles. Burkart seemed to be searching for a golden mean between the word and the interconnectedness of all things — between nature, the cosmos, and human history; between the passage of time, the finiteness of life, and the phenomenology of human perception. Her quest was to define and locate her existence in the universe through poetry.
As Ernst has informed me, Burkart never defended her work against critics: “She was, in fact, entirely disinterested in what they thought about her; she was even mostly disinterested in her audience.” Burkart lived for her poetry; so much so, in fact, that a number of her contemporaries have said they believe the only reason she managed to live to the ripe age of 88 (she’d had a heart condition all her life) was because she never stopped pushing the boundaries of her unique and subtle form of verse. One might say that through her poetry (and a lifelong endeavor to reinvent and hone her craft and ideas), she sought to illuminate a metaphysical connection between the duality of life and energy, of the inner and outer nature of things; of how fragments and shards (fleeting snatches of memory, of images, of myths and legends) expressed through the imprecise medium of words are the only clues we have to puzzle together a semblance of what the world is / may be.
A critic once asked her why she wrote. “Why do you breathe?” she asked him in return. To Erika Burkart, writing poetry was the breath of life.
* * *
What follows is a Sunday conversation with Ernst Halter at Haus Kapf over tea, cake, and the occasional jigger of malt whiskey. While Burkart was still alive, she and Ernst had made their “tea hour” a period of daily reflection and meditation. It was a time of the day they would catch up on each other’s projects and discuss anything of interest. As I enjoy this “tea hour” with Ernst, Burkart’s writing desk sits to my left, in the corner of my eye.
MV: Had you heard of Erika before the two of you met? How did you meet?
EH: I had read some of her work, but had no idea she was living here in this particular house. I had come to Haus Kapf because I had heard that there were these very old and fascinating frescos on the walls. On that Friday evening on the 23rd of June 1967, I walked up the steps, and there she was standing at the top looking down. I was astonished. We walked up together and she showed me the frescos. We talked for two hours that seemed like two minutes — and that was it: we both knew that we had found our soul mate.
MV: Erika was never really interested in living abroad then? She loved to be at home here in the house of her birth?
EH: Early on she had lived for about six months in Milan, but she never got along with the city. For one thing she had an awful sense of direction. She once told me the only way she could navigate around Milan was to try and recall landmarks — she had no idea about roads or avenues, she simply couldn’t figure these things out in her head. She was in her element here, overlooking the moor.
MV: So how and where do you see Erika’s place in German-language literature?
EH: As a lyrical poet of the post-war period, writing over sixty years, her place in German-language poetry is utterly unique. In my opinion, there is no other poet writing in German during that period with a similar development. Her many publications stretch from 1953 through 2011, and through all those years, from book to book — up until the very last day — her work went through phenomenal transformations.
MV: We both know that Erika’s mythos in Switzerland is mostly of a soft-spoken, shall we say, metaphysical or hermetic nature poet. What is it that makes Erika’s poetry unique?
EH: The uniqueness of Erika’s poetry is based on a “lived and innate” conviction of the process of metamorphosis — the relationship, even the “parentage” of every organic and inorganic creature, plant, or substance. What is separated on the surface can be perceived and understood as being one with its roots; a kind of metamorphosis à rebours (lived backwards). Here’s a passage from her notes:
To recognize something one has to look with both the material and the spiritual eye at the same time. One helps to see the other; the image forms when looking. In order to understand what you see, you require a third eye.
What she means is: her poems work (function in) “the metamorphic way” from the material (the body) moving in to the spiritual.
MV: And here’s a quote from one of your essays, Ernst, regarding Erika’s view of the duality of all things:
Here is there, there is here. Even eternity is encapsulated in time despite the fact that time is voided through eternity. What appears to be hidden is visible — what appears to be visible is hidden.
Can you tell me how her interest in nature, cosmology, mythology may have influenced her work? There has been some talk of her being influenced by the writings of Paracelsus.
EH: More important for Erika were perception and grounded science — she wanted clarity. She was very well read in biology and later, physics and astronomy — which she studied from all periods of history. She was extremely curious.
MV: And her almost mythical belief in the power of the word?
EH: The “word” for Erika was her first instrument of perception (how she loved foreign words!), but she knew that “the word” is not the “final” thing. Here’s a citation from her notes:
When studied in a certain infinitesimal detail, every word imbues meaning — (a reference tension) — concerning the “basso ostinato,” the theme of a love melody. For that reason: the polyphonic character of our existence.
MV: What of Erika’s perception of the place of the individual in the scheme of nature and the cosmos — the socio-critical element of Erika’s work?
EH: Erika’s love of nature came about in her childhood. Basically, she could go where she wanted and do as she liked. Mother had no time. Father had no interest. Just outside her front door was Swiss nature at its purest. She really had a wonderful youth from that point of view. Her parents never told her she had to be back at a certain hour. They basically let her run wild. Erika was very critical of man’s role in nature from the very beginning — in particular as far as her own immediate natural world was concerned, the ecology and environment that she had adopted as her “other” sibling, her ally.
MV: What would you say was her most prolific period of political writing?
EH: After 70. All through her work, starting with about the third published collection, there are political poems; but it’s not outspoken politics, it’s more like an insight into what occurs. There is, for example, one poem where she sees a man somewhere on a little road and she imagines what moves this man to be there, and what will come out of his actions. It’s a political poem, but not outspokenly so.
From Transparenz der Scherben, 1973 (The Transparency of Shards), “Orientierung” (“Orientation”):
Traffic accident dead. War dead.
Casualty coincidence crime.
(It could just as easily
have taken you or me):
When I read the newspaper,
those lovers of roses look suspicious.
I’m a gardener with a guilty conscience.
It seems difficult to deal with people who
enjoy poetry,
climb mountains,
attend concerts,
water radishes,
who talk about rights, guilt and justice.
I lose
all sense of orientation.
In place of words I see fists,
gestures, faces, isolated faces.
I see everyone alone with himself:
an almost harmless person,
just because he’s sad or he’s happy.
I fear the man whom nobody misses.
At a single blow he forces us
to picture him.
There’s nothing yet
about this man in the newspaper.
One knows him on sight.
It’s now too late to love him.
…….
Every day
the Bridge of San Luis Rey collapses.
We’re badly informed
because it tires us quickly --
in a burst to precisely follow
the flight of a single flake.
“Their manes flowed like a snowstorm,”
Black Elk said of the sacred horses.
Who killed the sacred horses?
The red? the black? the white men?
It has been said the grass grew over them.
— We
kill them now.
Invocation revocation obituary.
Men shrivel to names.
Names are words. Words flake.
Black flurry. Alphabet snow.
Holding on to the empty margins,
I hear
the growing
of grasses.
* * *
At the turn of the century, before a “relatively” sedentary life at Haus Kapf, Walter Burkart, Erika Burkart’s father, had been a hunter and adventurer in the wilds of South America. He appears over and over again in Burkart’s poetry and prose, mostly as a foreboding, sometimes terrifying figure. Even in Geheimbrief, 2009 (Secret Letter), Burkart’s father makes an appearance. Here’s an excerpt from the poem “Evening Parlor”:
…we bring
picture after picture into the winter parlor,
now you can talk, now you’re free
from quarrels with Mother,
now I’m free of my Father-fear.
EH: Walter Burkart was no Bruce Chatwin figure, no gentleman adventurer with a monocle and hardhat and a merry band of luggage-wielding natives. He was a tooth-and-nail, gun-toting, rough-and-ready survivor. Eventually he made his living hunting herons for their feathers in Argentina, but started out in Brazil panning for gold. For eighteen years he struggled in the wilderness of Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, and Bolivia. It was a hard life, but he adored every minute of it. When he finally decided to get married and settle down here in rural Switzerland with Erika’s mother, Marie Glaser (who until that time had been working as a governess in Ireland), he took up the bottle — and, let me tell you it was no avocation, it became his substitute bed-partner. He could have borne the risks of malaria, yellow fever, gangrene, leeches a thousand times over, but he couldn’t tolerate life here in quiet, rural, domestic Switzerland. He missed his pumas and caiman and howler monkeys and herons (and his Indio wives…). Ernst smiles. He shows me Burkart’s father’s cabinet of curios, a collection of stuffed Amazonian animals and bones, including a caiman skull and the largest armadillo I’ve ever seen.
MV: He published a book, Der Reiherjäger vom Gran Chaco (The Heron Hunter of the Gran Chaco), which became an instant bestseller.
EH: Yes, just the one — it kept him occupied in the early years of the marriage; apparently, he wrote it from beginning to end with virtually no edits or corrections.
At first you still know what month it is, but soon you lose your bearings and you stop counting. Finally, you understand how the wild Indians feel, the fact that they don’t know how old they are, and in fact, are even not familiar with the concept of time. Perhaps this is the reason that they are happy children of nature since there is no haste or stress in regards to tomorrow or the day after tomorrow.
He writes somewhere in his book that whenever you had a wound in the jungle, you should quickly pour gunpowder over it and ignite it. You could see the scars on his hands. He had a very close relationship with the indigenous people and assumed the role of midwife innumerable times. He knew a little more about basic medicine than they did. He always said, never dabble with the local women, but Erika was firmly convinced she had some stepbrothers and stepsisters somewhere on the Grand Chaco.
MV: He never managed to settle into life back in Aargau?
EH: The locals were not interested in his fantastical adventures — who knows if they even believed him. Walter frequently swore to Erika’s mother: “I’m going to sell. I’m going to sell.” That’s why Maria was always present in the tavern. With his signature he could have sold the house, but somehow she always managed to prevent it.
MV: How old was Erika when Walter’s book came out?
EH: His book was released in 1934 or 1935, so Erika would have been around twelve. Walter was never a real father to Erika. She writes in her memoirs that he only gave her a gift three times in her life. Once it was a pack of VIP cigarettes, once an eggshell, and once it was his book. That was it, nothing for birthdays or Christmas. He just didn’t care. Erika writes that she believed she was a lovechild. She was born just 12 months after Walter and Marie got married, her sister came two years later. It was only during the last years of his life that Walter finally became peaceful. He would lie in bed all day and reflect upon his former life. He used to say, “Ich gehe in die Jagdgründe.” Which means he went back over there, back to his jungle. I regret I never had the chance to meet him. In me he would have found someone who would have been interested in his past. Possibly one of Erika’s most poignant and direct poems about her father, “Mein Vater” (“My Father”), comes from the collection Die Zärtlichkeit der Schatten, 1991 (The Tenderness of Shadows):
A good hunter. An awful father.
In death he went back west
to the Indios whom he loved.
His urn has a crack --
now you’re laughing, Father,
you who never laughed;
death was your friend --
in his shadow
we loved you.
You always hit the mark, Father,
us too,
in our hearts.
MV: Did Walter have any literary influence on Erika?
EH: Not directly — not really, other than appearing frequently in her works; but of course, his book was highly lauded in its time. In some strange way, Erika inherited his talent. Walter always said he never wrote about the most awful things. He simply couldn’t write them — or perhaps he didn’t want his family to know. Erika told me later that one of the most terrible things that happened to him over there was during Christmastime — and therefore, every Christmas, he was utterly intolerable. He never let on what had happened. A dark cloud cast its shadow over everything. Once in a while, when he was really drunk, he said he would shoot the whole family. Maria and the two girls would cower in one of these rooms with the doors locked. He’d stand in front of the door with his gun, and bark over and over: “Open, and I’ll shoot you.” These fears never left Erika; a demon lived in this house.
MV: A demon that had wrestled with crocodiles and panthers… And Maria, Erika’s mother, was she interested in literature?
EH: Mother was the only place Erika could go. Maria was the first to appreciate her daughter’s gift. Without Erika’s knowledge she sent some of Erika’s early poems to editors in Zurich. Brichner, a big literary figure of the time, recognized her talent immediately. He helped her publish her first small volume of poems in 1958, Der Dunkle Vogel (The Dark Bird).
MV: Of course, it was rhyming poetry.
EH: Yes, most of Erika’s poetry was written in rhyme until the early eighties. In the beginning she wrote mostly nature poetry in the vein of Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, much later she moved on to free verse — though she never stopped rhyming completely, and she always had a strong sense of meter and cadence.
MV: And in those early days the family struggled financially?
EH: Erika’s childhood was fraught with hardships and poverty. It’s one of the reasons she was forced to become a high-school teacher. She would have loved to get an advanced degree, but it simply wasn’t possible. With her teaching job she managed to keep up the household for twelve years — and then suddenly, when she was about thirty years old, she had a heart attack. At this stage, her mother took up teaching again after having been out of that field for over twenty years. Every month they struggled to pay the bills.
MV: You’ve said before that although Erika couldn’t make a living with her writing, she did eventually achieve notoriety.
EH: In the end — but actually it wasn’t something she yearned for. All she really wanted to do was write. And although she was obliged to occasionally appear in public, she had great difficulties reading to an audience. Here’s a short piece from her many unpublished notes and journal entries where she talks about it:
My voice sounded like it didn’t belong to me. As soon as they were spoken out loud the words seemed foreign … When the audience claps at the end, I stand here as if I’ve been scattered in ashes. I then stand off to one side and don’t feel like talking to anyone.
Erika had the broadest literary knowledge of anyone I’ve ever met. Our mutual appreciation of literature is really what drew us to each other and bound us together.
MV: So tell me about Erika the poet versus Erika the prose writer.
EH: Of course, Erika was more poet than prose writer, but she was well accomplished in both forms. When Erika wrote her first novel, Moräne, 1970 (Moraine), the general reaction in the press was: “Lo and behold, our great poet has written a novel.” Later there was a reprint, and I wrote a foreword. The book is pure deconstructionism avant la lettre and it’s the very best prose book she ever wrote, but nobody realized that at the time. Generally, Erika’s prose is highly lyrical and imagistic, but she always struggled with getting the dialogue right.
MV: What was her process regarding moving between writing the two forms?
EH: If you are really immersed in a prose book, you normally don’t write poetry. Your thoughts are completely absorbed in that novel you’re writing — at least that’s the way it was with the two of us.
MV: Was there a conscious decision to write a prose book?
EH: It wasn’t a decision; it was a necessity. There was a deep-seated urge to write a novel or a collection of short stories. We spoke about this many times: while you continue on your daily regimen of writing poetry, the prose book or novel is building itself in an intensity. One day you can’t stand it anymore, and you have to sit down and write “the Book.” I know it was precisely like that with Erika’s novel Die Vikarin, 2006 (The Lady Vicar), and it was like that with my own last novel too. As soon as I’m sure I can write a book — and it was the same with Erika — it’s like a boat trip on a lake at night and there are these buoys in the water somehow linking the novel together. The buoys are sentences or phrases. In the darkness I have to navigate from one buoy to the other. But I know precisely when I have reached the last buoy. Then I write straight through for six or seven months.
MV: And those buoys? Are they somehow sketched out on paper like a kind of map, so to speak?
EH: No, not at all. They’re in my head, in my subconscious. And I know the precise sentence that must fall somewhere, and now I have to make the way to this sentence, and then I have to find my way to the next, which I already know precisely. So, in the end they turn out to be a kind of map, but not until the novel is complete. Very strange, I know.
MV: You’ve mentioned that you were convinced that Erika had “spiritualist” abilities.
EH: I’m firmly convinced that Erika was a medium, but she intensely disliked that idea. She frequently foresaw things that had not yet occurred, or she dreamed things that happened later. Erika’s first husband, Yanosh, was an orchestra conductor. In her notes she actually prophesizes his death — but she would never have admitted it.
MV: Of course, many marriages with poets have tragic endings. Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes come to mind.
EH: We were very lucky. When I think of Ted Hughes and Sylvia, it may be that those two were too close in their personality. Erika and I were quite different from each other; we had divergent interests. For example, Erika was a great botanist. I came more from physics and astronomy. Of course there were difficult times, and I had to have a strong personality to withstand when she went too far. Erika had many lovers, and they all left her sooner or later. None of them had the personality or patience or strength to withstand her tempers — she could be as terrifying as she was ravishing. I do believe my patience with her saved our marriage, and I firmly believe she was grateful to me for that. Many people prophesized that our marriage would end in disaster, but it worked perfectly.
MV: Did you know about Erika’s illness from the beginning?
EH: Yes, I knew that Erika’s heart was half the size of a normal heart. She was born like that, so she couldn’t do much strenuous exercise, but she did still become 88 years old in spite of everything. Her health really started to decline seriously after 2000. She didn’t want to die. She knew I would survive her — she was angry at me for that. The true farewell for me now has been the editing of her notes and memoirs. In the last years of her life (until she had to go to the clinic), she spent all the time in these two rooms, writing, resting, and looking out of these windows. She could barely sleep and was in great pain. Writing her poetry was the only thing that kept her going. Many of the last poems were written in the early morning and late a night. Those years were awful. I always had the hope, when she was in the clinic (the morphine helped her recover slightly)... I always hoped I could take her back to the old house, but it was impossible…
MV: Erika wrote until she couldn’t write anymore, until the words failed her.
* * *
In her very last posthumous poems, “Nachtschicht” (“Nightshift”), from the collection Nachtschicht / Schattenzone, 2011 (Nightshift / An Area of Shadows), in her battle against her loss of words (as Ernst explained to me), Erika once again reverted back to rhyme. Apparently this was the only fashion in which she could recall the words from her failing consciousness. In the second section of the book An Area of Shadows, fellow-poet Ernst Halter bids farewell to his companion and deepest friend for more than forty years. From An Area of Shadows by Ernst Halter, the poem “Your final thousand-and-first photo”:
on a blister pack
with the tablets rustling inside
for the last of your nineteen weeks
in this hospice of the dying.
Two to be taken in the morning, one in the evening,
the window, Monday 7-9,
has broken through.
The telephone call when they asked where to let you die
came at three-thirty in the afternoon.
Terror and laughter contort your face,
imprecise, zero contrast, the eyes buttons,
even the red shawl,
your guardian and comfort: blur.
Pillows prop you,
in the right hand, a pencil twitches,
last weapon
for defense against such imposition.
A mug shot on room twozerofour,
so you wouldn’t be confused
with an insane person.
Previously published in the Hyperion Journal
