Holocaust Memorial Day

 'To write poetry after Auschwitz is impossible,' as Theodor Adorno didn't say. What he did say was 'To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric', and he was later to modify even that statement. Not that it matters. Perhaps it would be truer to say that to write poetry about Auschwitz, i.e. about the Holocaust, is impossible, or all but impossible, and arguably barbaric too. The best art created from those unimaginably terrible events has tended to be documentary in nature, like the almost unbearable Shoah, Claude Lanzmann's nine-hour film.  Poetry, I think, can only approach such a subject obliquely; it is literally obscene, its proper place is offstage. To mark the day, here is Geoffrey Hill's very oblique Ovid in the Third Reich, in which he places the exiled Roman poet in Hitler's Germany, trying to live with his conscience, loving his work and his children, celebrating 'the love-choir', but knowing 'the ancient troughs of blood' are too near, and that he is among the damned, or something worse. He might be taken to represent all those 'ordinary Germans' who managed to live with an unspeakable, and unspoken, knowledge... 

I love my work and my children. God   

Is distant, difficult. Things happen.   

Too near the ancient troughs of blood   

Innocence is no earthly weapon.

I have learned one thing: not to look down

So much upon the damned. They, in their sphere,   

Harmonize strangely with the divine

Love. I, in mine, celebrate the love-choir.

The poem has an epigraph from Ovid's Amores – 'Non peccat, quaecumque potest peccasse negare, Solaque famosam culpa professa facit', which might be translated as 'He does not sin who can deny his sin, Only the admitted fault brings dishonour.'

See also today's Anecdotal Evidence.