Engaging the Shoah Through the Poetry of Dan Pagis by McCullough Shellie Gordon;

Author:McCullough, Shellie Gordon;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic

Figure 2.1 Photograph copyright by Laurence Salzmann, inspiration of the poem “Souvenir.” Reprinted with Permission.

This photo is clearly the topic of discussion in “Souvenir,” and appears to have interrupted the poet’s present sense of being, his memory of the past, and the trajectory of the future. Pagis would continue to say that this photo in particular began, “. . . a crisis in my relation to place and time, to reality, to ‘realia’ that can be given a name, to palpalable things in an actual situation” (Ezrahi H. Remembrance 124). It is fair to assume this photo overtook Pagis so that he was forced to examine and explore the time and space of his own Holocaust experiences. At this point, Pagis had begun to move from a highly stylized form of poetics, into a gapingly open ended, free flowing style of prose. In this manner, his paragraph style prose stylistically represents, in the manner of a photograph, a burial comprised of words.

Considering these deductions, a paragraph by paragraph analysis becomes a linguistic autopsy. The first paragraph of “Souvenir” functions as the mother’s speech does in “Written in Pencil,” since both place the reader in a static “here.” However, this “here” is Pagis’s actual hometown of Radautz, which in turn shifts his previous collective, poetic voice, into a specific individualized account.

By the second paragraph, the reader finds out that the speaker is reminiscing due to unearthing an “artifact” from his past. It becomes necessary here to point out that a photograph does not merely capture a moment in time, but actually conveys an absence of a time passed. Essentially, photos characterize a time one desired to commemorate with an image on paper. In turn, this reminds the viewer that this occasion has been forever lost, and will never occur again. This photographic quality expresses and evokes feelings then by means of an absence of presence, or a silenced voice. Pagis’s poems also function under the same conditions since he tends to omit ideas that can be hinted at, and refuses to hint at anything that could instead be silenced. Absence of sound also conveys that death lurks in the frozen images of the photographs, conveying the eerie sense that the past is inescapable. The death of a past moment captured on paper suggests human mortality. In this context, a photo which recalls the poet to the land of his birth transforms into a bone scan which lays bare all the dark contours of a skeleton in the present.

Photographs also function as footprints or etchings would, and both these images are recurring themes throughout Pagis’s poetic canon.16 The Radautz photograph elicits an acknowledgment with the past, and forbids the negation of its existence. Photos, like genealogical records, prove existence of the past, despite gaps in temporality. In photography, this lineage, or trace of the past, functions, “not only as an image (but), an interpretation of the real; it is also something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask” (Sontag 154).

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