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Could I just point out that Adorno is being misquoted? He said: Prismen, vol. 10a, p. 30. Kulturkritik findet sich der letzten Stufe der Dialektik von Kultur und Barbarei gegenüber: nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben, ist barbarisch, und das frißt auch die Erkenntnis an, die ausspricht, warum es unmöglich ward, heute Gedichte zu schreiben. (1955) "The critique of culture is confronted with the last stage in the dialectic of culture and barbarism: to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric, and that corrodes also the knowledge which expresses why it has become impossible to write poetry today." This, above, is the original reference that is supposed to be quoted. He also said, (among other reformulations & explications of the famous utterance): Noten zur Literatur IV, vol.11, p. 603 Der Satz, nach Auschwitz lasse kein Gedicht mehr sich schreiben, gilt nicht blank, gewiß aber, daß danach, weil es möglich war und bis ins Unabsehbare möglich bleibt, keine heitere Kunst mehr vorgestellt werden kann. "The phrase, a poem can no more be written after Auschwitz, has no validity on its own; what is certain however is that after it, because it was impossible and remains so for the unforeseeable future, cheerful art can no longer be imagined." [this one my translation.] There's a decent PDF essay on the net by Elaine Martin on the whole subject, which I would recommend to anyone interested in the subject: http://forum.llc.ed.ac.uk/issue2/martin.pdf Suffice it to say, that Adorno's statement should not be boiled down to a soundbite or a slogan: it needs to be seen in the context of his thought and indeed the progressions in that thought throughout his career. I think the most important aspect of it is that Adorno was almost certainly only referring to German poetry - he read no other, I believe - and that his view would have been that the language had been so corrupted by the Nazi years that poetry itself had become problematic, not just after Auschwitz, but after the whole period for which Auschwitz had become a symbol. Given my lack of philosophical skill or analysis, I am almost certainly getting this somewhat wrong. I also shied away from the translating his other quotes on the subject because I can't handle his prose most of the time . . . Tony ___________________________________ Tony Frazer Shearsman Books Ltd 58 Velwell Road Exeter EX4 4LD England Tel / Fax: (+44) (0) 1392-434511 http://www.shearsman.com/ ___________________________________