where poetry spent the night

 “For where there is amenability to paraphrase, there the sheets have never been rumpled, there poetry, so to speak, has never spent the night.” O. Mandelstam, Conversation about Dante.

Osip Mandelstam offers a definition of poetry as that which is not amenable to paraphrase.

Defining poetry might not be the best approach to reflect on the poetry of anthropology, because definitions introduce unwarranted normative constraints. Abstracted for the circumstances of the essay in which is written, taken as a definition, Mandelstam’s assertion carries an idealistic tone if one simply understands this sentence as referring to an evaluation of what counts as poetry and uses it as a rule for judging statements.

However, anyone familiar with Mandelstam’s essay would agree that the poet’s comment is less oriented at offering a normative statement than at opening up a territory for reflection. As a laboratory, Mandelstam’s comment can point towards an important trajectory to think anthropologically with poetry. If poetry is that which cannot be paraphrased, what matters is not poetry as a category, as a form of thought abstracted from its realizations, but the poem and only the poem (or the verse, or whatever else expresses something that cannot be expressed in any other way).

In the impossibility to paraphrase would reside the specificity and perhaps the power of poetry in constructing statements in which expression and content coincide to the extent that any variation or modulation would alter them in such a way as to become something utterly different, perhaps a different poem but not that poem, verse, word.

The conjunction of form and content, of the “how” and the “what” also resolves the relationship between the concrete and the abstract. The poem is what it is, one could say, in its irreducible concatenation of materiality and expression. With two conceptual consequences. First, the irreducible, stone like (Mandelstam again) character of words, sentences and any other poem-constituting element. One could call it a literalism, if one understood by this term not the absence of interpretation, but the necessary and irreducible sensory-material condition of its realization. Not unlike certain mystical traditions have conceptualized and practiced. And yet, it would be hasty to conclude that the idea of poetry as that which cannot be paraphrased leads straight to the identification of word and thing. What is at stake is something less assertive and more nuanced: it is the necessary character of poetic utterance, not its hypostasis. In other words, the non-amenability of paraphrase is not a reassertion of the primacy of logos.

In this regard one could also venture to conceptualize poems as monadic structures. What is at stake are not the originality and the absolute purity of a poem, but the concretion of its elements into an indestructible unit, itself aggregating with other such units, to compose larger unparaphrasable ensembles.

Through Mandelestam’s comment, the analogical foundations of poetry can be put in perspective. Poetry is often identified with analogical as opposed to scientific reasoning. However, Vico himself underlined the necessity of poetry as a form of expression of what could not be otherwise stated by humans in their infancy. There would be analogy insofar as that which cannot be said otherwise can be expressed analogically, but this does not mean that what poetry expresses can be substituted via analogies. The operation of translation/conceptualization (analogy) would in itself be an unfolding of the poem, or the production of a different poem, since analogy does not refer to the simple passage of a message from one code to another but the inevitable transmutation and reconstitution of something into something else.

The comment also helps considering the limitation of a “performative” approach to poetry, which, despites the caviats of its practitioners, always ends up reading the material instantiation of the performative acts as retrospective embodiments of a subjective trajectory: poems become signs of a subjectivity in the making to which they can be attributed. But, if the irreducible “letterism” of a poem is taken into account, it would be impossible to instrumentalize its readings towards whatever end, no matter how mobile and in progress.

But perhaps all this argumentation has itself moved too quickly away from Mandelstam’s sentence. It has indulged in paraphrasis. In Mandelstam’s passage, the assertion of poetry as that which is not amenable to paraphrase cannot be in turn abstracted from the image that substantiates it: poetry spending a night and leaving rumpled sheets as trace. Eros and experience appear as constitutive elements of irreducible poems.