Poetry: Continental Silentia | clivejames.com
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Continental Silentia

Neat name for the machine
On which the lists were done:
Quietly ordered violence.
Feathers by the ton.
 
Great name for the device
On which the lists were made:
Pan-European silence,
A pop-gun fusillade,
 
A muted rat-tat-tat,
The excuse already ripe:
We knew nothing of all that.
All we did was type,
 
And corrections in those days
Had to be done with x’s.
You couldn’t just erase
And start again: wrong sexes,
 
Wrong spellings… it took ages.
Just to get it right
Meant black spots in the pages:
Blurs of a foggy night.
 
Unspoken and unsung,
Those names that didn’t matter.
Sonderbehandlung.
Just written, pitter-patter.
 
Continental Silentia
For all those in absentia
Respectable dementia
Sub rosa eloquentia
 
List, oh list
The rest is silence
 
Put to silence
 
Zum schweigen gebracht
 
Typewriter
Firelighter
 
Tap tap

 

– Standpoint, September 2010
 

Dieses Gedicht auf Deutsch

Note (from Collected Poems)

The title is the brand name of a silent typewriter. Sonderbehandlung (Special Treatment) was a Nazi euphemism for extermination. After the war, the survivor Victor Klemperer analysed Nazi language in a brilliant little book called LTI (Lingua Tertii Imperii — Language of the Third Reich). ‘List, oh list’ and ‘the rest is silence’ are both from Hamlet. Zum schweigen gebracht: put to silence.