Antiphons To A Displaced God

The Austrian novelist and playwright Thomas Bernhard took a mordant glee in outraging his countrymen. The Austrians have a name for such troublemakers. Bernhard, they said, was a Nestbeschmützer, a man who fouls his own nest. But for Bernhard, the nest had already been fouled, and long before. Picturesque Austria was a whipped-cream façade behind which lay the bodies of the murdered. The Tyrolean hat with its jaunty feather sat atop a skull. Bernhard's penchant for laying bare the nastiness tucked behind cozy vistas had, of course, a long history in Austrian letters. The incomparable Johann Nestroy, with such untranslatable farces as "Lumpazivagabundus" or the wry comedy "He Wants to Make a Joke" (which somehow ended up as "Hello, Dolly!" on Broadway), had launched the tradition in the 19th century. But Nestroy and his successors were light hearted. Bernhard was downright nasty (as well as funny). The undeniable fact that he wrote the most magnificent German prose since Kafka only salted the national wound intolerably.

In his autobiography,"Gathering Evidence," Bernhard describes how one day, out of the blue, he decided not to take his usual route to school, but to walk in the opposite direction. He ended up in a shabby quarter of Salzburg he hadn't known existed; it was a neighborhood of the downtrodden, the ostracized, and the unemployed on the dole. It opened his eyes to what lurked behind the smug façade. He promptly got a menial job in a grubby convenience store in a basement and never went back to school. Walking in the opposite direction would become a stubborn habit for the rest of his short life.

Bernhard's early verse displays this inspired truculence. Two of his collections,"In Hora Mortis" and "Under the Iron of the Moon" (Princeton University Press, 168 pages, $14.95), from the 1950s, have now been translated in their entirety by James Reidel, with the German originals on facing pages and an enthusiastic introduction. These are Bernhard's second collection, "In Hora Mortis" — taken from the final phrase of the "Hail Mary" ("Pray for us now and in the hour of our death") — and his longer third collection, "Under the Iron of the Moon." The poems are Bernhard at his bleakest and yet, they carry an unexpected shock.

The poems are quiet, almost whispery in tone, displaying none of the virtuoso antics of the prose: no glittering cascades of insult, no manic swerves from tenderness to savagery. The shock comes from their unabashed religious fervor. Though they sound like prayers "to the unknown God," they are, nevertheless, prayers, by turns meditative, anguished, and almost perversely devotional. In one he proclaims, "my God I praise You / for as long as time exists." Bernhard was often denounced as a "nihilist." He brushed the charge aside; his "negativity," he quipped, was just "fun-philosophy." In fact he was a believing Christian, if an eccentric one. According to Mr. Reidel, Bernhard considered himself "saved." He quotes Bernhard as stating, "I always believed in heaven, even as a child. The older I get, the more I believe in it, because heaven is something quite beautiful. In heaven they always wear freshly cleaned, white clothes."That last remark is a bit quirky, but for once, it seems, Bernhard wasn't being humorous.

He studied to be a musician before turning to writing and the poems draw, often quite subtly, on musical devices. Bernhard uses refrains, leitmotifs, and contrapuntal themes. His dark notes are made up of the snow, the wind, the blackbirds, ice, and frost, while his bright notes come from honey, grain, cider, and, more surprisingly, "pink ham" on a plate. These presences weave their way insistently into the verse. Death is present too:

Death is clear in the stream and wild in the moon as clear to me as the evening star that shivers a stranger outside my door death is clear as honey in August

For all their austerity, these are tactile poems."I want to pray upon the hot stone," he writes in one,"and count the stars swimming in my blood."When the tone grows overly exalted, he comes back to earth with "long slivers of bacon" or the devil who fills his head "with stone and cabbage." It is as though only the homeliest objects are solid enough for his fervor. Bernhard was a city boy but, as the poems make plain, he had the earth in his bones.

Mr. Reidel's translations are admirably spare. He follows Bernhard's gaunt German word by word and is attentive to every shift of syntax and mood. Sometimes this leads him into awkward turns of phrase. One poem in the second collection begins simply, "I seemed to myself much younger," but Mr. Reidel renders this as "To me I was much younger," and it jars. In another,

Bernhard writes "My despair comes at midnight/and looks at me as though I were long dead." Mr. Reidel fluffs the effect of the second line by giving it as "and I look on as though I were long dead." Despair is doing the looking, not the speaker. But such slips are rare.

These are the poems of a young man. They veer from rage to desperation to self-pity. Inevitably they echo earlier poets. Bernhard was learning his craft and he studied the masters. As Mr. Reidel notes, there are accents reminiscent not only of Hölderlin and Trakl but of such older contemporaries as Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann. But an obvious influence, whom Mr. Reidel surprisingly doesn't mention, is Rilke and his early work, "The Book of Hours." Rilke addressed God in a voice of startling intimacy, calling him "You, neighbour God," and boldly asking, "What will you do, God, when I die?" Bernhard struggles for the same closeness; he can't quite achieve it and is too honest to fake it. But when he writes, "And on the mountains whitely stand the stars," the music of the verse pays Rilke the homage of imitation. And in fact, both collections strike me as Bernhard's conscious response to the earlier poet; they are antiphons to a displaced god.

Probably no one would make the claim that these are great poems. For all their acrid elegance, they are compelling because Thomas Bernhard wrote them. But they do show how deeply Bernhard, the caustic besmircher of the native nest, was rooted in the soil of his homeland. Every line suggests that his love of it was almost equal to his loathing.

eormsby@nysun.com