FRANKFURT ANTHOLOGY:

José F. A. Oliver: “black kite”

• BY JOACHIM SARTORIUS

From Andalusia to the Black Forest in search of a better future: Migration in this poem leads by winding roads to a foreign world, but not to a new homeland.

The overarching theme of this poem is migration and the ways in which it can transform the individual. In this case, the individual in question is very concretely the poet’s father. Francisco Agüera González moved in the summer of 1960 from an Andalusian village where he saw no future for himself or his family to the German Black Forest to work in a metalworking factory.
The first line of the poem—a verbatim citation of the opening line of the poetic fragment “Der Adler” [The Eagle] by Friedrich Hölderlin—introduces a broad panorama for peregrinations. It must have been an onerous journey for Oliver’s father by way of Málaga to Madrid and Paris, onward to the German border crossing at Kehl, then Offenburg, and finally: Hausach. Arriving in a foreign homeland in the Black Forest which would never truly feel like arrival.
Wandering without End
The story of this Spanish ‘guest worker,’ this wandering Andalusian, congeals beneath José F. A. Oliver’s pen. And thus, the many images of snow and ice, the metaphors of coldness, the coldness of lies. The poem’s title—“black kite”—is not coincidental. The German name for this bird of prey [Milan] is related to the word Migrans, both deriving from the Latin migrare: to wander. This dark wanderer is Oliver’s father, dream-commuting (pendelträumen, an Oliverian word) between what homeland was and what homeland would never be. He toiled, he saved, he “lied away his workman’s hands”—wringing and eventually losing them, as “he also lost his speech / to the artificial ice of migration”.
Language is, for Oliver (and so the title of an earlier volume of his poetry:) shelter [Unterschlupf]. To lose one’s language is unthinkable. In many of his poems, Oliver traces and dissects his words, sounding out their intrinsic discord to expose their unheard, undreamt sounds. In this poem, linguistic discovery and concentrated memory maintain balance. The reader recalls something of the inheritance of Celan, the hope both poets share: that their words’ sound and innermost experience coincide.
Oliver has written before about his father’s death, a final journey his father sought and ultimately undertook in Málaga and not in the Black Forest. The poem “black kite” represents the quintessence of these writings, drawing the balance for his father’s life. The poetic moments in his lines appear at once ancient and timeless.
There is also something Delphic in the poem’s appropriation of another line from Hölderlin’s “Der Adler.” Instead of “Where do we wish to remain?” Oliver’s father asks, “Whither do we remain?” This collision of conflicting words—of setting forth (whither) and lingering (remain)—expresses existential turmoil and powerless élan. The question is “polished mute” by unanswered years because it is insoluble. Because it is, in the words of Oliver’s contemporary, the poet Dagmara Kraus: an expression of both earthly and metaphysical exile.
“Afterwards” comes death, there as here: “t:here”. The assertion in the final lines recalls Rilke’s Duino Elegies, whose first elegy concludes a century after Hölderlin: “Remaining is nowhere”. Oliver’s “t:here” is Rilke’s “nowhere”. And so, José F. A. Oliver’s weighted, paradoxical verse remains entirely in keeping with Hölderlin’s fragment. The place of the wanderer is pained and painful placelessness.

José F. A. Oliver: „schwarzmilan“

mein vater ist gewandert, auf dem Gotthard
nicht & doch
verlog er sich die arbeitshände
unterm fremden schnee. Er sagte
es ist kalt die lügen kälter & jahre später
verlor er auch die sprache
ans gemachte eis der migration
einander schauend (neineinander)
er & seine hände & stummpoliert die frage
wohin bleiben wir? Danach
war tod & d:ort
wirst du ihn finden. Hier


José F. A. Oliver: “Black Kite”

my father wandered the Gotthard
thus & so
he lied away his workman’s hands
under the foreign snow. He said
it’s cold, the lies are colder & years later
he also lost his speech
to the artificial ice of migration
gazing upon one another (none another)
he & his hands & polished mute the question
whither do we remain? Afterwards
was death & t:here
you will find him. T:his place


Translation: Jon Cho-Polizzi

José F. A. Oliver in: Jahrbuch der Lyrik 2020. Eds. Christoph Buchwald and Dagmara Kraus. Verlag Schöffling & Co., Frankfurt am Main 2021. 248 pages, bound., € 22.

Joachim Sartorius’ most recent work: Wohin mit den Augen. Poems. Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 2021. 82 pages, bound, € 20.
Source: F.A.Z.