“Discovering the Beauty and Soul of Italy Through the Poetry of Andreas Reimann”

The edition of the work of the Leipzig poet Andreas Reimann is blossoming. The sixth volume brings together his Italy poems. Is Italy such a poetic country? Naturally. And you don’t have to want to discover anything new to be able to appreciate the poetry of these landscapes between Veneto and Sicily. You shouldn’t just be in a tourist hurry. Because the greatest magic is time.

It’s not about having seen everything, having photographed every sight, having posed everywhere with the gesture “See, I’ve been here!” That’s not how you discover the beauty or the soul of a country. To do this, you have to get out of the commanding tone of the time, the “you must have seen it”. You don’t have to.

Just maybe forego the flight over the Alps. Once upon a time, Reimann must have done it that way too – and in the end he was rightly appalled. Because every arrival by plane is like a crash.

It’s the wrong sense of time. Which is why the poet prefers to take the (night) train. Pack light. “Take what you have that you have nothing from and scatter it along the way / walk to the station, get on the train easily – a ticket would be too heavy already -: …” (“The Blue Tides”)

Looking for love in Italy

Because what do you need to live? And what is life? Isn’t it the experience of the “rushing blue”? Reimann does not write noisy poems. He neither wants to interpret the time nor what people are doing. That is far from him. He writes about life as he encounters it. And knows where he feels it most intensely. In Italy. Perhaps the strongest at Lake Garda, where he is drawn again and again. He knows that others have come before him and that he is following in their footsteps. Goethe, Platen, Kästner, Kesten…

One can rub oneself against Goethe. At this Italian trip of the poet stranded in Weimar who, after ten years in office, realizes that he has lost the poet within himself. And – perhaps – not yet found the man capable of love. The literary world has been wondering about this for decades now. Did Goethe actually go to Italy for the first time… ?

Reimann can also write his cunning lines about this. For he is far from imitating Goethe. He is not on the run from official business and does not have to placate a prince. And he doesn’t have to discover Italy for the audience at home who hasn’t traveled. It already knows that.

Or doesn’t know it because it doesn’t read what others have already seen down there in the land of lemons, as the saying goes. The Reimann but also not interested. He drives – “once a year” — not to the south “to rest”, but to wake up.

Waking up on Lake Garda

What can be experienced densely and atmospherically in the sonnets, odes and elegies in this volume. He doesn’t even have to name all the poets he knew before Italy opened up to him. He doesn’t mention Rilke at all, but she does “Duineser Elegien” are just as present as Goethe’s „Roman Elegies“. Just like Dante’s verses. Reimann masters the classic forms, even where he happily transforms them, Neruda merges with Klopstock – the joy of eating a fish with the solemn form of the ode.

That just by the way. It’s the tone, the melody, that comes to him almost weightlessly when he describes the evenings, the streets to the market, the blue of the lake, the feeling of becoming one with the landscape and light. And the big one, which we so seldom feel in the growling, greyish north: “The planet is spinning into sunny bright…”

Someone like Reimann always travels with a library in mind. And counteracts the general truth and wisdom of the people with heartfelt love – about David, the ruins of ancient Rome, the Fontana di Trevi. Or the huge dome of St. Peter’s, which promises exactly what the old man who rules there likes to condemn. If he looks closely, the poet sees: lust for life, temptation and beauty.

Broken in Rome

And he feels related to Platen and Thomas Mann. And knows that the ancient Romans were already familiar with such ambiguities: “The big broken thing meets the small whole / And can’t control the giggling desire.” And there’s enough broken stuff lying around in Rome, Florence, Palermo. And even when climbing Mount Etna, Reimann knows his witness from Greek times – Empedocles, to whom legend ascribes he ended his life by jumping into Etna’s gorge.

If you travel well-read, you will of course see more. Above all, sees the ephemeral in the beauty of the moment. Every comparison is obvious. But everyone has to see for themselves. And enjoy. And for that he needs time. “What is freedom? This parma ham / in slices, leaf-thin, and a glass of soave …” Freedom, if you look at it carefully, is the simple being. Existence in the fulfilled sense. (“As long as I don’t run out of checks”)

The feeling of not having to prove, settle and do anything. Reimann dedicated a whole bunch of to his favorite place, Malcesine punching. In terms of form, then, a salute to Ariosto and Tasso. Even if his stanzas are about pure looking and living.

And the reassuring insight that if you don’t own anything, you have nothing to lose.

“‘I have nothing, I have nothing to lose!'” : / When did I get that saying on paper,” he asks and sees the lizards scurrying about. Until the thought creeps in that ends up worrying him more and more. Because Italy is only a dream because he is only allowed to stay here for a while. Then it’s back: “There’s a threat of farewell. Give me your hand. / If I return home now, it will be as an emigrant.”

It’s a different farewell than the one you feel as a tourist when you’re packing your bags in your room. Italy is not a holiday for Reimann. But a different attitude to life, into which he immerses himself with all his senses every time. Knowing that he must return over the mountains. Again and again. In Goethe’s footsteps and yet completely different: “Now I’m sitting closer to Goethe’s place / full of happiness and melancholy and the bells are ringing.”

Where is the real exile?

He didn’t need to find women to teach him sensual love first. Italy is more of a temporary refuge for him, which he has to leave again and again. And taking things lightly doesn’t work: “In the cool morning I’ll enjoy / another coffee from a used cup / and a grappa. – I am deported.” What a wonderfully ambiguous word that is reminiscent of that nice old GDR joke in which a Vopo asks the caught citizen: “Can you identify yourself?” – And who only sighs: “It would be nice .”

And how does Reimann continue in this poem? – “What kind of water do I have on my face? / Who gets up now and goes: it’s not me.”

That’s how it is for someone who – again – was allowed to feel completely there, one with the light, the blue, the place. And someone leaves and knows for a long time that he left half or all of his soul behind. It will only be able to catch up later, much later, when it can finally be released. And follows the one who unpacks his bag in the grumpy north: “The slender grappa bottle comes to light / and a ticket, transformed into a cashier …”

You can stumble there again. It is not particularly noticeable with Reimann that he always tells his own life as well, knowing full well that one can never look at the world without presuppositions or even untouched. The past is always there.

And it’s also in this secret note, which recalls the two years that Reimann spent in jail from 1968 to 1970 for protesting against the troops’ invasion of Prague.

Andreas Reimann does not have to deny his life. And may also name the old wounds. Which he reluctantly does. Very carefully. Because he wants to tell about something else, the breathless intensity with which he can experience life in Italy. So intense that there can be no return without sorrow: “And I sit there in joy ashes / and long for the lighter across…”

The joy of not reaching the summit

Then he immediately hit the Goethe tone again, the hymn-like spirit with which the State Councilor from Weimar also got going when he wanted to write poetry about things that actually stirred him up and made him breathless. Just like Reimann shortly before the summit of Mount Etna. But where he turned back.

Because he doesn’t have to prove anything to himself or others, no climbing a mountain. On the contrary: If he does not complete the ascent, he has not yet reached the goal. Can he continue with peace of mind? And also remind his attentive readers how senseless this whole hunt for summits and goals is. That you completely lose sight of what is really important, because that can only be experienced if you take your time and get involved with the lesson.

It can also be the blue one. So that a very idiosyncratic interpretation of Klinger’s “The Blue Hour” found its way into the book.

But this reversal before the summit is so typical of him, so understandable and human that we have to quote it at the end, because that too is a disguised quote from feudal, planned-economy times: “You can of course / continue living, namely : because you / did not reach your goal.”

That is life itself, which gives birth to its fullness precisely from the unfulfilled. And enriches us because we can let go of achieving everything. Even the goals that others have announced. Like gods, as if they were entitled to it. Who is that Hephaestus? And who is “the devil you don’t believe in”?

It often reads so simply, so floating, as Reimann enjoys his Italy with all his senses. But in the subtext there is always a “Do you see that?” to the addressees at home, who work doggedly through plans and goals. “Life: ‘Take it easy!’, so it was said, and / the words were always meant to encourage: / here you were at last / also a challenge.” (“Das Fest”)

So you can also suffer in the country that has spat you out and often treats you shabbily, plagued with demands and demands on how you should live, grow and function properly.

And in Italy Andreas Reimann can throw off all that and write a line that basically says everything at the sight of the celebrating, “unwounded people”: “There I stood, shaken and crying / with joy and unrestrained.” everything falls together – the past and the present moment: there he is “a child and an old man”.

Andreas Reimann “The tides of blue, with drawings by Rainer Ilg”Connewitzer Verlagsbuchhandlung, Leipzig 2023, 26 euros.