south africa transit,
Ravan Press,
Johannesburg 1979
>'From one point of view, Manfred Jurgensen is a German poet; Germany is his homeland, German his first language, and, above all, his technical experiments in poetry seem (to the interested outsider, at least) to have more in common with the modes of post-war German poetry than with anything happening in Australia or elsewhere in the English-speaking world. From another, so accomplished a writer in English may be regarded as an English-language poet; whatever the closeness of his poetry to modes of feeling and organisation uncommon in English-language poetry, there is no sense in his work of translation, mental or physical, from another language. But, most pertinent of all, he is a bi-lingual writer; and in that respect he is something of a phenomenon in contemporary Australian poetry.
In a population with such an enormously high percentage of post-war European migrants (every third Australian is a migrant or has migrant parents), there are of course many writers who are bi-lingual in the sense that they are in the process of passing from one linguistic matrix to another, and from one home to another. Almost inevitably, a writer of this sort will experience a dual pressure: to assimilate, and not to forget; to be himself, yet not to abandon his first compatriots. Often this struggle will become one of the chief concerns of his writing.
Manfred Jurgensen is not such a case. He seems not so much
caught between two duties as propelled between two possibilities. His output has
already been prodigious, both in German and in English. From the four volumes I
have read, it seems there is an acute restlessness about his literary
performance. This in itself seems an expression of what we may call his
bilingualism of place. He is extremely reactive to place, person, occasion,
however randomly encountered, and any of these can become for him an epiphany.
His poetic techniques thus tend to be elliptical, repetitive, and summarising,
in ways not common in Australian poetry. This is perhaps the note of the
traveller-observer who, in Jurgensen's case, seems to become 'involved' with
astonishing speed, and detached, sardonic or self-doubting almost as
quickly.
When he was a student of mine, and later a friend, at the University of Melbourne at the start of the 1960s, it was obvious that this bilingualism of place would bother him painfully, both at the conscious and at the subliminal level. But that was in Victoria, in the far south-east of the continent. For many years he has lived in Brisbane, in the middle-distance north-east, in a state whose minority government (led by a Nordic Lutheran) has enacted repressive legislation which has earned the contempt of most intelligent Queenslanders (Jurgensen among them). Queensland has heavy deposits (so to speak) of black Australians and islanders (exploited, insulted, and put down) and of minerals (scooped out of the ground with great dispatch).
It is not surprising, with this life-experience, that Jurgensen should have visited South Africa and that he should write about it in the way he does. The traveller-observer, who carries his problems inside him, in his bio-rhythms and nervous system, will tend to put down in places where the stimulus to moral reaction is a violent one; and he may at least speak out against the evils which he sees. Jurgensen has done this with notable clarity and strength.'
Vincent Buckley
lecturing at r.a.u.
concrete laager
under
siege from unmown echoes
growing absentmindedly
into freedom of
speech
meener kafka's
language
classes have been metamorphosed
into architecture
pushed buttons
spread
demonstrative enlightenment
from model fingertips
to handwritten
signs
on the open-ended wall
with such dedicated
foresight
there is no reason why
these laboratory halls
could not be
extended
into a fully comprehensive statement