Nobel Prize winner Louise Glück shows again why she is one of the best poets of our time ★★★★★

When Louise Glück was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2020, a great loss was discovered in the Netherlands: no collection of this American poet had been translated. Thank goodness that injustice has now been corrected. There are now two exceptionally beautiful works in a sober and therefore strong translation by Radna Fabias. If you want to descend into the underworld of family relationships and emerge purified from it, you should read Glück.

The Underworld is just a half hour train ride from Naples. When I was in that Italian city last fall, in preparation for the inevitable, I decided to visit the crater lake that seems to be the gateway to the realm of the dead. From the slow train that took me there, I now and then had a view of the sea between the houses. After I got off at Lucrino’s little station, there were nothing but deserted beaches in front of me; a single man, who had left another continent behind, wandered lonely on the beach with odds and ends around his arm. He didn’t even bother to look at the few strangers who had left the train.

On the other side of the bare station, a small road, Via Italia, leads to a not too big lake within ten minutes. You are welcomed there by an ominous stone table inscribed with the following words (here in the translation by MA Schwartz): ‘There was a deep cavern, huge and wide gaping, with steep sides, protected by a black lake and dark forests; no birds could soar with impunity flying above, such a smoke arose from the black mouth and rose to the heavenly vault.’ And, directly below, even more menacing: “…far, abide far, all you who are not consecrated,” cried the Sibylle, “stay far from the sacred forest!” As I moved from the stone table to the lake and then looked to the sky, I saw that Virgil, from whose Aeneid these words stem, was right. Indeed, there were no birds flying over the lake. It was ominously quiet.

But the sun warmed my face and I set out on a walk around the lake. The late autumn light glittered on the dark waves. As I paused to look at those dancing sparkles, Louise Glück’s words crossed my mind: ‘This is the light of autumn, not the light of spring. / The light of autumn: you will not be spared become.’ Glück devoted a volume to this elusive place. averno, which appeared in America as early as 2006, is a contemporary masterpiece. Like many of Glück’s other works, the collection offers an idiosyncratic reworking of classical mythology, extended to the present, with attention to what it means to be a woman.

Neither dead nor alive

Perhaps there is a Persephone in every woman. In any case, it is this goddess of the underworld and, remarkably enough, also of spring with whom Glück engages averno identifies. Persephone is also a victim of male violence, because she was pulled onto his chariot by Hades and dragged deep into a chasm in the earth into the darkness (doesn’t every creation myth begin with violence against women?). ‘It does me no good; violence has changed me’, writes Glück, ‘My body has grown cold as the plundered fields’.

Persephone was released at the hands of Zeus, her father, but not completely: every year after the spring and summer she has to return to the underworld for six months. A chilling fact for which Glück has found appropriately bare words: ‘Tell me this is the future,/ I won’t believe you. /Tell me I’m alive,/ I won’t believe you.’ But neither is she dead: “Death cannot harm me/No more than you have harmed me,/My beloved life.” With Persephone’s abduction to the underworld, with that ‘mysterious/failed death’, as Glück calls it in another poem, the seasons were born.

Critics have often pointed to the chilling nature of Glück’s language, although I doubt that this characterization is justified. Exactly, those are her words, her images accurate. Also in averno are the lines of a striking sobriety, as almost all of Glück’s verses are. In that sense, Radna Fabias’ translation certainly does justice to these verses. Although she sometimes chooses a different line break (which is very accurate with Glück), but rightly stays close to the original.

Do not expect far-fetched constructions, no trifling neologisms, no gimmicks and no exaggerated images with Glück. Standing in front of the lake, I understood why she chose Lago d’Averno. It forms a perfect mirror of her poetry: calm, silent, round, meditative, reflective, clear and yet dark: darkness constantly threatens below the surface. Not really a place for summer birds.

Family threat

I once bought Glück’s stout collection in New York, which brings together half a century of poetry, including averno and the breathtaking The Wild Iris, the 1992 collection widely regarded as her best. On the cover of Poems 1962-2012 adorns a mezzotint of the planet Saturn. A particularly striking image, I realized when reading averno again. Not only does this planet symbolize melancholy, but under that name also hides a primeval father who tears his own children to pieces. In short, Saturn also stands for familial threat.

That threat can be seen everywhere in Glück’s poetry; certainly not just on the father’s side. Her verses, from the very first to the most recent, are about dark family relationships. About parental violence against children and vice versa. In ‘Persephone the wanderer’ we read:

In the first version, Persephone . becomes
taken from her mother
and the goddess of the earth
punishes the earth – this is correct
with what we know about human behavior,
that people get deep satisfaction
to do evil, especially
do harm unconsciously

Mothers punishing mothers, mothers tormenting daughters, neglected children, dead children, powerless parents – Glück has a name for all these family relationships: ‘We can call this,’ she writes, ‘negative creation.’ This concluding gesture is typical of Glück. She is a poet who distills general laws from the personal. If there is a core why all of Glück’s poems seem to revolve, it is that of negative creation, the black hole that a family inevitably also is. Everyone eventually lives on the edge of a Lake Averno. And hope, she notes in another poem, is not something you should expect from an artist.

Does she really mean that? Maybe. It is certainly a nod to Dante, who wrote ‘there is no hope for those who enter here’ above the gates of hell. In any case, the title of her most recent collection promises, Winter recipes from the collective, at least warmth or comfort. The warmth of food in winter and the comfort of a community. The book was published a year after Glück received the Nobel Prize. Such a book is a notoriously difficult task. But with winter recipes shows her again why she is one of the very best poets of our time.

Moving, tranquil, grand

In ‘The Denial of Death’, a series of two long poems, Glück recounts a journey to a lake, how she would make it with a ‘you’ and how she ends up being left alone in the inn – she had her leave your passport. She is comforted by a janitor: ‘Don’t be sad,’ he said. You have started your own journey,/not into the world like your friend, but to yourself and your memories.’ When one day she throws her passport – ‘Where my face, or what my face had been’ – into the sea, her past life sinks into the depths of ‘the empty water’. Then she walks around the lake with the janitor:

I see, he said, that you are no longer
wish to resume your previous life,
that is, to move, in a straight line like time
it presents us, but rather (here he gestured to the lake)
in a circle that strives for
the immobility at the heart of things,
although I prefer to think it looks like a clock too.

On the shores of the lake, the poet discovers that what she seeks is not an entrance to the underworld, but the abolition of death. How often has the desire for immortality been written, in pompous words, and how seldom has it been done so moving, stilling, small and yet grandiose, as by Glück? This is why you want to read her poetry, always more.

I too did what Glück must have done and does in the above poem: I circled Lake Averno. You still need an hour, at most an hour and a half to return to the starting point. About half way through I came across a sign: Grotta del Bagno della Sibilla. Aeneas descended to the underworld, not by diving below the surface of the lake, but through this narrow cavern hidden in a dense forest. That October afternoon I followed the winding path to the cave. Soon I was standing in front of a rust-red gate. There was no movement in it. Later I learned that old Carlo, the man who managed the cave and also gave tours there, was seriously ill. The gate to the underworld will therefore remain closed for a while. No human being – consecrated or unconsecrated – has anything to do with it.