conversations.from: human
conversations.value: a description for a book titled Economy of the Unlost about Simonides, Celan, It's with the genre: Literature & Fiction, Poetry
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: It's hard to imagine two poets farther apart in time and space than Simonides, who lived in fifth century B.C.E. Greece, and Celan, a 20th-century Romanian Jew who lived in Paris and wrote in German. Yet the author connects them through the idea of economy, the management of resources that determines the nature of one's poetry as well as one's life. the author is an acclaimed poet herself (her Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse, was nominated last year for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry), and if her subject is daunting and her style elliptical, at least she counters scholarly woolgathering with lapidary anecdote: of Simonides leaving a banquet after being told by a stingy host that his fee would be halved only to witness the collapse of the roof and the death of everyone inside; of Celan fleeing before Nazi exterminators and returning to find his house sealed and his parents taken to the camp where they would die. In their work, both writers not only measured off the area "within which word holds good," writes the author, but also discovered that "it is a limited area." For academic collections only.ADavid Kirby, Florida State Univ., Tallahassee <BR>Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: the first five paragraphs for this book
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Economy of the Unlost
  Yizkor, the memorial service for the deceased, follows the Haftorah. Its origin is obscure. It is mentioned in Parashat Ha'azinu in the Midrash and in Machzor Vitry (p. 173). It was originally introduced as a prayer only for Yom Kippur, to remind people of the importance of prayer by recalling man's final destiny on this earth. At the time of the Crusades, when many thousands of Jews were murdered by the fanatical crusaders, it assumed additional meaning as an expression of sorrow for the Jewish people as a whole. In our generation, a special prayer has been added to memorialize the six million martyrs of the Holocaust. Later, Yizkor was introduced on Sh'mini Ateseret, on the last day of Pesach, and on the second day of Sha'vu'ot. It is a sad commentary on the state of "religion" in the Diaspora that many Jews, who do not even attend services, rush to the synagogue for the sole purpose of reciting Yizkor. I sadly refer to them as "Yizkor Jews."71
  What is remembering? Remembering brings the absent into the present, connects what is lost to what is here. Remembering draws attention to lostness and is made possible by emotions of space that open backward into a void. Memory depends on void, as void depends on memory, to think it. Once void is thought, it can be cancelled. Once memory is thought, it can be commodified. Simonides of Keos first made these relationships clear in his invention of the famous Simonidean "art of memory." Let us consider the events that led up to his invention.
  But hospitality had other constituents, Theokritos emphasizes, in the relations between householder and poet:
  The fact is there would be no joy at all for them [the Skopads], once they emptied their sweet soul into the hateful old man's boat:
  The ideal of this contract is clear: the Skopads sustain Simonides on earth, he sustains them in memory. An exchange of life for life. Of mortal for immortal continuance. You might think it a delicate matter to price such a commodity. Cicero gives us a more realistic picture of how Skopas went about it:
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: four more paragraphs
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Simonides highlights the concept of exchange by placing at the center of the poem (at the end of v. 2) the resonant participle ἀμειψάμενοι. This participle is from the verb ἀμείβομαι, which means "to change" and can refer to change of position in space, as when the Medes cross the Spercheios River, or to interchange of question and answer, as when a prophet responds to inquiry, or to exchange of goods or money in a commercial transaction. It is a verb that can be active or passive, that can represent either or both sides of an exchange. A particularly appropriate verb, then, in a poem about a man who can see both sides of a river, a prophet who can see both sides of a moment in time. This fatally two-sided moment is isolated twice by Simonides with repetition of the adverb ποτε ("once on a day"). Megistias is a prophet who must both ask and answer the question of his own death, as Simonides must both buy and sell the poem that remembers him. For a gravestone is a coin with more than two sides. Inscribed on its surface are words that transform its commodity into communication and project its usefulness across time. Aristotle defines money as "a guarantee of exchange in the future for something not given in the present."13 So does the gravestone of Megistias guarantee a future exchange of oblivion for memory and purchase a moment of life for him each time its inscription is read.
  Which brings us to reading and writing, and to a set of historical factors that may very concretely underlie Simonides' insight into the exchange of life and death that happens on a gravestone. Simonides' inscriptional verse is the first poetry in the ancient Greek tradition about which we can certainly say, these are texts written to be read: literature. Now it is true Simonidean diction contains frequent epicisms and his metrics depend upon Homer's; it is also likely that most people who read a Simonidean epitaph did so by sounding the words out loud. The difference is physical: Simonides' poem has to fit on the stone bought for it. An oral poet may labor under restrictions of time or personal stamina or social decorum but only an inscriptional poet has to measure his inspiration against the size of his writing surface. Out of this material fact—which is also an economic fact because stones and stonecutting cost money—evolved an aesthetic of exactitude or verbal economy that became the hallmark of Simonidean style. The Greek term for this aesthetic is ἀκρίβεια,15 a word of double reference: the Greek lexicon defines ἀκρίβεια as "minute care about details of language, exact expression" or "minute care about financial expense, miserliness." Practices of life and practices of language overlap on an epitaphic stone.
  This sentence is an important one for Simonides himself and for the whole epitaphic tradition. The idea that human life is not a gift but a loan or a debt, which will have to be paid back, originated with Simonides. It became a cliché on gravestones throughout Hellenistic and Roman times; numerous examples are extant.21 But in Simonides' phrasing the idea has a bleakness that sets it apart. Facts of stone and money alone cannot account for this sentence. I think we must trace it back to a hard early decision.
  Simonides was born on the island of Keos: a barren, rocky, impoverished place where the calculus of sheer survival demanded of its inhabitants an economy both radical and obvious. It was the custom on Keos for every male citizen who reached the age of sixty to voluntarily drink the hemlock, in order that there be enough supplies of life to go round. The historian Strabo records the rationale for this custom in a sentence as cold and clear as an epitaph:
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Add another sentence about Nonetheless.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Simonides highlights the concept of exchange by placing at the center of the poem (at the end of v. 2) the resonant participle ἀμειψάμενοι. This participle is from the verb ἀμείβομαι, which means "to change" and can refer to change of position in space, as when the Medes cross the Spercheios River, or to interchange of question and answer, as when a prophet responds to inquiry, or to exchange of goods or money in a commercial transaction. It is a verb that can be active or passive, that can represent either or both sides of an exchange. A particularly appropriate verb, then, in a poem about a man who can see both sides of a river, a prophet who can see both sides of a moment in time. This fatally two-sided moment is isolated twice by Simonides with repetition of the adverb ποτε ("once on a day"). Megistias is a prophet who must both ask and answer the question of his own death, as Simonides must both buy and sell the poem that remembers him. For a gravestone is a coin with more than two sides. Inscribed on its surface are words that transform its commodity into communication and project its usefulness across time. Aristotle defines money as "a guarantee of exchange in the future for something not given in the present. "13 So does the gravestone of Megistias guarantee a future exchange of oblivion for memory and purchase a moment of life for him each time its inscription is read. 
  Which brings us to reading and writing, and to a set of historical factors that may very concretely underlie Simonides' insight into the exchange of life and death that happens on a gravestone. Simonides' inscriptional verse is the first poetry in the ancient Greek tradition about which we can certainly say, these are texts written to be read: literature. Now it is true Simonidean diction contains frequent epicisms and his metrics depend upon Homer's; it is also likely that most people who read a Simonidean epitaph did so by sounding the words out loud. 14 Nonetheless, this is not oral verse in its composition nor in its aesthetic. The difference is physical: Simonides' poem has to fit on the stone bought for it. An oral poet may labor under restrictions of time or personal stamina or social decorum but only an inscriptional poet has to measure his inspiration against the size of his writing surface. Out of this material fact—which is also an economic fact because stones and stonecutting cost money—evolved an aesthetic of exactitude or verbal economy that became the hallmark of Simonidean style. The Greek term for this aesthetic is ἀκρίβεια,15 a word of double reference: the Greek lexicon defines ἀκρίβεια as "minute care about details of language, exact expression" or "minute care about financial expense, miserliness. " Practices of life and practices of language overlap on an epitaphic stone. 
  This sentence is an important one for Simonides himself and for the whole epitaphic tradition. The idea that human life is not a gift but a loan or a debt, which will have to be paid back, originated with Simonides. It became a cliché on gravestones throughout Hellenistic and Roman times; numerous examples are extant. 21 But in Simonides' phrasing the idea has a bleakness that sets it apart. Facts of stone and money alone cannot account for this sentence. I think we must trace it back to a hard early decision. 
  Simonides was born on the island of Keos: a barren, rocky, impoverished place where the calculus of sheer survival demanded of its inhabitants an economy both radical and obvious. It was the custom on Keos for every male citizen who reached the age of sixty to voluntarily drink the hemlock, in order that there be enough supplies of life to go round. The historian Strabo records the rationale for this custom in a sentence as cold and clear as an epitaph:
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: the last three paragraphs
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Fynsk, C. 1994. "The Realities at Stake in a Poem: Celan's Bremen and Darmstadt Addresses." In Fioretos (1994), 159–85.
  Huppert, H. 1988." In Hollander (1988): 132–55.
  Olsson, A. 1994. "Spectral Analysis: A Commentary on 'Solve' and 'Coagula.' In Fioretos (1994), 267–79.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Add another sentence about Prayer, Mill's, Rattling.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Fynsk, C. 1994. "The Realities at Stake in a Poem: Celan's Bremen and Darmstadt Addresses. " In Fioretos (1994), 159–85. 
  Huppert, H. 1988. "'In the Prayer Mill's Rattling': A Visit with Paul Celan. " In Hollander (1988): 132–55. 
  Olsson, A. 1994. "Spectral Analysis: A Commentary on 'Solve' and 'Coagula. ' In Fioretos (1994), 267–79.