![]() She’s wearing the world’s sadness, in a subway, listening to the melancholy music of the accordion, finding a way that that Weltschmerz is elevated into something like a lament that also has the characteristic of a lullaby and a prayer. And I think there’s something about having a word for it, “Weltschmerz,” that allows you to realize that not all sadness comes from you, but sometimes you are just wearing the world’s sadness for a while and trying to figure out what to do with that.Īnd in many ways, this is what Carolina Ebeid is doing here. Years ago, I had a colleague, Karen, and sometimes you’d say, “Well, how are you today, Karen?” And she’d say, “Oh, I’ve a bit of the Weltschmerz on me.” She was a great one for many languages. It kind of implies that when the sadness of the world is on you it can be used, in a way, to speak about not being sad because something particular happened to you on your way to work, but being sad because of world-sadness. But even before that, there’s this reference to how the music of the accordion comes toward the speaker of this poem: “the accordion player / near the vendor’s hutch.” And then, the music “comes toward me, world- / sorrow drafting.” And “world-sorrow” is a gorgeous word from German, and Paul Celan wrote in German for his whole life. And partly that’s by the evocation of Paul Celan. This poem always, to my mind, signifies a certain way of looking at sadness. And it gathers in the sad, and it wraps the sad in the beautiful music of the accordion and amplifies and dignifies it with the elegance of a prayer offering, through music. And it gathers in the living and the dead. The poem really is something like a prayer from the bowels of the Earth in the subway station. The locale that’s described in this poem is so extraordinary: “Reconstruction delays, / the stench of piss & nothing / weather shaped, nothing ocean spun.” And then there’s “hammers / & dynamite tunnel out / a labyrinth.” And then there’s a busker, too, playing.Īnd it’s not only that, but Carolina Ebeid is also taking the music that that busker is offering on the “pleated lung” of the accordion and allowing that to rise like a prayer, up from the subway, up to the overworld and then rising even further, past these tall buildings, up into the sky and up to what she calls “Cause-Of-All.” That’s hyphenated, that phrase, almost like it’s a new name for God, or she’s referring to an old name for God: “Admit his music, / Cause-Of-All, it is handmade.” This poem is an amazing gathering-together of the experience of reading something while you’re in a subway station, and at the same time taking in so much else that’s happening. Greyhounds, the corridors of silver buildings, the thunderīecause it seeks the high, lone sun. Past scaffolding & saplings blown like tonophants, ![]() It lifts away from us climbing the stairs I follow his fingers’ minuscule work over a column of keys, Steam hammersĪ labyrinth, this inner ear where eros doesn’t linger. Near the vendor’s hutch-but it comes toward me, world. “I can’t say whether the other commuters stand arrested “Reading Celan in a Subway Station” by Carolina Ebeid: And somehow, the humor of it all and the tenderness and the languagelessness of everything combined to make that a moment that I’ve never forgotten. And then the person on the other side offered a peppermint. Eventually, one person next to the person who was crying put a Kleenex on her knee. And it was obvious, but there was a kind of a respect and an awkwardness in trying not to draw too much attention to it. ![]() And somebody in the middle of this carriage was sitting and was crying. And in the underground in London people don’t talk at all, really. Pádraig Ó Tuama: My name is Pádraig Ó Tuama, and once, I was on the underground train in London.
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