Eldbjørg Raknes / Paul Celan / Scott Walker

I was recently sent a couple of CDs to review for Jazzwise by a Swedish singer I was unfamiliar with, Eldbjørg Raknes. I liked one of the two, ‘Solo‘, a collection of pieces comprising only Raknes’ voice and live vocal samples. It was stark and rich with darkness and shadow. The other CD which I liked less, ‘I Live Suddenly’, was the product of Raknes and three other musicians. The words were by the likes of Emily Bronte, Dorothy Parker, Pablo Neruda and Robert Frost, but four songs featured the works of the German Jewish poet and holocaust survivor, Paul Celan. My feeling was that the Celan settings would have benefited immensely from the treatments applied on Solo, in preference to the relatively straightforward music that was actually used.Like most people, I first encountered Celan (many years ago) via Death Fugue (“Black milk of daybreak, we drink it at evening…”); soon after I purchased a volume of selected poems, which I rediscovered the other day lurking at the back of a bookshelf. Although I didn’t include the observation in my review, I wished that Raknes had approached Celan in the same way that Ute Lemper sang the two Scott Walker compositions, ‘Scope J’ and ‘Lullaby (by-by-by)’. These are extraordinary pieces, almost epic in duration; stretched and riven, they’re also direct precursors of Walker’s own ‘The Drift’.

I opened the Celan volume randomly at ‘Snow-bed’ and was immediately struck by its proximity to Walker’s late work which, until now, I could only relate to the likes of Samuel Beckett’s own late work (e.g. ‘Imagination Dead Imagine’), both being denuded of anything extraneous, leaving only flint-like shards of meaning. Celan’s poetry with its shafts of blinding light, shed upon unspeakable horror appears to be a much more appropriate point of reference. Fellow travelers surely?

Eyes, world-blind, in the fissure of dying: I come,
callous growth in my heart.
I come.

Moon-mirror rock-face. Down.
(Shine spotted with breath. Blood in streaks.
Soul forming clouds, close to the true shape once more.
Ten-finger shadow, clamped.)

Eyes world-blind,
eyes in the fissure of dying,
eyes eyes:

The snow-bed under us both, the snow-bed.
Crystal on crystal,
meshed deep as time, we fall,
we fall and lie there and fall.

And fall:
We were. We are.
We are one flesh with the night.
In the passages, passages.