Ute Eisinger
Translated by Andrew Duncan
Ute Eisenger was born in 1964 and lives in Vienna, and we present an extract from her only book of poetry, Bogen. Bogen in German means both “arch” and “bow”, and we have translated the title as “Overarcher”. Overarcher consists of 7 groups of 7 poems, mostly seven lines long and each inflected in the shape of an arch. We present one group. The seven poems can also be arranged together, to form an arch shape. There is one extra poem, ‘Cathedral’, consisting of 6 7-line stanzas. Each poem reflects the formal properties of the shape which is common to bows and arches. Each group of poems includes lines repeated in a preset way, and each 7th poem is composed of lines excerpted from the preceding six poems. This arrangement mimics the symmetry and bracing! of an arch. Bogen also means ‘sheet of paper’, which is what the book is printed on. The rigor of this work may perhaps be grouped with other recent highly systematic work from Austria, by Ferdinand Schmatz and Franz-Josef Czernin. The coherence of the rules set up for the project gives stability to what is actually a new departure in language, a kind of speech which no-one has ever spoken.
from Overarcher
Terminal of ARCH
Queen-
To be able to wait for the bearing place
on the upper bow-arm (-wing), of paseng horn;
with over-extension to the counterstressed
middle part: stems from tree, what the left fist grips;
lower wing endows the gazing- gauging-lens,
out of the horn of the buck paseng, with:
“Where all will, everything breaks inwards.”
–
Hunter
Firmly drawing: present – aimed device
(skittering away because of a slurred angle)
and with excited hand to keep through
scent trail your eye on the bull’s (in the hurricane’s);
the naked lens takes
flight – takes sight,
backlash behind it, the endeavour, the sweep along
taught from being on to being away,
of the image, in the recoil.
Describing a
A crown of gold catches plaited sinew
on upper bow-arm (-wing), of paseng horn;
smoothed he turns his back from the target.
Middle part: stems from tree,
what the left fist grips
turned towards the archer also lower wing
of round bays, out of the horn of the buck paseng, with
eye, in which the sinew is made fast.
Archstone, Kernel
To be able to wait for the bearing place
in the knowledge, that any time it could be the capstone,
with over-extension to the counterstressed,
stroked-smooth waiting
endows the gazing- gauging-lens,
everyone wants to achieve, to be stretched out –
where all will, everything breaks inwards.
Hall
Weight, laid on two footings of arch,
of the soundless, unseizable nothing, lashed by vortices,
guessed at ridge of immense span, from
whose mid-line the arrow (arc) would fall, if breadth did not brace it,
with jutting in from both sides, again walled-over
by the art of best performance; run-up and run-out;
supported – loyal, sturdy – by counter-bearers.
Bearer
Laid out on firm pressure; falls
(slant view is called fraction)
after laying-on the hand to hold its eye
to a timeless eye (of the hurricane)
to spatial curve, brake, tug –
suffered break-in, collapse; allows
infinite stretching of itself;
it bends span to span and back.
-warrior
A crown of gold catches plaited sinew
in the knowledge, that any time it could be the capstone,
smoothed he turns his back from the target
in stroked-smooth waiting,
turned into the archer; also round bays
everyone wants to achieve, to be stretched out –
eye, in which the sinew is made fast.
An Afterword on Overarcher
The first implements which mankind invented and used strengthened or extended essential qualities, revealed as inadequate to carrying out exertions: so the stone was a harder fist, the stone blade cut better than the flat of the hand, the base of the arm reached out into flight with the throwing spear.
This early stage of evolution, preceding what we are familiar with as “technology”, is called by the anthropologist ‘organ projection’. It was surpassed by the development of a tool that combined qualities of different, not directly connected, organs, as it summoned up the best energies of all to a single goal: in the arrow flight – of the bow.
The first bows consisted of elastic branches, were strung with sinews of animals, and were fitted to a feathered reed arrow and shot. They were easily over-spanned, and fragile. The bow of antiquity, highly developed in Asia, as Ulysses used it for his master-shot depicted by Homer (Odyssey 21, 420), was because of its costly and time-consuming method of construction such an expensive device that it was left at home while the hero was off waging war and going on voyages, and was kept safe in the treasure chamber (Odyssey, 21, 8).
Such a composite bow ( ), with a marked ‘elbow’ or in the form of a two-bayed “Cupid’s bow”, may have consisted (in the classic case of Iliad 4, 105-111) of a pair of horns from the Mediterranean mountain goat paseng, delicately married to each other by means of a strip of wood. Written evidence of its production, and excavated remains, show the common composite bow as rather being made of layers of different, treated materials – different woods, paseng horn, and sinew – joined, glued with pitch, and covered with leather for protection.
At least on the horns, in order to stretch the bowstring (made of several plaits, twisted), the bow was reinforced with metal.
Such composite bows were produced in Egypt, among other places. In Greek they are called “smoothed”, because their high value – setting aside the long production time, which lasted 5 to 10 years, while the organic materials of the composition were multiply and at great expense macerated, fulled, softened, and dried – was thanks to the careful smoothing (filing, grinding) of layers of diverse nature. For each one of them possessed energy-conducting (-guiding) qualities, which must not see their power and capacity impaired under the hand of the (“horn-carpenter”). Rather, the laminations (seven, sometimes eight) of the bow had to be fitted to each other (dowelled, wedged, keyed, glued), as well as being “smoothed” to the common goal: stringing – drawing – arrow nocking – and commended to the intention of their association.
The materials for such a “smoothed bow” derived from bellwethers with the largest growths of horn, from the sinews of the most powerful cattle, from the wood of quite straight trunks. Creatures from regions distant from each other, whose lives had elapsed at great intervals from each other, were merged in the bowyer’s workshop by virtue of their best qualities and smoothed to an – invincible! – bow.
Art consists in the harmony of many energies towards one goal, without depriving any one of its essence.
(The whole is only whole when mindful of the wholeness of its parts.)
The energy it takes to draw a bow is around 30 kilos. It is measured by hanging up the drawn bow by its mid-point, until the string forms a vertical: laden now with lead-filled linen bags the weight, which is hanging from the mid-point of the string, between this and the mid-point of the bow, gives the energy it takes to draw the bow, once the distance between the two corresponds to the length of the arrow.
Mostly it corresponds with the weight of a burden which the archer is able to carry for a long distance.
The size of the burden which a bridge has to bear is necessary to work out its span and the construction of its arch. (A vaulted ceiling is the addition of a set of arches, the construction – in three dimensions – of a cupola is rather more complex.) Before the arrival of reinforced concrete construction, all bearing structures (buildings. bridge, monuments) were based on the arch. Gothic bridge arches reached spans of over 70 metres.
The weight which an arch has to sustain depends on the density and direction of the forces bearing on it, through their combination, and whose resistance or redirection is sought in designing arches – or in the arches which sustain a vaulted ceiling.
On paper, one constructs a parabola ( an arch) by connecting the apexes of existing parabolas (or connecting intersection points by tangents).
Because of the complexity, an architect can never trust an arch to the teeming parameters on the drawing-board; but has to trust to experience.
A curiosum in vault arches is offered by the parabolic, or catenary, arches of Antonio Gaudi. Setting out from the array of ideal forms and functions offered by Nature, the Catalan considered that arch to be the best and most beautiful which describes exactly the shape which it assumes when it takes up its load.
The poly-funicular tiltability of the forces of an arch were utilised by Gaudi using the following model, conforming to this premise of the best form as the most beautiful ornament, in the building of the Sagrada-Familia cathedral in Barcelona.
The loads of the dome, as calculated, are distributed as lead weights in linen bags and hung from models of the arches on threads. Gaudi reflected the shapes of the hanging bridges, which came about in this way, in the horizontal plane – although he ascribed no aesthetic justification to this plane – and so derived the framework for the gigantic tortoise-shell and stalactitic termite mounds of his controversial cathedral.
The construction of arches follows the need for extension through connection of two things in space. In its execution, they overcome prevailing rules (gravity, time), are able to found something new (in the control of space, in models).
Our ancestors needed at first only a beam of wood or a slab of slate in order to roof over free-standing bases and turn them into primitive shelters.
Until – with increasing enterprise, with inventiveness in proportion – obstacles could be overcome, distances mastered, monuments erected. In the at first hesitant – layer by layer, course by course – arching of projecting stones (bricks) , the eager weaving of wattle and daub, the art of arch-building found its origin.
To evaluate and match the burden with the bearer is to connect visible forces with forces which are still invisible and not yet knowable; to measure space is to cross space and to ignore one’s limits.
Andrew Duncan is the author of Anxiety Before Entering a Room and Skeleton Looking at Chinese Pictures and is a translator of German-language poetry. To see more about him, visit www.pinko.org
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.