Daisy Aldan’s Coup de Dés
by Marc Widershien
I first heard of Daisy Aldan in 1978. Howard Gottlieb, Curator of the then Special Collections at Boston University, had asked me to find some poets whose work would be worthy of having a home at the Twentieth Century Archives. I must have discovered her through her celebrated Folder Editions which began publication in the early 1950s. Much of her tabloid is collected by the New York Public Library, and most of her papers are housed at the Beinecke Library at Yale. Daisy published mostly avant garde writers and artists, many of whom are still known. She was one of the first publishers of Ginsberg, Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Rexroth, Kerouac, Jaspers Johns, and de Kooning. They were all there and none of them were known.
At the time I made her acquaintance she was a proponent of Anthroposophy, an offshoot of Theosophy, founded by the Austrian Rudolph Steiner who was also the founder of the Waldorf schools. The school originated with classes for employees at the Waldorf Astoria cigarette factory in Stuttgart, Germany. The schools are headquartered in Dornach, Switzerland, but have satellites all over Europe; but, there are many in America such as Pine Hill and High Moving in Wilton, New Hampshire.
Daisy loved Eurhythmy which is a form of dance where speech is made visible through dance, a discipline developed by Jacques Dalcroze at the turn of the 20th Century; but of course, the Anthroposophists would never admit their debt to Jacques Dalcroze and the American-born dancer Isadora Duncan. Steiner was an occultist. It was exciting material for a poet with spiritual aspirations, and that is what I find characteristic about Daisy Aldan’s work—along with her mastery of modern diction. She explored a super reality not only through her work but through her own personal development. But she was thoroughly grounded as well, and highly practical. Her poems, though, reflect her taste not only in Anthroposophy, but French Surrealism. She was very interested, for example, in the secret society of the Cathars, who were Gnostics of the 12th Century, later persecuted by the Catholic Church, and finally exterminated through the machinations of the Spanish Inquisition. They were an affront to political power just as Aldan was through her free thinking which manifested very early in her relationships with people such as Anais Nin.
Daisy also was an innovator in the translating of French poetry. Her translations of Mallarme are outstanding, and only her version of Un Coup de Des is truly successful. Mallarme’s poem was symphonic in nature. She said that “Mallarme wanted it done on music sheets because it was structured like a symphony.” She tackled a number of writers, including Albert Steffen, the Swiss poet, Edith Sodegran and others. She knew many of the French surrealists. She was an actress, a poet, short story writer, critic, and a constant innovator.
For nearly 14 years, she was my friend and sometime confidante. I have reviewed some her books such as Day of the Wounded Eagle, A Golden Story, Climb Mount Parnassus and Behold, Between High Tides and others. She was unlike any American poet I had read. There was a European tradition in her work, but also the secret traditions of Gnosticism and the Jewish Kabbalah which abounded in her work. She would often write to me from Dornach, and describe her need to do Eurhythmy as a way of getting in touch with her adytum. Eurhythmy, as stated, is an offshoot of modern dance and the science of movement developed by Jacques Dalcroze who also taught music theory in Geneva in the early 1900s. Photographs of his dancers seem to show weightlessness as they leave the ground unbounded by gravity.
I always wondered if Daisy had made the acquaintance of Paul Celan. I don’t recall her speaking to me about Paul Celan whom I discovered in a course taught by Michael Hamburger, an English poet and translator, who taught a semester at Boston University. Michael’s translations of not only Celan, but of Rilke, Holderlein, Heine, Trakl, Georg and others, sound like authentic poetry, not transliterations. Daisy’s German was excellent, and I can only find the nexus between the two by inference. Celan was creating a new German language in his poetry, not to be confused with the same German that Hitler and his gang spoke. Daisy, unlike Celan perhaps, was not a tortured poet, le poete maudit of Rimbaud. These lines from her poem Adam and Eve remind me of a language that can embody not only the time space continuum as we know it, but also a geometric knowledge of a more illusive reality:
The wheel, a leaf framework:
web of slender metal threads: frail insect
transfixed: transformed as I begin to spin:
sphere; ellipse; skeleton cathedral;
fragile and precise sculpture of a life-tree;
indrawn intelligence of galaxies:
silent image of my Self.
I note the original use of colons here, as though one image introduces another, then another in a kind of clustering and unfolding of perceptions, until one comes to the matter of the Self. This is the kind of interior thought that I believe one finds in the work of Paul Celan. It is a peeling away of illusion, and the inner music creates a rhythm beyond the power of meter. Poetry is written with the ear. I think that is primary before any other sense. Without a good ear, a poet cannot form effective imagery. To write by the eye without the ear creates a static poetry of little diversity. There is also no kinetic energy without the ear. Yet aspiring poets are never taught ear training in the way music students are, and that is a pity. Poets of the ilk of Aldan and Celan understood the power of dynamic energy; both were innovators. For Daisy, it was embodied in Stephane Mallarme’s symphonic poems requiring two facing pages to create the diagonals that in painting suggest movement out of stasis.
Was there a surrealist streak in Celan or an anthroposophical leaning?
A critic in the influential German journal Merker stresses Paul Celan's music, “fantasy playful freedom,” likening him to Mallarme and Valery for his “self inspired styled poetic language developed from pure verbal configurations.” But there is a presence of Paul Eluard in Celan, and both Daisy Aldan and Paul Celan knew the great proponent of “objective chance.”
Michael Hamburger in the introduction of a collection of Paul Celan’s work he translated, (Paul Celan: Poems, Persea Books: New York, 1980) writes: “His German could not and must not be the German of the destroyers. That is one reason why he had to make a new language for himself, a language at once probing and groping, critical and innovative; and why the richer his verbal and formal resources grew, the more strictly he confined them to the orbit of his most urgent concerns.” And as Celan said about Paul Eluard, “Lege dem Toten die Worte ins Grab/die er sprach, um zu leben.” (“Lay these words into the dead man’s grave/which he spoke in order to live.”)
In 1993, Daisy Aldan sent me her book of translations by the Swiss poet, Albert Steffen, Climb Parnassus and Behold! The inscription reads, “For Marc, you must now also climb Parnassus and Behold.” The following year, Daisy had an emotional breakdown from which she only partially recovered. It was unlike her. I had known her as a person which such zest. Two months prior, she told me how exciting New York City was at Christmas time. The death of a close family member may have affected her quite deeply.
In that book of translations, Steffen speaks through the mind of the translator:
Ice, that melts in the flame of the heart
flame of heart of hallowed love,
hallowed love, now resurrected,
resurrected out of ashes,
out of ashes of the phoenix,
Phoenix-I on Mt. Parnassus
Climb Parnassus, and behold!
Daisy passed on in New York City at the age of 83 in 2001. She always sounded the warning: Don’t succumb to “the vanity of fame.”