from boudnary 2 (26:1) 99 Poets/1999: An International Poetics Symposium, ed. Charles Bersntein

Ernst Jandl
from "Scenes from Real Life"

Talk, when we do it, and who doesn't, so long as he can speak, talk is fully a matter of extrapoetic reality. Talk is made up of language and bodies, our bodies, the head primarily, but other extremities also, "he talks with his hands" does not of course mean "with his hands alone," except perhaps in the special case of the deaf and dumb among us. It is wholly a matter of extrapoetic reality, even when it is halfway composed of a thing which gives poetry its material. So naturally a poem that deals in some way with talk is a poem that somehow also incorporates extrapoetic reality. "Somehow" is valid for poetry as a whole, for each single one can do it only in a completely determinate way, each in a little bit different way, and so all of them taken together then do it "somehow." I'll show you what I mean, in a spoken poem from 18 April 1957. . . :
talk

blaablaablaablaa
blaablaablaa
blaablaablaablaa
blaablaablaa
bäbb
bäbb
bäbbbäb
bäbbbäbäb
bäbäbbb
bäbb
bäbb
bäbbbäb
bäbbbäb
bäbäbäbbb
blaablaablaablaa
bäbb
bäbb
bäbbbäb
blaablaablaa
bäbäbbb
bäbb
bäbb
bäbäbbb
bäbb
bäbb
bäbbbäb
bäbäbbb
blaablaablaablaa
bäbäbbb

You have noted that this poem is oriented towards conversation, conversation as a extrapoetic reality, although the way that this occurs here, and it must be this way with such a poem, is through and through poetic and not otherwise. It makes use of an open and a closed syllable, one which ends with a vowel, "blaa," and one which ends with a consonant, "bäbb," one which can be found in your dictionary, and one which is invented, "bäbb" being the invention and "blaa" being in the dictionary - but how? Always doubled. If I now begin to spell out words, I find myself almost completely outside any poetic reality and at the same time apparently exclusively in the extrapoetic actuality of language, and I'll do some spelling now, after so long, for the first and perhaps for the last time in these lectures, sometime or other there must be spelling, otherwise why did we learn it? Always doubled, I have never heard it any other way, but what a disappointment, my big two-volume English-German dictionary does not have it, Langenschiedt's Encyclopedic Dictionary, and I have it, nonetheless, from English, I have it in my ear: "that's just blah-blah," but it is not to be found in there, maybe in Dudens German Universal Dictionary, in there of course in German, the neuter noun, imitative of the sound: "das Blabla ," written together, b-l-a-b-l-a, with the accent on the second syllable, Blabla , slang, with the meaning: empty chatter, expressions that say nothing, for example: "The discussion was nothing but ____." But thank God neither Roget's Thesaurus. . . nor Daniel Jones's "An English Pronouncing Dictionary". . . leaves me in the lurch. Both here and there we find the beautiful English word "blah-blah," b-l-a-h-hyphen-b-l-a-h, with even stress, suspended accent, according to Daniel Jones, no differently than in my poem, where the line perhaps can't even be sounded as "blabla- blabla ," but rather only as "blaablaablaablaa," thus to be spoken with suspended accent, even stress, valid evidence for its origin in the English language, not in the German: whereby I, in contrast to both, employ the written form b-l-double a-b-l-double a-b-l double a-b-l-double a. Three dictionaries, then, were needed, to return to our point of departure, for me finally to find, in Langenscheidt's Encyclopedic Dictionary, as American Slang, the mutilation b-l-a-h, blah, undoubled, as I have never heard it, a word-cripple, pitiful. With the meaning entry: nonsense, crap, bragging.
This uninvented syllable, not invented by me anyway, never appears alone throughout the whole length of the poem, it would have negated the concept for me, since its concept for me was constituted by the doubled syllable. But it also never appears, and this is equally decisive, merely doubled, rather four times quadrupled, blaablaablaablaa, and three times tripled, and therein lies a decisive withdrawal from extrapoetic reality, without its becoming in this way less clear, on the contrary. Or imagine to yourself that I had completely renounced the invention of the second component of the word, the repeated "blaablaa"--then I would have had to renounce the poem as a whole. With blaablaa alone, however often repeated, it would have always remained a mere extrapoetic thing. . . . Besides that, it would only be by means of the syllable "bäbb," written b-umlaut-a-double b, that it would be in some way a German poem, which would be thanks to the "a" with two dots over it--even if, in fact, it works across the borders of languages, and thus remains understandable without translation. The title "talk" of course fixes the English point of departure, and besides, because of its monosyllablic character fits better with the play of syllables that follows than would its German counterpart "gespräch." It also holds for the German, or at least Austrian, ear (not eye!) a resonance with the slang, probably regional verb "talken," meaning the babble of a child not yet fully capable of smooth speaking.
For the etymologists among you, one additional note of corroboration of the unconditional necessity of the doubling: what do you make of "Bar" when you are thinking of "Barbar" ? And what you make then of a simple "Blaa"? It is a question, not of poetry, but of onomatopoeia, one of the possibilities of its realization. …
In any case, the invented syllable has gotten a bit too little attention up till now, a question of balance, or fairness. As something not taken from anywhere within extrapoetic reality, if at the same time it reflects this reality, though thanks only to the poem, within which it first came to be, this syllable is an inner poetic being, a poetry-immanent entity, not subject to the laws of any extrapoetic reality at all, it is free, it is free, and would be fully so, were it not compelled to obey, without contradiction, the compulsory laws that make this poem the poem it is. However, it has retained something of its natural-born freedom, and indeed it must, in order to make this poem the poem it is. "bäbb" is the opponent of "blaablaa," and without this syllable there would be no play. Also no poem, that has already been emphasized. It appears eight times in isolation, always taking up a whole line for itself, yet always paired, not doubled, but paired in couplets, four couplets. "bäbb" appears doubled ten times, but not a single time doubled in the manner of "blaablaa"--one does not want simply to imitate--thus never with suspended accent or even stress, rather always with a distinct accent, at the beginning or end, even in the two place where it appears tripled. You will no doubt demand to know how this shifting stress, this displacement of accent, was actually achieved, not how it was spoken, you already know that, rather how it was achieved on paper, how it was notated. Nothing simpler: "bäbbbäb," the doubling with the accent on the forward syllable, appeared as b-umlaut-a-b-b-b-umlaut-a-b, the reverse "bäbäbbb," the other way around. The tripling, with the accent at the end, appeared as: "b-umlaut-a-b-umlaut-a-b-umlaut-a-b-b-b"; the reverse, "bäbbbäbäb," appears in print simply as the inverse: b-umlaut-a-b-b-b-umlaut-a-b-umlaut-a-b. Besides that, and this is a concession to a thing that was once so free, the syllable "bäbb" belongs to 22 of the total 29 lines of the poem, what more could this thing ask in compensation? It is this that brings all the movement into the poem, if you sense movement in it. Nevertheless, "blaablaa" retains all the power lent it by extrapoetic reality.
[Jandl reads "talk" a second time.]

(Translated from the German by Tyrus Miller)