Poetry: You can't trim this grass

Rabbi Shneur Günter Grass has written a poem at the age of 84. It is, of course, pertinent and earnest, but lacks Grass’ trademark finesse.

Titled What Must Be Said, the poem primarily reveals the German octogenarian’s concerns about the current standoff between Israel and Iran. He is acutely aware about his own timing and asks, “Why only now, grown old/ and with what ink remains do I say: Israel’s atomic power endangers/ an already fragile world peace?” It seems like the most obvious question to pose, and since the writer is German, since he has confessed to having joined the Waffen SS when he was 17, and moreover, since he is someone who has been awarded the Nobel for literature, the poem can’t just be dismissed as literary excess.

The Israeli Prime Minister was quick to go on record this Thursday. He said, “Günter Grass’s shameful moral equivalence between Israel and Iran says little about Israel and much about Mr Grass.”

Iran, for its part, went on a rhetoric offensive of its own with well chosen superlatives. This is how Iran’s state television played up Grass’ poem, “Never before in Germany’s postwar history has a prominent intellectual attacked Israel in such a courageous way. Metaphorically speaking, the poet has launched a deadly lyrical strike.”

It can safely be assumed that Grass never wanted to launch such a lyrical strike. If anything, he wanted to perhaps unburden himself from the weight of etched personal and public history — ‘Because I thought my own origins/ Tarnished by a stain that can never be removed’ — and arrive at a consensus that will allow an international authority to inspect both countries’ nuclear facilities.

These seemingly realist concerns, however, pale in comparison when one considers all the other accusations that are now being levelled against Grass — anti-Semitism being the most repeated. One can perhaps blame poetry itself.

There is something to the nature of this much-ignored beast that seems to send emotions and passions always tumbling over the top. The mounting sense of hostility that now pervades the relationship between Israel and Iran is indeed an occasion that deserves international thought, and to let a writer’s national and historic particularity come in the way of him voicing his concerns and thoughtfulness, is to me, a disservice to an essential sense of freedom, the last of whose ink Grass does seem to have.

For some reason, I can’t seem to stop thinking about Saadat Hasan Manto as I write this. The man died at the age of 42. He was half the age of Grass. The six trials of obscenity could perhaps make him compete with the German master in terms of notoriety, but Manto’s writings, like Grass’, seem eternally trapped by the shackles of an unforgiving history. In his Letters to Uncle Sam, Manto asks for the States to send Pakistan and India all its old weapons — “As for your military pact with us, it should be maintained. You should sign something similar with India. Sell all your old condemned arms to the two of us […] Your armament factories will no longer remain idle.”

Even though there may have been little that was satirical in Grass’ plea, he was, in essence, just another author looking at the world around him, seeing it unchanged, trying to keep it short and simple, and saying what must be said. That, though, is some cause for cheer. There’s at least one Nobel laureate doing that.

Shreevatsa Nevatia writes at DNA for a living. He may not be wise but he is a lover of wisdom