Paul Celan translated several of Marianne Moore’s poems into German for a 1952 issue of Perspectives USA, a short-lived magazine founded by James Laughlin. John Felstiner, in his Celan biography, notes that Celan “responded to her verbal acumen with his own, and without mind-bending exertion. The first two poems went into German cleanly, though without her intricate rhyming and syllabifying. And What Are Years? had a clear call on him . . . Moore’s sinuous truths fit Celan’s own ever-aggravating struggle.”
It was What Are Years that first compelled me toward Moore’s poetry, though it stands apart from much of her work. Felstiner gives only a partial rendering of the poem, but he preserves the question mark in the title, a mark Celan would have encountered. Moore did not approve. In a conversation preserved in the Quarterly Review of Literature, she insisted: “In my ‘What Are Years’ the printers universally have insisted on putting a question mark after the title: ‘What Are Years?’ It’s not that at all! It’s a meditation: ‘What Are Years. What Are Years.’ You’re thinking about it, not asking anyone to come and answer you.”
It has been too long since I returned to Moore. Perhaps her clarity of tone and structural control make her less visible in an era drawn to disarray. But this poem persists, not asking, only turning the thought again in hand.
What Are Years
What is our innocence,
what is our guilt? All are
naked, none is safe. And whence
is courage: the unanswered question,
the resolute doubt,
dumbly calling, deafly listening—that
in misfortune, even death,
encourage others
and in its defeat, stirs
the soul to be strong? He
sees deep and is glad, who
accedes to mortality
and in his imprisonment rises
upon himself as
the sea in a chasm, struggling to be
free and unable to be,
in its surrendering
finds its continuing.
So he who strongly feels,
behaves. The very bird,
grown taller as he sings, steels
his form straight up. Though he is captive,
his mighty singing
says, satisfaction is a lowly
thing, how pure a thing is joy.
This is mortality,
this is eternity.