Adorno

With his Back to the Wall 469

Marie-Luise Borchardt, the second wife of the poet and scholar who
had died in 1945.^95 In his letter to her he stressed several times over that
for him it was ‘both a pleasure and a matter of responsibility’ to make
a selection of Borchardt’s poems and to write an introduction for the
volume that Suhrkamp intended to publish. He was, he said, fascinated
by Borchardt’s language; there was ‘a remarkable meeting of what might
be called Borchardt’s radical conservatism with avant-gardist positions’.^96
The book publication was linked to a talk entitled ‘Charmed Language’
that Adorno was to give in Zurich. He intended to combine the talk
with a reading from the anthology: ‘I believe I have some idea of what
I can and cannot do; and reading is one of the things I can do.’^97
After some strenuous days in January 1968 in Paris, where he gave a
talk on aesthetics at a conference and met Samuel Beckett, he gave the
lecture on Borchardt’s poetry in Zurich in the Theater am Hechtplatz.
Adorno’s pupil Dieter Schnebel remembers the occasion. He arrived
late and was not allowed in so that he could only hear the lecture and
the reading from behind the closed doors:

His soft voice was not able to make itself heard beyond the

hermetically sealed door. Only by holding my ear to the door

could I understand the text as he read it out. By just standing in

front of it.. .I could only hear the cadence of his speech. This

meant that I could hear how musical it was. There were strong

main subjects, melodic secondary subjects of great tenderness,

passages of elaboration in which the characters quickly changed.

Recapitulations stirred memories of earlier statements, and, finally,

the entire piece faded away in an extended coda which neverthe-

less ended with a clear point.^98

In April 1968 Adorno was to give the opening address at the socio-
logy conference in Frankfurt. By then he had already completed the
introduction for the anthology of Borchardt’s poems. In this text Adorno
situates the poet within the tradition of writers who had experienced
the decay of language. But also, through ‘the educated, culturedelement
in his poetry’, he established his affinity ‘with Eliot and Pound, Joyce
and Beckett’.^99 His poetry ‘speaks into a darkness.. ..The heroic ges-
ture of Borchardt’s speech is a despairing response to absolute solitude.
This is the way a child speaks to himself in the darkness, interminably,
in order to exorcize the anxiety darkness causes him.’^100 At the end of
his talk Adorno pointed to Borchardt’s musical side, illustrating it with
reference to an early poem: ‘Do not look into my windows, day. / My
ship wants storm and not a star. / The final thing the heart can do / Is to
be ready to die gladly.’ Adorno concludes: ‘No purer voice of Saturnian
melancholy has sounded since Verlaine.’^101
A source of pleasure for the 65-year-old Adorno, despite his distance
from official recognition, was to receive the accolades that greeted him