US avant-garde literature | Lyn Hejinian and the uncanny stickiness of language

For Lyn Hejinian, in France every word was a bird, “a singing thing,” for example a hummingbird. Photo: Unsplash/Mark Olsen As our lives rapidly fall apart, there is something that seems to hold them together: language. What happened yesterday, the day before yesterday, and the day before yesterday, what Hinz shouted in our faces and Kunz whispered to us, the stupid joke from the commercial and maybe even a line from a hit, the bar chatterer or the indignant chatterer can paste all of this together into a phase of life.

The American poet Lyn Hejinian has used the glue of language to collage one of the funniest and most intelligent books of the younger avant-garde and rather boldly called it “My Life”. Her life is also made up of many colorful mosaic pieces, but you can clearly see the joints: »The hummingbird, for all we know, could sing from dawn to dusk. We were in France, where every word was really a bird, a singing thing. I laugh as if my pots were clean.« It is an autobiography and yet not, at best it is a polytonal swansong for everything autobiographical, including autofiction. Now this masterpiece has finally been published in German.

First, a few tips for orientation: Hejinian, a Californian born in 1941, lived, in true Rousseauist style, with others, including the saxophonist Larry Ochs and her children from her first marriage, in a self-built house in Mendocino County. She founded the publishing house Tuumba Press in 1976. After she became friends with the poet Arkady Dragomoshchenko in Leningrad in 1983, she learned Russian.

Hejinian weaves her web of vague statements and unprovable protocol sentences.

In 1980 she wrote the first draft of her amazing book. The chaos of memories holds her together through a formal exoskeleton: the text has 37 sections, each with 37 sentences, because she had just turned 37. The final version was created in 1987. Now the woman was eight years older, so there are 45 sections with 45 sentences each. The sections only loosely relate to the respective age. In the third section there is actually a sentence about the third year of life and in the ninth and tenth there is something about the ninth, generally the dice are thrown colorfully. What is spooky, however, is that in the 42nd section Hejinian alludes to the beginning of Dante's “Commedia,” “in the middle of our life's path,” and in fact, at 42, she had just passed the middle of her life; she was 83.

So what are their sentences about? It's about family members: the uncle with the wart, the grandpa who parades as a general, or her son Paull; it's about plants: exhausted fuchsias or turnips that long to "be human"; about beach experiences; about horses and ponies; about birds as birds and as words; ominous advice (“Never give money to a blind man without accepting one of his pens”) or sayings (“No temptation is greater than looking back”); about impressionist painting or the church windows of Chartres. Once she makes a joke at the expense of the poet William Carlos Williams, whose pseudo-materialist motto was “No ideas but in things.” For her it is: “No ideas except potatoes.”

Other topics are not being discussed at the moment: Hejinian admits in an essay (“Schreibbheft”, 104/2025) that she has ignored the persecution of communists and similar contemporary events. After all, there are sociological highlights like this: "Women with Walkmans who were randomly interviewed contradicted the impression that they were displaying alienation: 'It's the 80s,' said one, 'all we do is subordinate the space to a non-historical perspective.'" Pregnancy and birth are mentioned in passing, but anything intimately physical is missing, although the poet notes that she had to throw up in the school toilet because she longed for her mother so much. Hejinian weaves her web of vague statements and unprovable protocol sentences.

As a postmodern Penelope, she does not unravel what she has already woven. But she pulls the strings here and there. Individual images, words and phrases recur, sometimes with minimal modifications, in different places. This increases the irritation when reading and makes the translation a herculean task that only two proven poets could manage: Sonja vom Brocke and Norbert Lange.

The first three words of the book already prove how difficult it was for the two of them: “A moment yellow”. This is correctly rendered as “A moment of yellow,” especially since Hejinian writes elsewhere that her earliest memory is the yellow of buttercups. But “yellow” can also mean jealous and cowardly. Since purple appears in the same sentence, referring to the wounded badge “Purple Heart” and thus the bravery of the father who fought in the World War, the yellow no longer seems quite so yellow. To shatter clarity - with the finest watchmaker's hammer at hand - is Hejinian's blatant intention. Vom Brocke and Lange guide you confidently and knowledgeably through this iridescent text. Nowhere do they allow themselves to be carried away by the tricks that other translators use to promote themselves. This gives the text a pleasant sobriety.

Oswald Wiener wrote that the lives of the philistines were novels from the 19th century. Given the autobiographical wave that has been rolling over us for years, some may ask themselves whether they want to see the contradictions of life drown in it. “Memory is the currency of my class,” jokes Lyn Hejinian and shows us in “My Life” how remembering can be thought against memory.

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