Abstract

Geoffrey Hill’s approaches to memorializing the Holocaust in his poetry have been widely examined for his innovative, self-conscious, elegiac practice and their embodiment of the anxieties of the postmemorial witness. His 1998 book-length poem The Triumph of Love attempts to bear witness to the trauma of the Holocaust through numerous cross-cutting and argumentative sections which meditate on history, memory, and the role of the poet after atrocity. What is most striking about Hill’s witnessing of the Holocaust in The Triumph of Love is his linguistic representations of photographs of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (1943), a complicated encounter between word and image which has not been previously examined. Hill selects photographs taken by Nazi photographers during the suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in his poetic memorialization of the Holocaust. I argue that Hill depicts these photographs in order to refocus the narrative of perpetration embedded within the images. These reimagined photographs become linguistic objects capable of fostering a state memorialization within Hill’s poem. I investigate The Triumph of Love by considering the role that perpetrator photographs can play in literary representations of post-Holocaust memory.

摘要

杰弗里希尔在他的诗歌中纪念大屠杀的方法因其创新、自觉、哀悼的实践以及对纪念后见证人焦虑的体现而受到广泛的检验。他 1998 年的全书长诗《爱的胜利》试图通过许多交叉和争论的部分来见证大屠杀的创伤，这些部分对历史、记忆和暴行后诗人的角色进行了思考。希尔在《爱的胜利》中目睹大屠杀最引人注目的是什么是他对华沙犹太人区起义（1943 年）照片的语言表现，这是以前从未研究过的文字和图像之间的复杂相遇。希尔选择纳粹摄影师在镇压华沙犹太人区起义期间拍摄的照片，以诗意地纪念大屠杀。我认为希尔描绘这些照片是为了重新聚焦嵌入图像中的犯罪叙述。这些重新想象的照片成为语言对象，能够在希尔的诗中促进国家纪念。我通过考虑肇事者照片在大屠杀后记忆的文学表现中所扮演的角色来调查爱的胜利。