What a little-known Austrian poet can teach us about making meaning from poetry

Cultural objects like poems are a fundamental part of what it means to be human. But how, as humans, do we engage with them? How does the act of interpretation change over time? These were the questions driving the Clayman Institute faculty research fellows talk given recently by Lea Pao, assistant professor of German studies at Stanford University. 

To engage with these questions, Pao explored the case study of Hertha Kräftner, a largely unknown poet – and, crucially, one of the scarce few women poets in the post-war Austrian literary scene. Kräftner committed suicide when she was twenty-three years old, only having published one or two poems. She was “discovered” as a talented poet in the 1960s, after which more of her unpublished work was released in a few collections. In her talk, Pao showed how the treatment of Kräftner’s poems by these later publishers shaped the way the poet has been read and remembered for the several following decades. 

The presentation of Kräftner’s posthumous collections, Pao argued, reflects a deep set of interpretative choices related to the poet’s gender. The collection, for example, included selected diary entries, in addition to Kräftner’s poems, and a 10-page reconstructed biography in the collection includes extensive fixation on her love life, relationships, and potential mental diagnoses. According to Pao, these presentational choices shape how Kräftner’s poetry gets read: as a subjective worldview with no universal value, and as a figure to be diagnosed rather than interpreted.

Pao presented her own translations and interpretations of two of Kräftner’s poems, showing how a strictly autobiographical approach limits our interpretive potential. One poem, called “Mädchen” (“Girl”), has largely been interpreted as an autobiographical piece about Kräftner’s loneliness, but Pao argued it could also be read more broadly about the experience of adolescence. And a poem titled “Die Frau des Henkers” (“The Executioner’s Wife”) has been read as capturing Kräftner’s own sense of feeling trapped. Instead, Pao focused on uncovering the poem’s rich layers of sense impressions and Kräftner’s vivid evocations of taste, smell, sight, hearing, and touch.

With these examples, Pao showed how contradictory forces change and shape how poets are read and remembered, and she began the process of illustrating the work involved in adapting our collective reading practices. Every new reading of cultural objects, she argued, can both uncover and add new layers of meaning.