German Poetry in Translation

by Rosmarie Waldrop

The twelve writers in this section are not "representative" of anything. Some Andrew Joron or I have discovered recently, in magazines like Zwischen den Zeilen or Manuskripte. Others are old loves we've taken this occasion to translate more of.

A number of the poets (Elfriede Czurda, Gundi Feyrer, Birgit Kempker, Waltraud Seidlhofer, Barbara Köhler) share a strong interest in visual art as well as a reaction against the rich, saturated language of "beautiful" writing, of "literature." In their very different ways they work with narrow vocabularies, flat, denotative language which they explore through permutation, often moving in Gertrude Stein fashion one step at a time. Barbara Köhler in particular uses a syntax that tests the relation of subject and object. As they begin to slide and oscillate we are taken into new indeterminate spaces, as we might be by film scenes shot in a "blue box."

Richard Anders is interested in the visual too (one of his collages is reproduced here), but from a very different angle. He embraces the heritage of surrealism wholeheartedly, if with a touch of melancholy. Whereas Bruno Steiger seems obsessed with uncovering and dismantling the mechanisms of image and writing.

In Elke Erb's early poems, complex syntax gave the lie to official GDR simplicities. The more recent poems presented here have the more relaxed structure of journal entries, but always with her eye "fixed on the molecule."

So is Michael Donhauser's, who reads nature as if language were a microscope, with scientific precision and the strangeness that comes from the "enlargement" of close attention.

Dieter Gräf's "text machines" tackle our digital world with aggressive, pleasurable energy and speed, with complex collages cut against the grain of both the everyday and Poetry (with a capital P).

Ulf Stolterfoht constructs and deconstructs a world of jargons with a delightful sense of play and satire: "not only the world is the world." He takes particular pleasure in the tortured syntax of bureaucratic German and its empty spin.

Walter Thümler is concerned with the relation that precedes the poem and the foreignness of the other that precedes relation. Also with the shipwreck without which, he says, a poet cannot be a poet.

Carlfriedrich Claus, one of whose "thought landscapes" introduces this section, died a few years ago. A "concrete" poet ? A visual artist? Language is his material, language in movement, the gesture of writing. His work moves along the border that divides language from both image and the speechless — and at the same time makes them touch.

The translations are mine unless marked: translated by Andrew Joron.

© Rosmarie Waldrop. All rights reserved.