Uwe Tellkamp, Rosa Luxemburg and Peter Rühmkorf: would you go to that party?

I finally got round to collating the translations I've been doing over the last three years, the work already published and what is forthcoming. Looking back on them, the writers I've translated appear to me like guests invited to a rather odd party, where people often don't know what to say to each other, but where the guests are still determined to linger. Long after courtesy has called to say that it is time that they were fetching their coats.

Here's the list:
* A sample translation, commissioned by Suhrkamp, from Uwe Tellkamp's award winning novel The Tower. My translation can be read at the Suhrkamp website, here. This is the scene where the young doctors from different wards of an early 1980s East German hospital are fiercely competing for the Socialist Challenge Cup: Who's got the best Christmas tree? Dressed in Father Christmas outfits, they break into The Party's private plantation, at dead of night, where each tree is hung with the name of a leading city functionary, and nick one of the finest evergreens.

 Interestingly, it is only since Suhrkamp published this sample translation at the start of 2012 that they've gone on to sell English world rights digital for this book to Frisch & Co., and to sell English world rights print to Penguin Press, both sales happening a full five years after the novel was published, and after the rights had already been sold for all other major world languages.

* A translation of Michael Buselmeier, German novelist and poet. My translation of an excerpt of his novel The Fall of Heidelberg was published in the magazine No Man's Land, edited by Isabel Fargo Cole, Katy Derbyshire and Cathrine Hales, in 2013. Full text plus me reading an audio version of the translation are available in the online edition of the magazine, here.

Willy Brandt: Does disappointment in social democracy ever really have a beginning?

For the millions in the English speaking world who feel chronically let down by social democracy — particularly post Blair and post the exposure of the Obama illusion — it may be a comfort to discover that many German social democrats became disappointed with social democracy much earlier. Willy Brandt, who, from 1969 to 1974 became the first social democratic Chancellor since the Weimar Republic, would have been 100 this year. The German papers have been full of eulogies for the man; so it was refreshing to find the poem I've translated below giving a different perspective on Brandt, first published in the weekly newspaper Die Zeit, in December 1966. That was the month in which Brandt entered as a junior partner into a coalition government lead by Kurt Kiesinger, by this stage a CDU leader, but a man who'd previously had a moderately successful career inside the NSDAP, the Nazi party. 

Alongside Brandt's willingness to work with an ex-Nazi, there were two other main points of his coalition politics which Delius, the poet, and many others who had previously supported Brandt now found unacceptable. The first was the introduction of state of emergency legislation, referred to in the second stanza of the poem. The second was the cooperation over employment bans for political radicals, which, in practise, primarily meant Communists, or members of organisations dominated by Communists, including the Society for the Victims of the Nazi regime and for Anti-Fascists. Brandt's cooperation on this issue culminated in his Redundancy for Radicals legislation of 1972, which focused on public sector workers. 1100 people either lost their jobs or were refused jobs as a result of this act, with 2200 disciplinary procedures and 136 redundancies among teachers alone (for more details use your browser's translator software to read the Wikipedia 'Radikalenerlass' page on the subject.)

These were policies which Brandt was supporting back in 1966 already, when Delius wrote this poem. These were the policies which caused an irreparable break between many Germans, who had seen themselves as social democrats, and their former party, the SPD.

Abschied von Willy                                                             Farewell to Willy

Von Friedrich Christian Delius                                     By Friedrich Delius, trans. Henry Holland

Brandt: es ist aus. Wir machen nicht mehr mit.        Brandt: we are through. We're not playing any more. 

Viel Wut im Bauch. Die Besserwisser grinsen.            Ready to punch out. While the know it alls are grinning.

Der letzte Zipfel Hoffnung ging verschütt.                  The final coin of hope falls on the scrap heap.

Für uns ist längst krepiert, was Sieben Schwaben    What still seems good for Seven Swans like you

wie euch noch gut scheint, euch zu kopulieren.        is decrepit stuff for us, a corrupt corpus.

Den Spieß herum, es gilt zu formulieren:                    So put the foot on the other boot, shout it clear and raucous: 
Wer Notstand macht, der will den Notstand haben.   Who legislates an emergency state should know he's going to get that.                                                                                                       

Wer jetzt nicht zweifelt, zweifelt niemals mehr.        If you've no doubts now, you'll not be doubting never.

Was jetzt versaut ist, wird es lange bleiben.                      What's screwed up now, will stay that way for long.

Von Feigheit. Dummheit lässt sich nichts mehr schreiben,         On cowardice and stupidity I can not write forever

Kein Witz kommt auf. Verzweiflung nur und Spott, die treiben      With punch-lines lost; just despair, and scorn, endeavour

Uns zurück, wohin ich gar nicht will,                                           To push me back where I don't want to idle,

Verflixt noch mal, ich stecke im Idyll.                                           For chrissake, God, I'm stuck here in my idyll.

'Stuck here in my idyll': these words might also fit to Brits today who still see themselves as social democrats, but who wouldn't even consider touching the post Blair Labour Party with a barge pole. It may be a good position from which to launch satire. It's a poorer position from which to launch politics. 

The holy - and holy shit.

I just had my first encounter with poetry from Franz Josef Czernin, born 1952. As there’s no published English translation to quote from, I’ll quote the first four lines of his poem sonnet, with the plough taken from his 2002 collection elements, sonnets in my own translation:

with flames. tongues, out and playing at us, up, wild lashing

and edged vivacious wheels which are hot in our hands,

what heaves us up to heaven, fiery in their prompting

until it off it flies, reveals, far off and still akin:

This sonnet sequence is built from, as the title of the collection suggests, the four antique elements and aims – according to Michael Braun writing in the latest issue of the literary newspaper Volltext  - at embodiments of star constellations in concrete poetic material. Braun reads Czernin as writing using the poetics of the early German-language romantics – Friedrich Schlegel, Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis to your man on the street) & Clemens Brentano. Not really knowing these writers myself, Czernin reminds me above all of Gerald Manley Hopkins on first impressions – the way stressed syllables appear to be crammed into a line (the original first line has got 8, my impromptu translation 7), the alliteration, the readiness to break with colloquial idiom & grammar for poetic effect.

Czernin hasn’t only been interested in poetic effects, but also in the subject of affectedness, how the standards with which publishers & literary establishments judge texts in any given period constantly need to be questioned. That’s what lead him to write and publish, in conjunction with Ferdinand Schmatz, a book of purposefully bad poems at the start of his career: Journeys. Around the World in Eighty Poems (1987, Residenz Publishers) tricking his own publishers in the process – a piece of holy shit, in other words. It only became clear that Czernin & Schmatz had done this when they brought out, later the same year, an exposé of what one may have been nothing more than a clever publicity stunt: The Journey. Into the Whole Deep Ditch in Eighty Squashed Dogs (1987, Droschl); - I guess Residenz didn’t have the guts to publish the exposé after the first book had left them looking foolish. Shame.

Is bad poetry, or to go a step further, intentionally bad poetry, possibly just as rewarding & useful to read as the poetry that they’re claiming is good? And what if Czernin enjoyed that early confidence trick of his so much that he’s simply gone on playing it with his audience & his reception into the literary establishment, writing on through his acceptance into the Darmstadt German Academy for Language and Poetry – continuing to write what many readers will experience as in some way holy, though it might only be holy shit? My gut feeling is that Czernin isn’t doing this; but I’m going to keep close tabs on his future poems. And if these turn out to be the latter of these two holys I may keep it up my sleeve; it’s often better to let Squashed Dogs lie.

At the Thalia Theatre's Faust

On the October 1^st we saw the second night of the Thalia theatre’s uncut production of Goethe’s Faust. More on this theatre experience later, but we’ll begin with the end, with Faust, now saved, being pulled up to heaven. The text of these final lines of the play belongs to a “Chorus Mysticus”; in most productions these verses will be recited, but at the Thalia they were sang with the whole cast on stage, to a catchy tune, musical style. This is my English translation of what Thalia’s Chorus Mysticus sang:

All which will die on us

Is only allegory;

The inadmissible

is our contemporary;

The indescribable

now has been done;

The forever-womanly

draws us ever on.

Catching Rilke’s Autumn

Because Rainer Maria Rilke’s most famous autumn poems evoke the season so strongly, it becomes hard, after years of living with these lines, to distinguish between your own recurring autumn experience - & Rilke’s framing of that experience. Harder, still, in days of climate change, to catch those “two final southerly days” that Rilke refers to in “Autumn Day”, which was published in his 1902 volume “The Book of Images.” Yet while our Hamburgian grapes rot on the vine – sweeter & bigger than last year but still too sour to eat many of – I feel it’s my last chance for this year to post my translations of ‘Autumn Day’ & of ‘Autumn’.

Autumn Day

Lord – it is time. The summer was so big.

Lay your shadows down upon the sundials,

and down the dales let the winds fly loose.

Order fullness from the last few fruits;

give them two final southerly days,

push them into ripeness – and hunt

the last sweetness in the heavy grape.

If you’ve no house yet, you’ll not build one now.

If you’re alone now, you’ll stay that way for long,

you’ll wake, read, write long letters,

and wander here and there through the avenues,

restlessly, as the leaves tumble down.

Autumn

The leaves are falling, falling from afar,

as if withered in the heavens’ furthest gardens;

they’re falling with a gesture of negation.

And in the nights the heavy earth is falling

out of all stars into loneliness.

We’re all falling. That hand, there, falls.

And take a look around you: it is in everything.

And yet there’s One, who holds this Falling

infinitely gently in his two hands.