der Nebelgang

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“A translation,” I thought as I’d paused on the ski trail to catch my breath and look around, listen around. (No sound. No birdsong, no human sound: no gear shift or metal grind or churn of airplane overhead.) I looked up. A complex skeleton of tree overhead, each limb outlined in thick white. A translation of a tree, those thick white lines underscored by thin lines of black beneath. A white tree version of the damp-black tree beneath, a bit cumbersome, a bit heavy, but beautiful, the two kinds of lines living together. I love side-by-side translations, love to eyeball the disparate marks between the two, to see how the translator handled the line break, the punctuation. Love to examine the original for repeating words or ideographs or glyphs. When they live side by side on a page or set of pages, the original and the translation can reside like limb and snowshade.

I may be flirting with the limits of free use here, but I’ve just had such an enjoyable time poking through Wickerwork, poems by Christian Lehnert, translated by Richard Sieburth, published by Archipelago Books, 2022, and messed around with by me, with help from a certain unmentionable online translation program, and some German-English dictionaries. Again, I realize, given Lehnert’s interest and careful attention to form, rhythm, and rhyme, I am guilty of the treason of translation. Sieburth’s translations are perfectly fine. I mean no disrespect to this lovely volume. It’s just that I poked around and found some little gems in the language that delighted me. So. Here are two more poems from this intriguing collection, and the results of my meddling.

Erster Advent, 2016,  Autobahn vor Breitenau

Ein Rauhgefieder treibt, es weiß den Weg nicht mehr.
So heißt der Nebelgang: Gezeiten ohne Meer.

Sieburth’s translation

The wings, raw with wind, no longer know their reach.
Thus the name of the fogs rolling: tides with no beach.

My find:

A rough-feathered bird drifts along, it no longer knows the way.
That is what the misty paths are called: tides without a sea.

And here’s one more:

Ruhendes Jetzt

Die Apfelblüte fällt, verwelkt, kehrt nie zurück.
Du findest dich in ihr für einen Augenblick.

Sieburth’s translation:

Now at rest

The apple blossom falls, fades, with this you can never reckon,
yet find yourself within it for a never-ending second.

My find:

Resting now

The apple blossoms fall, withered, never to return.
You find yourself in them for a moment.

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Always With the Questions!: One Poet’s Writing Manual

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“Poems have a way of hearing the accusations that put the heart on trial. I’ve always had the question, Why does a poem begin? I like noticing the feeling that something is already interrogating me.” —Alice Oswald https://www.theparisreview.org/…/the-art-of-poetry-no…

You got it right there, Alice. I got nothin’ but questions.

Always with the Questions!

Und Leiber stiegen auf / ein Tausendklagen /

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The mead of poetry is honey and blood, according to the Icelandic Snorra Edda. I like that sense of sweet things and life’s essential fluid, of stickiness and the taste of iron. A little buzz of life, a little drop of death. It gives me, to quote John Irving’s Owen Meany, “the SHIVERS.”

I like when a poem gives me the SHIVERS. A book of poems in the library recently caught my eye — it was small in size, with a pretty cover, and it spoke to me, although I’d never heard of the author, nor the translator, nor the publisher. It’s called Wickerwork, by Christian Lehnert, translated from his German native language by Richard Sieburth. Lehnart is a contemporary poet, lauded in Germany, born in Dresden, teaching in Leipzig.

I bogged down two pages into Sieburth’s introduction but skipping forward to the actual poems I was intrigued to find, in the first section, small, interesting pieces based on flora, and sometimes fauna. I do love a short poem. And a little Latin nomenclature. The poems are laid out with two-line poems on one side and eight-line poems on the facing page. I’m unclear why, but the intro told me the author is much interested in form.

One poem caught me, and I spent time with the translated lines, and then pondering over the German, a language I don’t speak but have sung in, so I have the feel of it a bit in my mouth, and have tackled translations before with the help of dictionaries and a simplistic sense of German’s syntax and strategies. And being curious inherently, although I was interested in Sieburth’s translation, something made me dump the little poem into Google translate (I hear the gasped horror of translators and foreign language teachers everywhere) just to get a sense of some of the choices the translator had made. And it was then that I got the shivers. Sieburth wanted to maintain the rhymes and form of the original, but of course, in so doing, you trade off some possibilities of language. (English is a notoriously terrible language to rhyme in.) But the author, of course, may be horrified at my jettisoning his careful planning in form. But oh, the poems seem so much more strange and interesting in English when unleashed. Forgive me, Mr. Lehnert! But I did get the shivers!

Der Aufbruch der Graugänse

Christian Lehnert

Ein Schwingen / Laut und Schwingenschlag / gesagt
War nichts / doch nichts blieb sich von nun an gleich:
Die Auen zitterten um einen Teich /
Dort war kein Land / dort war ein andrer Tag.

Ich stand in einer Schalung / einem Pochen /
Das in die Knie kroch / sah Flügel ragen /
Und Leiber stiegen auf / ein Tausendklagen /
Und alles schrie / das Licht war wie gestochen.

Translation by Richard Sieburth

Grey geese breaking into flight

A leap / sheer wingbeat and alarm / not a word
uttered / yet nothing quite itself from this point on:
The meadows taking fright around the pond /
The land disappearing / and the day unheard.

As I stood there in a formwork / a pain sliced
Through my knees / I saw wings rushing into flight
And bodies on the rise / thousands of cries /
Everything screaming / the light had been knifed.

my translation

the departure of the greylag geese

A flapping / loud and the beating of wings / nothing
was said / yet nothing would ever be the same:
The meadows trembled around a pond /
there was no land there / there was another day.

I stood in a formwork / a throbbing
crept into my knees / and I saw wings protruding /
And bodies rose up / with a thousand cries /
and everything screamed / the light was as if stung.

When the speaker felt that throbbing in his knees and, to my reading, glanced down and felt he was growing wings. Isn’t that amazing? And do you, as I do, become out-of-bodied when you hear the cry and flap of a flock of geese scrolling across the sky? Do you feel, as I do, some kind of primal call to go? Or at least a great sadness at their departure, which heralds the shift in seasons, the irrefutable changes rendered by it, what it portends. The shiver of the coming winter.

Anyway, such is the pleasure and discoveries of translation.

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the methodology of giving up

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Something is scratching in the walls and I imagine it’s the stucco itself, chilly and damp out there in the dark morning, seeking to ease inside for a bit of warmth. “Is a River Alive?” asks Robert Macfarlane in his recent book, and I have long wondered the same of rocks. I have a nodding acquaintance with many. Well, I’m doing the nodding, anyway. At least in the quick time frame of human life.

An animate world is the kind I want to live in, so I make assumptions that anima is everywhere. “Sorry,” I say to the throw rug whose corner I flipped up with careless footing. I feel a little bad it has to stare up at that water stain in the ceiling I can’t get around to painting over. But the stain looks like a feather. So that’s nice.

It is an old tradition, to see the world this way. I am reading Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s book Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies. Simpson is a member of Alderville First Nation in Ontario, Canada, and is a scholar of Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg, the indigenous people of southern Ontario. This book is an imaginative and strange telling of tales in which characters are at once human and other-animate — a tree, for example, that pushes its shopping cart around Toronto; a caribou spirit who wears a backpack it found on the street. One section is voiced by the geese preparing for departure, trying not to feel judgey about the ones choosing to stay behind (in the changing climate that allows such choice now). Two sections are the voice of a frozen body of water, Mashkawaji, which in Ojibwe means “is frozen.”

Here is a poem from Mashkawaji’s second section, called Mashkawaji’s Theory of Ice.

the failure of melting

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

the frozen sighed
and gave up

the lake wrote
its letter of resignation

with the useful
usefulness
of despair

july 15
30 cubic metres
five storeys

your finger is
tracing nothing on my arm
as if we are the only ones here

i bring you coffee
a blanket
moonlight

i bring you stitches
a feather

three books

the caribou
sit
measuring emptiness

the fish
study
the methodology of giving up

the molecules
calculate
the accumulated effects of hate

you break
down
to a less ordered state

the ice
breathes
and gives in

the lake
runs
out of options

july 15
30 cubic metres
five storeys

just like
the Gwich’in*
always said

there are all kinds
of ways
to fail.

*The Gwich’in are northerly indigenous people of North American, living in Alaska, Yukon, and the Northwest Territories

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and stops the smock and linger of pond racket

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Again (again?) thinking about that treacherous “about”-ness of poems, or of my attempts toward a poem. How seeking to write “about” some Important Thing makes my work flat and explainy and earnest in the way of a Hallmark card. Nevertheless, I persevere. I have been trying to figure out how to write a poem that informs, as I want to talk about Important Subjects in a way that Opens the Eyes, but I want to do it with grace, ease, play, subtlety.

But do I, as a reader, want to be informed? Is that what I want from a poem? No. Something else. I want the something elseness of poetry. The subtext and subtle unsaid and loud silences and momentary confusions that ease into — what? — a moment of wisdom, maybe, or of connection to an Other, or of perspective, insight, or something more visceral — the ah ha, the oh, the yes.

What I admire about this poem by Jennifer K. Sweeney is that she is committed to communicating information but also to the playful use of sound and language to carry that information out of the sometimes-tedious realm of explication. And also how the denseness and movement of it enact the subject matter. How it dams and flows, hurriedly gathers and lets loose.

I sometimes ponder the arcane information I have learned from fiction — I know to keep my heels down if I go off a ski jump (thanks, Nancy Drew), and how starfish regrow arms (thanks, Madeleine L’Engle), that the province of Quebec is a hotbed of organized crime (thanks, Louise Penny). But I have not considered all that I’ve learned from poems, mostly because what I learn is less arcane information and more like life. But hey, if a poem wants to slip me some info, well, bring it.

Slowing Down the River

Jennifer K. Sweeney

 
When beavers are threatened—

water moves faster, darts straighter, stops

its slow seesaw into sloughs and side channels

and stops the smock and linger of pond racket,

less water spreads across floodplains, less plants 

root, edgewater flowers not stationed to bloom,

less birdsong, less chatter, less surface skimmer,

less water stored underground, less summer

seepage, more fire, less swamp, less leaf-huddle,

stick hovel, less hidey-holes for native fish, less

sediment, less firmament, less space for Sockeye

who spend half their lives in fresh streams, who

need deep slow water to hide from predators

and feast, to rest from raging spring currents,

less silver-maroon braids of water & matter, less

refuge, less salmon, who in a healthy river have

so little chance to survive the run, and when the

slick runs overfast, life is chased right out of it,

and when beavers cannot be restored quickly

enough to their woodsy-banksy lives—those

sweet-hunkered fiberworkers crafting detritus

into lattice and cave—whose communal busying

changes time-flow into longshore drift and spawn,

the water stops breaking, the soil-rich pools empty,

the salmon the salmon the salmon the salmon

less full less welcome, less shallows for thousands

of eggs laid in redds, less silt for young who grow

under gravel, so that beaver “analogs” mimic

their structures, beavers without beavers, restoring

riparian dams so the waters might wait for the

furred sod-lifters to return to the river’s lap and

grind and gather—hear it—so the Sockeye will

continue on, the Sockeye who are sometimes swiped

by bear paws and taken deep into wood, and who

then feed the forest, their nitrogen found in the salt

heart of the Sempervirens.

https://www.wayfarermagazine.com/p/slowing-down-the-river

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Toshi doshi ya

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A poem by Basho

(tr. RH. Blyth)

Toshi doshi ya
saru ni kisetaru
saru no men

Year after year
on the monkey’s face
a monkey face

“Mask” some have translated that second monkey face, and yes, sure, but I like the helplessness of that there-I-am-again-in-the-mirror sigh. The slight recoil from an unexpected self in the plate glass window. For are we not unknown even to ourselves?

Walter Benjamin sees in Klee’s “angelus novus,” its nervous eyes, an angel with the past wrecked at its feet, its back to the future. Because who can look at what the face becomes, the one coming, not the old frown-worn, judgey-mouthed, jowly-throated, the Dutch cheekbones broad as a tidal flat, mustache of my black-Irish aunt, but the wide-eyed terrored face of tomorrow, how the world leans on the face, making it a rumpled pillow, and then whatever’s next and its imprint.

Angel, don’t try to hide it with your infernal flapping wings. Step aside so I may see tomorrow’s monkey face, the past reflected behind me in future’s terrible mirror. We will laugh and laugh.

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I threw my voice

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I found myself trying to write about something, which is always a mistake. I lose all grace and instead plod along in earnest prose making some painstaking point painfully and yet missing it. Missing the point, which is not a point but a wave, or a confusion of waves, or an eddy of points and waves, or some such unutterable thing because if it were utterable I would have just said it but instead mumbled this other obvious blather, feeling virtuous and knowing. It’s the not-knowing. It’s always the not-knowing. So I have to begin again, and move beyond my knowing, into and into and into the question. What is the question? Well, that is often the question. I’ll take a breather and move back into this about-thing some other day, less gray and dismal, less in the deadzone that is the last week of the calendar year. Maybe January will inch me closer to some words and some image that might indicate the question, so I can leave behind in 2025 that poor, earnest knowitall who is myself.

Here’s a poem by Ted Mathys that I found in the Bennington Review that I admire for its confusions, its play, its distracted looking about, and how it stumbles down the page, as we do along the sidewalk on any given day, finding recollections, losing track, having conversations in your head.

Fluencies

Ted Mathys

I am a person
on whom nothing is lost.
By whom it’s been lost,
the nothing, I’m unsure.
Like a suntan it just
appeared on my arms.
Now I carry nothing
beneath my routine.
When I place a cabbage
in the shopping cart
nothing mimics the gesture.
Nothing sleeps as I sleep.
I never ask after its owner
because nothing is an echo
that will, given time,
reinfect the source.

✦

She gave me
the cold shoulder.
I cradled it in my palms
like an ostrich egg.
I knew I was to protect it
until she gave the word.
When she gave the word
I placed the word
along with the shoulder
in a small cooler
with an ice pack
and took it to the pier
jutting into the lake.
I removed my feet
from my shoes,
the shoulder from its cooler.
I let the sun go to work
but kept the word on ice.

✦

I jumped the gun
I found in a cornfield.
Winchester lever-action
rifle with wooden stock,
it rested in a furrow
between shorn stalks.
I got a running start
and when I leapt
I saw in the distance
a scarecrow, mouth sewn
into disfigurement,
staring back.

✦

I threw my voice
in a tight spiral
from my spot on the field
toward an older man,
a version of myself
idle in the end zone,
hands in the air.
My voice arced
over fresh cut turf,
its spinning laces
speaking in tongues.
He caught the answer
to a question I lack
the language to ask.

✦

I ran out of time
to say what I meant
so kept running
until I entered
a vacant space
faceted by blue light.
It was once a parlor
where moods were kept.
Solemnity, irreverence,
sadness, too.
I searched for self-
delusion, as if it were
a mood and not,
as I knew, a condition.
But the parlor
had been swept clear
into mineral-blue
absorbing distance.

https://www.benningtonreview.org/fourteen-mathys

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I eat the many possibilities

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The other day I found myself a bit overwhelmed with my dead. It must have been the coming-on of Christmas, hanging ornaments on the tree that made me think of me and my little mom doing that together. A guy running in the park put me in mind of my brother. Some guy’s facial expression on TV made me think of Dave. I’m shopping for new skis, which made me think of Art, who would have had what I wanted and would have given me a discount. I heard myself say in my head “Oh…mygod,” just the way Emma used to say it. And I’m glad not to be once again wrangling with Kathy about not wanting her to give me a gift but her wanting to give me a gift so me trying to come up with something I wanted and then having to come up with a gift for her. Geesh, woman, give it a rest. And she did.

And I felt bereft, a word that to me feels like a sort of dignified sadness, with its measured e’s balanced on either side of the fulcrum of r, and that efficient ft cutting off any great show of grief. So I walked bereft in the gray wind. But then solstice, and the coming-on of light, bit by bit. And someone told me the stars are aligned in some way that only happens during times of great change.

And so I resolve to stay present, both with my dead and with my living. Both so surprisingly full of light. And here is a poem by Kathleen Lynch that cracks me up. And isn’t that what we want art to do, crack us up a little bit.

Why I Love Oysters

Kathleen Lynch

Their tiny three-chambered
hearts, their colorless
translucent blood…

I love that they are true hermaphrodites,
tiny gonads surrounding digestive
organs like a ring of peeled grapelets,
apt to change sex one or more times
during an oceanic life.

Thus I am able to take both male
and female into my body whole
knowing as they slide into me
I eat the many possibilities

of sex, and it tastes like ocean
and body juices and I feel like a true
pure beast on the earth.

Bring them to me alive, sapid
in their nacre cups, aswim in their
liquor–with perhaps a dash of mignonette–
their throb bodies still humming.

When I tilt one in, life
and death will exist
in my mouth together,
as they will when
I inhale my last
unimaginable
breath.

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Sneak Peek from Always With the Questions!: One Poet’s Writing Manual

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Here’s another brief excerpt from my new book, available from The Word Works (wordworksbooks.org) or from Bookshop.org. Every section ends with a writing or revision prompt. Nudge nudge. This would be a fun gift for your writing group, some games to play to liven things up a bit. Or a gift to yourself — a little company along the lonely road.

II. Do Be Do Be Do; or, the Power and Necessity of Active Verbs

I was listening to someone read a short fiction piece recently and was struck at the leap in power when she came to a character’s gesture. For all the loveliness of the prose telling who, why, and where, it was the act of the characters—he reached toward her throat, she grabbed after the falling ring—that caught and carried the energy of the piece. Someone else read a poem and again, it was not the abstract nouns, for all their romantic evocations, that contained the poem’s gravitas, but the verb that snapped out and struck.

I just read Robert MacFarlane’s Landmarks, a wonderful book about books and words, specifically words of regional dialect that describe things specific to regional experiences: how the fog creeps across the moor, the way certain rock formations sparkle, how the regular passage of a small animal through a hedge creates a hole. Worlds and worlds, words and worlds.

I think of Rilke in “Ninth Elegy”: Maybe we are here to say: house, bridge, fountain, gate, pitcher, fruit, tree, window…. (Well, is the best translation “pitcher”? Or is is it “jug”? “Carafe”?) Looking through my recent drafts I think I’ve gone slack with language.

Good writing demands strong verbs, motion, gestures. Power lurks in the acts of the hands, the body, the feet, trunk or petal, wing or Mack truck. Don’t give me love. Give me the actions that love compels.

*

Examine all the verbs in your draft, and act to wake up those verbs, make them carry more weight, move with more gravitas or fleetness.

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the eloquent purple, those heart shaped leaves

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I’m bemused by how social media is filled with people who are convinced I’m doing some simple thing wrong — tying my scarf, cleaning my toilet, how I’m pronouncing a word — and assuring me that they know how to do it properly and they will tell me. I’m bewildered that the individual and collective response to such posts is not “who the fuck are you?”, rather, people seem to hit the “follow” button and spend a few minutes + a few minutes + a few minutes to learn random stuff from random people being cute in front of a camera. The ubiquitous camera. I guess we are a species eager for our own betterment. Eager to understand how best to play the game, all the games of life. It’s sweet, I guess. All our stumbling around doing the best we can, secretly sure there’s some secret to life we have not yet learned. Is this how you do it? Is this? So many things to learn, so many ways to do things incorrectly. So many “opportunities for improvement,” as some old job review form used to state.

I love art for its embrace of the not-knowing. That sense sometimes of sliding one foot forward slowly in the dark, then the other; or of feeling along the wall for a light switch. I know it’s here somewhere. I like that the advice offered in poems can be both wise and suspect, both silly and true. Can be understood by the body, but not necessarily by the brain. Yes, something in me says. Yes, that’s true, even as the rational brain may say, Now, wait a minute, hold on here, what’s this now? And I appreciate artists who speak out of the not-knowing, the I’m-not-sure. The artists who say, Let me show you what I saw, tell you what I heard, and you decide: what does it mean?

Here is a poem by Carol Graser from her new book from Kelsay, Prayer for the Sorrowful Brain.

In Congress Park on a Lunch Break from a Job in Retail

Carol Graser

Hundreds of white clover are flowering
with purpose. Each small head jiggles

in the breeze and I tell them about the patch
of violets I mow around each summer

that is wider every spring. I tell them
because they’re listening about the manager

and her imperious clothes, about her assistant
who picks at her loose threads, drapes

them like a veil over his dusty head
They tell me in their chirping voices

to hold that patch of violets close to me
the eloquent purple, those heart shaped leaves

But the owner, I shriek, he travels to Tibet
to meditate on his choice of good fortune

Their green voices ripple with tiny urgency
Our thin roots listen when the cold stone speaks

The breeze picks up, ruffling their spiky petals
Let the hair on your skin listen now

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