Category: Post

For the past few weeks I’ve been trying to re-activate my German, this by way of preparing for a trip to Innsbruck. One fruit has been this self-translation of an old poem, the founding experience of which dates from forty years ago when I was especially sensitive, indeed vulnerable to the “phenomenology of love”. A friend helped with some syntactical and lexicological issues. Below the poem and after its source is an index of the poems and texts I have written in German, usually in the weeks following prior visits to Innsbruck, Vienna or Berlin.

Ein Zündholz,
dessen Flamme
geschützt vor Sorge
in den hohlgemachten
Händen unserer
unheimlichen
Umarmung,
machen wir
die Mauern
mit unserem Geflüster
flackern.

After My Own English

A match
whose flare
is closed from fear
in the cupped hands
of our uncanny
holding, we make
the walls flicker
with our whispers.

***

INDEX OF WRITING IN GERMAN

Fahrplan
Zeitverschiebung in Berlin
Der Respekt
Wie Länder
Drahtseilkünstler
Zwei Texte auf Deutsch

Cherish books meant for the young.
Think what children think at play.
Let adulthood blow away
with the sorrow it has sprung.

Weary of life’s demands,
sick to death of daily rounds,
I still love these dreary grounds,
have known no other lands.

Though my fevered memory blurs
I recall of yore the yard
where I swung upon a board
beneath tall, dark firs.

After Osip Mandelstam

Только детские книги читать,
Только детские думы лелеять.
Все большое далеко развеять,
Из глубокой печали восстать.

Я от жизни смертельно устал,
Ничего от нее не приемлю,
Но люблю мою бедную землю,
Оттого, что иной не видал.

Я качался в далеком саду
На простой деревянной качели,
И высокие темные ели
Вспоминаю в туманном бреду.

***
The inkling of Russian I show here is illusory. I am deeply indebted to a friend who glossed some of her favourite poems for me during two years of weekly trysts in the 1980s in Berkeley.  I use that word in its high literary sense.  

I have alluded elsewhere to how amazing it is to meet someone who shares a sense of poetry, this via a translation of a simple stanza of Rilke’s written when he was passing through a moment of jealousy over Pasternak’s attraction to Marina Tsvetaeva and vice-versa.

Yes, but it is like any other mode or of even instance of communication. Contingent, fugitive, ephemeral.  Which is why these rosebuds should not be gathered immediately when they bloom, but certainly before they wither. < Poetic License