Language—Translations from the German & Lithuanian by Susan Bernofsky

Language includes two poets from Germany, and one from Lithuania by way of Germany, all translated by Susan Bernofsky. Matthias Goeritz's first book of poems, Loops is forthcoming from the distinguished German publishing house Fischer Verlag. Durs Gruenbein, still the youngest of Germany's most prominent poets, is "proficient in a variety of poetic idioms," Susan Bernofsky writes, "and has published a baker's half-dozen of volumes of poetry and essays on topics ranging from anatomy to tourism to life in the urban landscape to Ancient Greece." Antanas Gailius lives and works in Vilnius, Lithuania, "where he has been active in politics and publishing as well as poetry, but he has also spent time in Germany since 1989" (SB). The poems included here were translated in collaboration with the author using German as a bridge between Lithuanian and English.

            —Leonard Schwartz



      ***



2 Poems by Matthias Goeritz



Suburb


A mouth snaps shut over me
Don't worry it's called sky

On the hilltop lies shimmering grass
Glass man where are you

Today there he opened and closed eyes
Sky upon hill upon grass

Everything goes on and on
Behind its backside dog shits

In the middle lies glass
Little house at the edge of town

In this tract once I was
for one moment

at home



Wisteria Arch Pangs


Where life appears weak at its outermost edges
Where hard water collects mornings
In the teakettle pot
Mother

With that I vanished
Fire in smooth sunlight
Torn apart by a cloud

My day's allotment of people
Papa, Nicki and me

At night we all hang by a thread
Don't worry, one day there'll be childhood

Above all no end
He who labors on our plane becomes a nothing

Table, chair, corner, slat
There must be more than that

One day we have a summer
One day a spring

We have just now
Just now we have

Played music
That was easy

Papa played the flute
Nicki held her finger to the glass

The sound, she says, goes into the finger
When it's all over

I put my finger to the glass
Not even summer do we have here


(trans. S. Bernofsky)



      ***



6 Poems by Durs Gruenbein



LATER THEN it was the streak of luminous
    silver bright filament traced
                on the frostclear
sky, like a huge
    safety pin holding
            together the halves
        of morning. Difficult

to describe: when this first light
    was half forgotten suddenly you
        sensed the gravity

in your bones. Everything seemed
                foreshortened ("Order?
            Never was any...") and you

walked on, haze-headed, drunk on aether
                    above the roar
    of the industrial labyrinth.



Heat Sculpture after Beuys


Only when the lewd swarm of flies
    scattered in iridescent panic
                dancing around its prey like

            a cloud of electrons
with accelerated spin, could one see the two

                    baby birds, bare.

It was twelve noon and this unfortunate
            happenstance nothing more
    than a chemical equation

        for a pair of bloated maggots' nests
                sunny-side up
in the street's crucible
    of asphalt and tar.



Untitled


Chris (age 3) shot down his brother Bob (age 9)
while playing, reports the Philadelphia
police blotter.
        Cruising the apartment on all fours
Little Chris discovered tucked beneath the sofa
His father's pistol—deluxe model,
Its brand name Parabellum. For a while
He forgot everything around him, the hi-fi tower,
The cupboard full of sweets, the wall-hung elk,
The TV treasure chest with its childproof lock...

And played and played with the weapon Me But Bigger.

Ten finger-grubs about the grip's cold weight,
He was just scoping out the furniture
Like in video games full of "bang!" and "crash!"
When brother Bob arrived—
                "Hands up!"
Chris cried, and with a plump-cheeked grin
Fired at the horrified and marvelling face.
"I was too tired" the father testified. Cleaning
his weapon the day before he'd dozed off before the VCR
just as UFOs high above America...



To an Okapi in the Munich Zoo


That a steel door opens, and a legendary beast
Enters his last cage, trembling, since it's time for being fed,
Since the keeper's going home and the spectators laugh,
Is found in none of our unicorn tales. Okapi—
A word from primeval tongues no one speaks any more.
Too short for savannahs, the patient, rustbrown neck
Has earned these bales of straw, this barred stall.
The bulldozed world must seem strange to him, strange
As the daydreaming visitor finds this patchwork beast:
Half giraffe, half zebra, and equally distant
From the childish shadows, the picturebook silhouettes of each.
Just another ruminant from a long-lost age, sentinel
Posted beside the zoological road, as if to warn us:
Beware these exotic relics, survivors of their sort.



Hard Luck for the Late-born


Two a.m., hour of the hedgehog
            Scrabbling in the dumpsters
        As you pick your way past
         Like someone walking on thorns

Somewhere in Europe, indigeneous
    To the same lunar floodlight
        And like this hedgehog
            Rustling in the gutters

Somewhere in Europe, unsuspecting
    Chilled by November
        And like this hedgehog
            All too lean for a long
            Winter's sleep, all too naive

Not to gorge on apples
    At 2 a.m.
            Somewhere in Europe
                And like this hedgehog

Such easy prey for time.



Caoutchouc


"The night is sublime, the day
is beautiful." (Immanuel Kant)

...Words you must live with are not comic
If not tragic either, yet shouldn't we ask who's saying whom?
Speech from the ground up is infrequently heard.
Not the song of the uppermost layers... The arrival
Of something like strangeness obstructs its own path.
Monstrous as two eyes just beneath the water's surface,
A date staring up at you one morning: "Still in the game?"
Were not the days and their cycles set down long ago?
Tool, metaphor, clock—hairline cracks a threat to all.
Mobile in immobility, easily damaged, soon overtaken,
It returns to life ever anew, and laughs, and warms.
But what has the fly in the window to do with change of place?
In silence the moon ironizes the earth, a yellow clown.
A body reduced to imbecility belongs to space...


(trans. S. Bernofsky)



      ***



3 Poems by Antanas Gailius



Nobody loves you. You bear,
hidden deep beneath clothes, the mark
of the rigorous monks—
idle dreams. In vain
special portents appear: dogs
digging in the trash heap,
a wasteland the fields,
eyes die here of distance:
they couldn't follow the bird.
Still no sign of an angel.



Jeremiah


A voice from the depths of the waters.
Who will heed it tonight
with the moon so red,
the cries of owls from the graveyard?

This voice of luminous distances,
voice of Babylon's shores, borne
on the wind, caressing
the dry blades of grass?

Take your leave and begone.

The cold clay of the highroads
burns the soles of your feet.

Take your leave and begone.

Perhaps you will be the last
to be called by this name.



Here


1

Wind at your back: so you'll remember. East
wind, whipping like switches. This too
we know well. Now
it is winter, time
of the forgotten, dead men's souls late at night.
Train station. Smells:
garlic, unwashed socks, urine
sweat and blood.
Yes, blood.
A tear falls in Heaven: so many
hungry years.


2

This evening.
An angel
walked through the garden: big
as a cloud. The apple trees
bent their boughs to the earth.

Doubtless, doubtless.

Red sky to the west, till
midnight.

Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin...

In the dark the mouse rustles.


3

Meadow of the souls of the dead. A relic
from heathen days. On the hill beside the railroad
men gather: the bottle of home brew
plugged with newspaper. The eyes
of a drowned man at the bottom of the river. This
century—
let's sit it out
here.

* * *

Evil-eyed the starless night
gazed at me, haven
of spirits: they came padding on cats' paws,
breathing schnapps and cold air
at my nape. I was
one of a thousand,
with the unborn I was,
with the already deceased,
with all of them—in the cave of the lifeless.

* * *

Night watch,
drumbeat and holy song. The fire,
to drive out evil demons.

Women
in freshly-washed underclothes,
ready
for love or for death.

Voices in Heaven, beneath the earth.

The blood of the sacrifice
has marked your forehead,
my son.

* * *

A pigeon, head cocked to one side,
peers up at the heavens, eye overflowing.
In the shade of the lilac
a mangy tomcat, the grass is withered,
the hut lifeless—

No one's sung here in the evening for years.

At midday the shadows creep hungry-eyed
across the floorboards; on the wall
a yellowed postcard from Paris.

The moon winces when the night
is clear and it sees its own image
in the poisoned waters of the pond.

The children grow here
huge-mouthed,
and day after day
the old woman curses this world, when,
crossing the yard with a broom,
she pauses to spit on the ground.

Then only silence remains.

* * *

How far these white
winter spirits
have led me astray:
men in fur coats,
horses
at dawn,
all covered with frost.

Then I heard:
someone rapped at the window,
whispered, sighed,
then: uttered a prayer.

Father in his undershirt
crossed the cold mud floor barefoot,
opened the door,
ladled water in silence.

Then I heard:
the guest began to drink, he
drank as though he had drunk nothing
all this eternal spirit-plagued winter,
this whole century long.


(trans. S. Bernofsky)