from Outer Limits

I first became interested in Max Czollek’s work through reading his nonfiction and then began to explore his poetry. The poems I selected to translate here pack a political punch in their incisive deployment of blended imagery, realities, and language to create a jarringly original commentary on climate change and the plight of migrants against whom Europe has fortified its actual borders and its ethical foundations. The recurring motif of brackish water, a body of water that is slightly salty, the result of a mixing of seawater and river water, constitutes the liminal terrain Czollek stakes out in these poems. On this terrain, he assembles an often puzzling and inscrutable mixture. In the first and last poems of this selection, for example, a scene is articulated that is both delineated, and therefore imaginable, and estranged, providing for a destabilizing reading experience. These scenes at a beachfront location feature a character who is addressed and provides a dialogical function as well as other, incongruous, puzzling beings and occurrences, such as an enigmatic cat or the image of the planet being blown off course by windmills. The poems also use lineation to move smartly between polyvalent images and refracted, arrhythmic units of speech, creating the impression of proceeding by way of a disjointed collage-like cumulation, an effect also aided by a lack of punctuation.
 
For the translator, it is a challenging and stimulating task to render Czollek’s compressed, layered, and mysterious poetic language and to maintain these characteristics in another language, as for example with “on the horizon a spot not sure / if patrol boat or whale.” At times, I had to capitulate before the unique referential properties of the original, as in “brackish water two,” in which the original German elicits a reading of “Meerwasser” (“seawater”) alongside its homophonic partner “mehr Wasser” (“more water”). We gain more seawater and, at the same time, more (salty) water from our eyes. Here, I had to rely on the following phrase, “rising levels,” to make the double entendre apparent. An impression is left in the reader’s mind from the freshness and originality of Czollek’s writing. The poems generate surprising connections, and new meanings emerge from their precisely muddled conceits and forms. In “tzimtzum 2015,” Czollek employs a term used in the Lurianic Kabbalah to describe the process of creation through a primordial contraction of God’s infinite light in order to create a space in which seemingly independent realms could exist. “Tzimtzum” thus gives rise to the paradox of simultaneous divine presence and absence. The resultant creation from within this vacuum in the poem is a dead body, like that of Alan Kurdi, a two-year-old Syrian boy who was found on a beach near the Turkish resort town of Bodrum. Created and unleashed in the reader’s mind is a recollection of the shocking pictures that became iconic representations of the dangers faced by refugees as they try to reach European shores.