Mother Earth
Mother earth, much trodden, sun-washed,
dark slave and mistress
I am, beloved.
From me, the humble and the sullen,
you burst forth—a powerful stem.
And like the eternal stars, and as the flame from the sun,
I circle in long and blind silence
through your roots, through your branches
and half in vigil, and half in slumber,
I search, through you, for the high sky. READ MORE…
An Acorn Gives Birth to a Tree, the Tree Gives Birth to a Fiddle
An acorn gives birth to tree, the tree gives birth to a fiddle
and you give birth to my star, so the night will be true.
You give birth to it far from here, its light belongs to me and to you,
you give birth to it where no leaf fades, nor anyone’s smile.
We haven’t been of this world for a score of silences now,
a heroic cosmos will not allow our joint death.
The earthly, the real, is real as earth and valid
and death no longer has any power over our breath.
His kingdom does not extend to the green Tree of Life,
what is past has not passed, time is not yet ripe.
Escaped from the clamor, our silence is love,
new images stream from the weeping eye of the soul.
The paired twitch of two silences in one
approaches perfection on a rung of its own.
This wonder-without-a-name tells of its deeds,
the language of atoms has a folksong’s simplicity.
*****
Translated from the Old English by Spenser Santos
The Seafarer
May I utter truth for myself,
to say of trials, how in the times of toil
I often withstood wearisome times,
bitter breastcare, how I have bided,
come to know on a ship, abode of much care,
the terrible seawave’s rolling often held me there,
anxious nightwatch at the boat’s prow,
when it pitched against cliffs. Pinched by cold
were my feet, frostbound
with cold fetters, there the sighs of care
were hot around the heart; hunger tore from within
the mereweary mood. That the man,
to whom the most pleasant on earth befalls, knows not
how I, wretched and sorrowful, on the ice-cold sea
dwelled in winter in the paths of an exile,
bereft of beloved kinsmen and
hung with icicles; hail flew in showers.
There I heard naught but the sea to roar,
the frigid wave. Sometimes the swan’s song
did I take for entertainment, the gannet’s cry
and curlew’s sound for men’s laughter,
the seagull’s singing for mead.
Storms there beat the stony cliffs, where
the tern, the icy-feathered one, answers him,
very often the eagle screamed round about,
the dewy-feathered one; not any protecting kinsmen
could comfort the wretched spirit. READ MORE…
Under Black Sails
questioning why the fog’s green
is my goodnight to the godless
and my good evening
to a hasty summer
of trains that don’t run on time
and rain that always wants to be first
with the freshest of the fresh
so the dance can bloom
on the great sloom’s deck
as it heads straight into a glare of cold
where the comatose lie
awaiting passage home to the dull life
the superficial love
because they don’t think
there’s anything else
when a person can’t be
like a garbage truck in paradise
that’s forgotten its way
to the incinerator
from YOUTH
The way the snow falls
and covers the plain
that’s how I grew up
at the hearts of your eyes.
*** READ MORE…
Translated by Maria Tatar in Penguin's "The Turnip Princess and Other Newly Discovered Fairy Tales"
A woman had a son named Jacob, and he was the source of much pain and sorrow. Her irritation with him grew until one day she cried out: “I’ve had it! It’s time for you to leave home and find a master, even if it’s the devil himself!”
Jacob heard these words and felt so bad that he left home and decided to find an apprenticeship. As he was walking along, he met a man who asked him where he was heading. The boy replied: “My mother ordered me to find work, even if it’s with the devil himself.”
“Well, then you are quite welcome to come with me,” the stranger said, and the two started walking together. READ MORE…
Öxnadalur
Fog drowns the dale
so the ridgepeaks
no longer show
From Hraunslake
gasps carry in
crackling silence
*
Summereve in Gotland
Pier
stretches its tail
out in silvery waves
The sun strokes
a lightbow
over seaplain
Heavens
get to play
dusksong
*
India
Man
goes to sleep
on a traffic island
Newsprint his down
Little room
for sleepwalking
in the seashallows
shines ironskin
of coldeyed sharks
***
Gerður Kristný’s poetry has charmed readers the world over. They have won her, among other honors, the Icelandic Literary Prize and nominations for the Nordic Council Literature Prize. Her most recent book of poetry, Drápa, tells the unsettling story of the night the mircus comes to town.
Spenser Santos is an MFA candidate in literary translation and Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of Iowa. He translates from Spanish, Old English, and Icelandic. His translation thesis is a translation of the Old English Illustrated Hexateuch translation of the Book of Exodus. He holds a Bachelor of Arts from Winona State University, where he majored in English, Spanish, and Writing.
An excerpt from The Country Road, translated by Kurt Beals
Death was prepared in the form of a trap. But before its time finally came, the mouse would have to gnaw through the wall that led into my bed-chamber. It would have to gnaw through a long and narrow passage, and gnaw through my sleep.
Sometimes I pounded on the bed with my fist, frightening myself with the way that its thunder rolled over everything imaginable in the night. And I thought I could sense that the mouse felt this fear, too. But before this wave of fright could roll gently into peace, that same quiet gnawing could be heard again from afar. It was so quiet that it was audible only to someone alone and left to himself in a house by a moonlit field on the edge of a forest. He guards himself like his own hunting dog, and even when he is asleep he will hear any approaching danger. He is like fog, when it is dark, the fog that seems to live in its own light. He is like the rain, far and wide, high and distant, in the heavens and on earth. How could he fail to notice the gnawing of a mouse, when that activity returns again to itself. He feels it in his blood. So once again I lit my candle, the bane of all four-footed intruders. But the candle didn’t spread its angel wings as it had in other nights, arching them over the dark abyss of fear, becoming a spirit of the shadows, the better to offer its light . . . Instead it suddenly betrayed me to my enemy, becoming a sort of gnawing creature itself, there in its candlestick. It ate away at my sleep, and the mouse did not fear it.
Book of Monelle translator Kit Schluter brings to English the haunting final installment of Marcel Schwob’s “Mimes”!
Read all previous posts in Asymptote’s “Mimes” translation project here.
Mime XXI. The awaited shade
The little guardian of the Temple of Persephone has laid out honey cakes sprinkled with poppy seeds in the baskets. For a long time now she has known that the goddess never so much as tastes them, for she watches from behind the pilasters. The Good Goddess remains unmoved and sups beneath the earth. And if she were to eat of our foods, she would rather bread rubbed with garlic and vinegar; for the bees of Hades produce a honey flavored of myrrh and the women who walk in the violet meadows there-below rattle black poppies without end. Thus the bread of the shades is dipped in honey that smells of embalmment and the seeds scattered upon it come with a desire for sleep. And thus why Homer said that the dead, governed by Odysseus’ broadsword, came by the ruck to drink the black blood of sheep in a square trench dug into the soil. And only this once did the dead partake of blood, in order to regain their life: customarily they repast on funereal honey and dark poppies, and the liquid that flows through their veins is the very water of the Lethe. The shades dine on sleep and drink of oblivion.
The corpses of Orto dei Fuggitivi speak
No bones or shreds of toga,
even less flesh, or blood, or semen:
what’s left of us is the shell
of our corpses in lava, and don’t say
lava saved us: rather condemned us
to eternal sudden death.
You won’t think of us often:
your century wants a culprit
to commemorate the dead.
We remain because our nothingness
remains: there’s the rub.
Translated by our editor-at-large Mirza Puric
Omarska
Omarska.
Death likes pretty names.
Pelvic bones make good stirrups.
Gypsies’ cruelty to jades Madame Geneticist has always admired.
Lamp him across the gob, Joshka.
Translated from the Serbian by Mirza Puriç
In September 1992, I started school. We lived in the country back then, in one of those Voivodinian villages headed for extinction. Small, fat and grubby-faced, I dragged my green, cube-shaped, double-buckled rucksack—emblazoned with apples, a motif from Snowy White, I suppose—full of Serbian, maths, science and social studies text books. I may have also had a container of that white glue, the one that came with a plastic spatula, the one that smelt of dairy products.
“Then I enfolded her in my arms—but clasped nothing besides the beguiling air.”
Read all previous posts in Asymptote’s “Mimes” translation project here.
Mime XIX. The mirror, the golden pin, the poppy
First to speak, the mirror:
I was shaped in silver by a skilful craftsman. At first I lay hollow like his hand and my other face looked like the ball of a wall-eye. But then I was given curvature enough to reflect images. Finally Athene breathed her wisdom into me. I am aware of the desires of the girl who holds me and already I tell her that she is pretty. Still at night she rises and lights her bronze lamp. She directs the gilded flight of the flame towards me, and her heart craves some other face than hers. I show her own white temple and her sculpted cheeks and the swelling tips of her breasts and her eyes full of curiosity. She almost touches me with her trembling lips—but the golden burning lights up her face alone; all else remains dark within me.
had he just heard that said or / read it in the books of his friends? / what had gone wrong? had it gone wrong?
noon
outside the shadows are dwindling
but we are so tired again.
above us the sun stands at midday
around us the thicket of high
buildings: inside couples lie close
and barely know one another.
we are there too, you and me too
on the floor. my skin cools against
yours, outside as always the heat
but I am as always too cold. are you
asleep, my friend? one clock hand stopped
dead on top of the other and someone
shouts NO and then again NO and
the shadows between us start to grow
***
‘write down what we had.’ we had
one or two poems, three or four weeks
the city towers as our primeval forest
and burrowed inside we two in the
yellow light of a streetlamp, between
the tree trunks cast of metal and glass.
there was no sun, for the time I was with
you, for that time the rain held us at bay
for that time everything drifted away: all
your money, my shoes, the time and my
dream of animals in a totally rain-swept zoo:
a unicorn out for the count, motionless bears
a dripping-wet peacock. high above us flew
a swarm of foxes, we hardly heard them at all.
for, whatever you say, there were two of us,
and everyone else was lost without trace.
***
first she took him by the hands
then she left him by the ferns
in the furthest part of the forest
alone. time passed in an instant
between the birches the heat flared
then night fell hard one more time
birds swivelled their heads to face him
slowly two-hundred and seventy degrees
but he had not marked his way back
to the glittering cities of central Europe
with a single crumb of bread.
mushrooms sprouting round his feet
the feel of fur brushing past him
out of nowhere, front and behind
shadows, above him trees creaked
the southern sky kept on turning
and kept on turning in circles or
had he just heard that said or
read it in the books of his friends?
what had gone wrong? had it gone wrong?
***
Read the poems in their original German here, and listen to the author read her work here.
***
Ulrike Almut Sandig was born in 1979 in Großenhain, Saxony, and now lives in Berlin. In 2005 she completed a degree in theology and modern indology and in 2010 she graduated from the German Literary Institute in Leipzig. Alongside various editorial activities, she has published three volumes of poetry—Zunder (2005/2009), Streumen (2007), and Dickicht (2011)—and Flamingos (2010), a collection of short stories, as well as radio plays. She has been granted residencies in Helsinki and Sydney and won numerous prizes, including the prestigious Leonce-und-Lena Prize (2009) and, most recently, the Droste Award for Emerging Talent (2012).
Karen Leeder is an academic and writer. Her translations of German poetry have appeared in a variety of journals including Poetry Review, PN Review, Domus (Italy) and MPT. Her volume of Evelyn Schlag’s Selected Poems with Carcanet in 2004 won the Schlegel-Tieck Prize in 2005, and her translations of Durs Grünbein’s “Childhood in the Diorama” won the Times Stephen Spender prize in 2013. Her translations of Sandig poems have appeared in MPT (UK) and SPORT (New Zealand) and she received a Deutsche Übersetzerfonds award in 2014. She will translate Sandig’s Flamingos for Liverpool University Press in 2015.
Published with permission from: Ulrike Almut Sandig, Dickicht. Gedichte. © Schöffling & Co. Verlagsbuchhandlung GmbH, Frankfurt am Main 2011.
Read more:
