The Poet

Adelheid Duvanel

Illustration by Lananh Chu

Only months ago, I was still taking pains to be sociable. I drew strangers into my house; the wine glowed like bloody flowers in the glasses I held out to them. In the early morning hours, the eyes of the young women and men would spill out, trickle warm over their throats, lap over collarbones, and run ever downward. But I sat sober as cellophane in the threadbare chair by the furnace and watched their dances; they freed themselves from the walls they clung to and fluttered like ivy in the wind. When I was a child, I tried to make contact with people using small gestures and suggestive words, but they loved the loud and the clear, which I detested. They could not understand me. My older sister and I grew up without a mother. I remember that our father loved the words “temperance” and “sacrifice”; he belonged to an abstruse sect, which we also had to belong to, though when I was sixteen, I began skipping the God-fearing prayer meetings because they gave me stomachaches. If I became thirsty while eating, Father would say: “Eat lettuce”; to drink, even water, was an excess in his eyes; our palates and hearts were to stay dry.  
 
My sister left Father earlier than I, but even when I did emerge from the cold of my parents’ house into the cold of the world, I was not quite fledged. I ran astray, got myself stuck, became a plaything, and fell; so far, in fact, that I nearly married. Today I drift on an ice floe, getting farther and farther from the shore that looms flat and joyless in the distance and never recedes from view. The silence around me is stretched taut with fear, blown up like a gigantic cloud.
 
Every day I walk with my dog, who limps in exactly the same way I do (I know what a ridiculous sight we make) through the neighborhood; when I stop, the animal also interrupts its pace and looks up at me. It was on one of these walks that I became a poet: on the side of the street stood a car that the frost must have wanted to make invisible, because it seemed to be wrapped in thin, white tissue paper. The sky, draped between the white rooftops, was gray. When I had almost reached the car, I saw that a child’s finger had tried to bring it out of hiding with letters, with a word, but had transformed it: its purpose as a car, already called into question by its white disguise, was taken away for good this time. Something was written on the hood, a word that aroused my interest; walking by closely, I deciphered: RAGE. I was shocked, strangely agitated, as if the naked face of a white-veiled bride were telling me something, as if I could read a message in her expression that had nothing to do with her being a bride. Since that moment I have wondered whether words might create a new world over the great emptiness, over the chasm into which my life has fallen. I now write words day and night, paint with their sound the floods of heaven that wash a mad fish past my window; I build towers and bridges, let the sun sweep the shadows out of the depths with its glinting broom, and shake my head when the wind I am describing reads old newspapers in a corner like a vagabond; hastily, with laughable curiosity, it turns the pages.

translated from the German by Tyler Schroeder

Read the original in German

Listen to an excerpt of the original German read by Svea-Patricia Kammer:

“The Poet” (Der Dichter) was first published in Basler Magazin in September 1978 and appears as the first story in her 1980 collection Windgeschichten (Wind Stories; Luchterhand Verlag). It belongs to the minority of Duvanel’s prose pieces written in the first person. More typical is for her protagonists to be introduced in the third person with crisp, mononymous names, which endows her figures with a fragile, ironic integrity that the “I” of “The Poet” must forego. Furthermore, where most of Duvanel’s protagonists are also overtly gendered, this narrator is not: the only indicator is Duvanel’s use of the masculine noun Dichter rather than the feminine Dichterin, which vanishes in the plausible English translations of “poet,” “writer,” or “author.”
 
In both the title and the body of the text, I have elected to translate the word Dichter as “poet” to further the word’s connotations of aesthetic and cultural gravitas. The transformation that takes place at the sight of the word on a frost-covered car is therefore somewhat miraculous in its instantaneity: becoming literary is a fundamental realignment of the self. I want to stress, however, that I had no intention of drawing a bright line between poetry and prose by translating Dichter in this way. Instead, the figure’s experience of writing has to do with the operations of words in general, including Duvanel’s own body of prose work.
 
“It was on one of these walks that I became a poet”: this is a construction characteristic of Duvanel’s paradoxical plainspokenness and terseness. Her language does not flinch at the magnitude of the moment it represents, just as it is unperturbed by the deliquescent eyes of the party guests. Throughout her writing, Duvanel evinces a talent for preserving tone and cadence at the very moment in which we readers become disoriented by a sudden turn into fantasy, poetry, or violence, often gone as quickly as it arrived. The risk in translating such moments is that what is abrupt but evocative in one language may seem distracting and cumbersome in another. I have sought, as often as possible, to exercise restraint in rounding off rough edges, especially when my impulse to do so is based less on the rhythm of the text than on my anxiety that my rendition might appear clumsy.

Adelheid Duvanel (1936–1996) was a German-speaking Swiss author and artist. After beginning her career as a visual artist, she migrated to literature due to the jealousy of her husband, Joseph Duvanel, also a painter. She began publishing short stories in newspapers and other periodicals in the 1960s and published volumes of short prose with Luchterhand Verlag starting in 1980. She also revived her painterly work later in life. In 2021, Duvanel’s collected literary works were republished as a hardbound, single-volume edition by the Zurich publisher Limmat, prompting their reappraisal in the German-speaking literary establishment. To date, one small collection of Duvanel’s stories has been published in English as The Writer in Her Writing, translated by Patricia H. Stanley (University Press of America, 2002).

Tyler Schroeder translates prose and poetry from German. He holds a graduate degree in film and media studies from the University of Chicago and his work has appeared in Exchanges: Journal of Literary Translation.