from “limen”
WELL NOW JACKDAW!
are footsteps on gravel so bad?
like a boy in the rushes
who stands there in his pajamas
playing the violin and freezing
no time to get dressed in the mornings
when the sun’s first rays shine on hotel balconies
I want to become a wooden shingle
on the roof of this house
when the helicopters are on patrol
the motor drowns out the footsteps on the gravel
the people who walk here
have free time they are relaxing
patrolling is work?
practicing the violin is like saluting
when you are not yourself ringing with the sound
but just practicing woodenly in the rushes
so!
let’s get this behind us jackdaw
the beginning
you first
I hear a buzz saw
that has hit a nail
I hear the V-belt snapping
and hitting the table
I hear pausing
stopping
swearing
the motor revving up again
the high-pitched sound
a throat-clearing riddle
fatherland
on, jackdaw!
we are still just at the beginning
don’t hop
fly
the loss of
don’t stutter
der Verlust von
gubitak
gubitak nacionalne nezavisnosti
excuse me?
the loss of borders
they come from a small country
you could almost say tiny
at the periphery
the loss of sacrifices
is that how you say it?
I meant the loss
of being able to offer sacrifices
not mine
JACKDAW YOU TUCK YOUR HEAD IN YOUR PLUMAGE
you dream fly a stretch fly sleep
in flight for us we have no time
we have to set out hourly
your plumage is a variety of greens
sleep jackdaw—your colors go glowing
behind you across the meadows by the harbor
a wingshining by the warehouses
let us begin to head toward
the slag heap in your shadow
if in the grit your beak
pecks out a binary code: beginning/end
where is time? it buries the code
time as if on cones the slag trickles
the downslipping of an avalanche now
and before—does it happen if we are not there?
when we sleep does time slip like this
in small avalanches? your shadow
and the night are two different things?
down underground in the potash mine it is roomy
and there are palaces and school groups
ride in subterranean cars
in the evenings they whisper in bunk beds
perhaps the beginnings exist without us
AND WHERE THE FATHERLAND BEGINS
is a dark place
like snow
that shows the outlines
just like everything that ends
WE WALK UP CLOSE
to the frozen lake but one
of us says: not a lake danger
a trap perhaps: a three-legged dog
comes across the field
dragging his chain behind him where is his master?
how does he belong to the lake? let’s go!
let the lake break open on its own
we never considered:
the different degrees of freedom
chain and ice
ice and inclination
obligation
from V
Daniela Danz
translated from the German by Monika Cassel
Listen to the poems read in the original German by the poet:
Daniela Danz is one of the most exciting young poets to come out of East Germany and has been described as the “new voice” of German poetry. Her third book of poems, V, published in 2014, explores the concept of fatherland. Danz explains that the word Vaterland, from which the title initial comes, used to denote “the father’s field” but has expanded through the Latin patria to a very different sense of national identity. V explores this evolution of fatherland through a series of wide-ranging but interconnected poems that include prose poems constructing a mythological stone-age past, pieces set in Danz’s homeland of Saxony, and a poetic sequence applying the prisoner’s dilemma to international relations. As such, Danz interrogates the individual’s place in the world, often engaging directly with past and current political issues and events, both in the former GDR and abroad.
The poems here come from a section titled “limen,” a Latin word that can mean “threshold,” but also “beginning” and “termination”; these poems journey through a series of scenes interrogating notions of beginning, ending, borders, and time. Seven of the twelve poems in this section are addressed to a jackdaw, a bird whose range spans Europe, the Balkans, parts of Russia, and northern Africa. A boy who is either a refugee or in a war zone is juxtaposed against school children on a class trip into an old mine in the shadow of an enormous slag heap, literally descending into their history; both the ice in the final poem and the snow in the short poem about fatherland reveal borders to us and allow us to change our perspectives or simply become more aware of them.
Danz’s vision for her work is that it help foster international understanding. The poems themselves speak to the global through the local, never losing sight of the fact that we cannot fully understand ourselves or each other without looking honestly at how easily communities can lose sight of an individual’s humanity. At a time when Europe’s and Germany’s role in the world is being shaped by the refugee crisis and when national identity in Germany stands to change as much, if not more, than it did at the end of WWII or the fall of the Berlin wall, Danz’s work offers us an opportunity to reflect on how our homelands and national boundaries define us, anchor us, and can separate us from one another.
The poems here come from a section titled “limen,” a Latin word that can mean “threshold,” but also “beginning” and “termination”; these poems journey through a series of scenes interrogating notions of beginning, ending, borders, and time. Seven of the twelve poems in this section are addressed to a jackdaw, a bird whose range spans Europe, the Balkans, parts of Russia, and northern Africa. A boy who is either a refugee or in a war zone is juxtaposed against school children on a class trip into an old mine in the shadow of an enormous slag heap, literally descending into their history; both the ice in the final poem and the snow in the short poem about fatherland reveal borders to us and allow us to change our perspectives or simply become more aware of them.
Danz’s vision for her work is that it help foster international understanding. The poems themselves speak to the global through the local, never losing sight of the fact that we cannot fully understand ourselves or each other without looking honestly at how easily communities can lose sight of an individual’s humanity. At a time when Europe’s and Germany’s role in the world is being shaped by the refugee crisis and when national identity in Germany stands to change as much, if not more, than it did at the end of WWII or the fall of the Berlin wall, Danz’s work offers us an opportunity to reflect on how our homelands and national boundaries define us, anchor us, and can separate us from one another.
Daniela Danz was born in Eisenach in 1976. She studied art history and German and wrote her Ph.D. thesis on the construction of hospital chapels in the Weimar Republic. She is director of the Schiller House in Rudolstadt and teaches creative writing at the University of Hildesheim. She has published three volumes of poetry, Serimunt, Pontus, and V, and two novels, Lange Fluchten and Türmer.
Monika Cassel is a translator, poet, and educator. Her translations have previously appeared in Asymptote, POETRY Magazine, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Guernica, and are forthcoming in The Harvard Review Online. Her poetry chapbook won the 2015 Venture Poetry Award and is forthcoming from flipped eye publishing, and she was a recipient of a 2016 American Literary Translators Association Conference travel fellowship. She lives in Portland and teaches German at Oregon State University.
