She and the City
Out in Vienna she alone is in Vienna
Up to the utmost until the utmost
When she takes the streetcar when she goes shopping
right and left and on every side she's in Vienna,
Vienna exists only in her care.
Out in the city only she is in Vienna
A bird's head eye and breadth of wing
A bird's field of vision in a green meadow
When she goes out in Vienna opens her umbrella
everything above and below is also Vienna.
Parents' child, grandparents', school child
Teenager college-student teacher
Adult passing through all the world's ages
Before she meets friends sees an exhibit:
She attends to Vienna she alone is in Vienna.
In Vienna she's almost always in the city.
And in Vienna she's only most exactly
In the design most concisely
When she roams around this Vienna,
and even when she peers at being-in-Vienna.
Clouds up above. I know just one thing
I walk next to the wheel.
The wagon is taller than I am.
It carries a tall load.
Behind it the gables stand
delicate with air.
They close up the roofs.
So to my right the path climbs farther.
Then it ends, but in front on the right
the chestnut tree towers.
A country path, in the village, a
village street, ours.
The cartload rolls out.
The driver on his seat?
Gazes cheerfully. The oxen gaze like oxen.
I gaze seriously.
Whoever approaches can see it.
I'm an eight-year-old.
The driver—the age of drivers.
The oxen are for their part oxen.
On the right next to my temple
the trapezoid of the wooden wagon side.
Left—nothing, the garden; in the distance,
where it ends, my parents' house.
I go with the freight.
The driver's gaze is whimsical:
Under his cap's visor
the eternal laugh lines.
I remain next to the wheel
as though I were the one who,
now and then, carefully moves the reins.
Among the motions, what's happening.
A gentle flight.
For Example
One tile was neon green. That couldn't be changed.
It was so, is so, so it is. If it still is.
Nothing can be done. It's set in, it sits fast.
Insufficiently appreciated. Appears bearable, past.
It needs an ingredient, a certain dose of neglect,
of looking away, knowing, there it sits.
Surely it needed that. Perceptible toleration so to speak,
but with undiminished attentiveness.
Neon is a phenomenon. Think: neon.
Three Poems
Elke Erb
translated from the German by Sara Edinger
Elke Erb is fearless in her willingness to pursue complicated logical trains of thought and to produce complicated sentences that don't "flow." She is therefore fun to translate if one enjoys puzzling over logic and syntax problems. She uses metaphor sparingly, but when metaphor does appear it is usually integral to the poem. In "For Example," "knallgrün" in the German original is a bright or glaring green, and "Knall" is a bang or loud sound, here used metaphorically as a "phenomenon" or, in context, something that stands out or doesn't fit. It was difficult to find an English term which could both describe a glaring color and qualify as a "phenomenon." "Neon" was my solution.
Elke Erb is winner of the 2020 Georg Büchner Prize. In her own words: “Born in 1938 in Scherbach (Eifel); migration to Halle (GDR) in 1949, farm work from 1958 to 1959, teacher’s exams in 1963, work at a publishing house between 1963 and 1965. Freelance writing of short prose, poetry, procedural texts, translations, poetry adaptations, editing since 1966. Lives in Berlin.”
Sara Edinger became interested in the German language and German literature as an undergraduate at Stanford. After Stanford, she obtained an M.A. (and A.B.D.) in literature, but for practical reasons she spent most of her working life in information technology. In retirement, she returned to the study of German and began making translations, mostly of poetry. Initially, she saw her translations as a way of understanding the poems more completely; she has since become fascinated by the process of solving translation problems. As a translator, she has published English versions of three poems by the German poet Elke Erb in Asymptote (April 2014) and another by Elke Erb in Passager (this poem was also published on Poetry Daily). Her translations (again from the German) of two poems by Gisela Hemau appeared in the Fall 2016 issue of Field.
