Elsbeth
I almost forgot about Elsbeth, since, it seemed to me,
she did nothing important. She took me
by the hand, whooping through wheat fields:
I love thith! They called her simple.
Her hair was curly.
In my photo she’s engrossed in sewing,
a slim wristwatch shows half past four.
Her cancer was already growing as
she pulled thread nimbly through a needle,
and no one paid her any heed.
They told me she had never been in love,
but I don’t think that’s true. At daybreak, in her nightgown,
she brews coffee, carries the chamber pot
to the privy. I watch her wash her face
in the enamel bowl,
polish planks with wax—the smell of it.
Then quarrelling at the table. No, she can’t
have Harzer cheese for breakfast.
I hear her voice rising, her feet stamping.
How many times I tried to get inside
her rural inner mind, to grasp
the world behind her brow: the bright fleck
on the photo. She wrote nothing
down. And when she died, there was
nothing of her left.
Doris
She’s never liked the stripey jumper,
but tries to play it cool.
Her face is flawless,
silver ribbons glitter in her hair.
A touch of Hollywood.
She plays movies on the lino floor with Barbie.
Speak out loud, I beg, but nobody
believes the singer, her fading cry in the grave,
the dying fantasy.
Girl becoming woman.
Her face is pale, her hair and lips are black.
She doesn’t say a word at lunch. No one
sees the shadow in her eyes, the broken
chord. The record player spools
Dark Side of the Moon.
Dregs of Bacardi Cola glisten in a glass. And me?
Well, I’ve been studying the proletariat.
She gets married, six months pregnant,
at seventeen.
Johnny is a small-time crook.
I read her letters, girlish writing slanted
to the left with pretty hearts. The little one
is walking now. She goes for a smoke.
Water cannons blast
teargas in my eyes.
from The Harmonica
Kornelia Koepsell
translated from the German by Marielle Sutherland and Kornelia Koepsell
Listen to "Elsbeth" read in the original German by the author:
First of all, Kornelia translated the poems herself. I then helped to refine the language, sharpen the images, and, as a native English speaker, bring in alternatives from my broader range of vocabulary and understanding of register. One of the interesting things about working with an author’s draft translation is that once the first translation has been seen, it cannot be unseen. This was the challenge of the project. I had to work within this tension in my search for new ideas and inflections. But it was also a liberation, as Kornelia gave me ideas and starting points where I may not have gone myself, and the poems went back and forth between us in conversation.
The characters here occupy their space on the page like bodies. I tried to draw their contours, capture their movements, rhythms and tonalities. In “Elsbeth”, for example, there is no external rhyme, but I felt I wanted to bring out the sounds echoing internally, as in her inaccessible mind.
I introduced Elsbeth’s lisp when I realized the German word was potentially her idiosyncratic pronunciation (“gout” instead of “gut”). This made me see that in leaving the German poem behind while focusing on the English—which of course has its merits—I had missed this detail. This little turn then led me further into the character’s voice, so I changed “call” or “shout” (“ruft”) to “whoop” to bring out a childish exuberance in both the meaning and the alliterative sound in the line. Translators might draw aspects out of the original that they feel are innate to it. Whether or not this is welcome is something only each individual reader can judge.
The characters here occupy their space on the page like bodies. I tried to draw their contours, capture their movements, rhythms and tonalities. In “Elsbeth”, for example, there is no external rhyme, but I felt I wanted to bring out the sounds echoing internally, as in her inaccessible mind.
I introduced Elsbeth’s lisp when I realized the German word was potentially her idiosyncratic pronunciation (“gout” instead of “gut”). This made me see that in leaving the German poem behind while focusing on the English—which of course has its merits—I had missed this detail. This little turn then led me further into the character’s voice, so I changed “call” or “shout” (“ruft”) to “whoop” to bring out a childish exuberance in both the meaning and the alliterative sound in the line. Translators might draw aspects out of the original that they feel are innate to it. Whether or not this is welcome is something only each individual reader can judge.
—Marielle Sutherland
Kornelia Koepsell was born in 1955. She spends her time between Höchberg (near Würzburg) and Berlin. She studied sociology and psychology at Frankfurt University and graduated with a PhD in developmental psychology. She also attended drawing classes at the Städel Academy of Fine Arts. She finished her education as a psychoanalyst in Würzburg, where she then worked at the university and in her own practice. Her poems have been published in German and Austrian literary magazines and anthologies such as Akzente, Sinn und Form, Manuskripte and Jahrbuch der Lyrik, and in the complete volumes Weißes Rauschen (White Noise; Edition Faust, 2015), Epiphanien (Epiphanies; Königshausen und Neumann, 2019), Die Mundharmonika (The Harmonica; Edition Faust, 2020) and Heimatland (Home Country; Königshausen & Neumann, 2022).
Marielle Sutherland was born in Hartlepool, UK, in 1976. She studied German at the University of Oxford, completed a PhD at University College London and holds a Diploma in Translation. She is now a translator and copy editor at the German Historical Institute London. Her publications include Rainer Maria Rilke. Selected Poems, co-translated with Susan Ranson (OUP, 2011); Bauhaus Architecture 1919–1933, by Hans Engels (Prestel Verlag, 2018); texts in Early Radio: An Anthology of European Texts and Translations, ed. Emilie Morin (Edinburgh University Press, 2023); and translations in several literary journals. She was awarded the Peirene Stevns Translation Prize in 2023 for a sample translation of Yael Inokai’s Ein simpler Eingriff (A Simple Intervention; Hanser Berlin, 2022). The full novel will be published in 2024 by Peirene Press.
