Study Room
What one studies, I asked my grandmother once, when one studies,
Was already quite clear to me: The priesthood, that’s my job!
To float through churches on organ notes, dressed in a black cassock,
With the Scripture under my arm, apostle-scribes in chorus,
To charge step by step up the pulpit’s gothic carvings,
Catch my breath for the Word: indeed a worthy ambition.
Today I’m the trustee of a pastorage and need but words,
Fill with smoke the south-facing room, where sermons once flourished.
Books en masse instead of a text written in flames,
Folders, scripts and clutter; Duden, orthographic concordance.
All sorts of leisure: painting tools, clay overwintering in the oven,
Bric-a-brac in the brass stash, what was once a rock-pillow pit,
All manner of muses: Athena’s bust with stone-blind eyes,
The Princess of Kagran in the wind, Garbo’s divine profile.
Designs, models and blueprints of buildings that were never realized
Hang yellowed on the wall, witnesses of utile deeds.
A humus of leaves, mail, journals scattered across tables,
Wastepaper for the basket, among it all a poem sometimes.
Reading by day? A sin. I sit in the armchair near the window,
Let the Aare flow, squint at its flashing ribbon.
A wisp of tobacco smoke: Charutos, Sumatra and Brasil,
Boxes, bronzed with gold leaf, bookends for Kleist’s oeuvre,
Blowing smoke rings, I ponder what a learned man might study:
One ought to never swim twice against the current of the same river.
Sickness
Greenish, like back in the infirmary, when I gasped in the children’s hall,
Screamed thirsting for water, a thousand blades in my stomach,
Flour green, the ceiling, the pipes, the window, the closet door,
The goblin stared, today it’s death’s crepitant yawn:
Man of bones and tales, lamenting and sullen, in hairy prose,
Sneers with a wheezing sound: Ars moriendi, my son!
Whatever decomposes, Epicurus says, lacks sentience,
What is insentient doesn’t concern us—cold comfort for the living.
Green infirmity in July, the shutters, the eyelids are closed.
Heat rages and pain, pain without origin or ambition.
Youth festival: cornflower children, scattered strains of marches,
There, beyond the river, distant fairground noises.
Outside, like scything the ting of a pick: the digging of a grave,
Clay-moist misfortune, earthquake’s fissured abyss.
Seemingly dead, trapped in the courtyard: you don’t want to, aren’t allowed to, can’t,
A hundred times a day no, a pentagram against the crypt.
To take measurements with words, friends appear by the body,
Cheerfully they write you off, fatten their lives with death.
Nightmare of agonies: smothered with down the Emperor of China suffered,
Begged for sweet music: Nightingale, sing me your song!
The toys lay dead, seasoned with stones, in the velvety casket,
A tin wind-up bird, unwound, spent coil by coil.
Two Poems
Hermann Burger
translated from the German by Daniele Pantano
Used by kind permission of Nagel & Kimche im Carl Hanser Verlag, München.
Click here for Hermann Burger’s The Emergency Brake, translated from the German by Adrian Nathan West, from the Spring 2023 issue.
Hermann Burger is commonly seen as one of Switzerland’s most important writers. Marcel Reich-Ranicki calls him “an artist who went the whole hog every time, didn’t conserve himself,” while Uwe Schütte considers him to be “one of the truly great authors of the German language: a writer of consummate control and range, with a singular and haunting worldview.” While Burger is primarily known as a novelist (see Adrian Nathan West’s recently published translation of Brenner [Archipelago Books, 2022], one of the high points of twentieth-century prose in German, for example), he always considered himself first and foremost as a poet. In fact, his first book, published when he was only twenty-five, was a collection of poems: Rauchsignale (Smoke Signals; Artemis, 1967), and he would continue to write and publish his poetry for the next two decades. Surprisingly, however, while Burger’s prose is finding a dedicated readership in the English-speaking world, his poetry has—until now—never been published in English translation. In order to fill this crucial gap and allow English-speaking readers to fully experience Burger at the height of his linguistic and artistic powers, I am currently translating his Collected Poems. As such, the two poems published here, “Study Room” and “Sickness,” represent the first examples of Burger’s poetry in English translation.
Hermann Burger (1942–1989) was a Swiss novelist, poet, and essayist. He published several novels and volumes of essays, short fiction, and poetry. In 1985, he won the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize. Burger first achieved fame with his novel Schilten (Artemis Verlag, 1976) the story of a mad village schoolteacher who teaches his students to prepare for death. At the end of his life, he was working on the autobiographical tetralogy Brenner (Suhrkamp, 1989), one of the high points of twentieth-century prose in German. He died by overdose days after the first volume’s publication.
Daniele Pantano is a Swiss poet, essayist, and literary translator. His work has been translated into over a dozen languages and published in various international journals and magazines, including Conjunctions, Evergreen Review, Guernica, Harper’s Magazine, International Poetry, Literary Hub, Modern Poetry in Translation, Plume, Poetry Daily, Poetry London, 3:AM Magazine, and 32 Poems. Pantano’s most recent books are Home for Difficult Children: A Memoir in Verse (Black Lawrence Press, 2023), Robert Walser: The Poems (Seagull Books, 2022), and The Damned: Selected Poems of Georg Trakl (Broken Sleep Books, 2023). For more information, please visit www.pantano.ch.
