Auszug aus >Kussnester<

Werner Lutz is a formidable character; at his home in Basel we chatter non-stop for 7 hours straight; at 82 years of age he's more alive and sprightly than ever.  "I'm like an old snail. The shell is cracking," he says, "but the heart, the heart goes on forever."

Although Werner once worked as a commercial artist and a painter alongside writing his poetry—in fact many of his earlier books feature both—his eyesight is now failing.  Despite that, he's just completed two new collections of poetry, both of which he's eager for me to get translating tout-de-suite.  He hands me a manuscript full of scribbles, squiggles, arrows, corrections.  "This is >Flusstage< (Riverdays)," he says, "poems that I wrote along the Rhine—as days and years flowed into each other and cheese was maturing.  Keep it, I have another one."

Werner's verse is imbued with an almost casual sense of place in the universe (he calls it a tiny place, but with a cracking bottle of Amarone).  He has a deep affinity with the natural world of the Alps, and yet there's something more here: Werner's razor-sharp, subtle sense of the absurd in the everyday.  "An unlikely Swiss trait," I say, "trying to wind him up."

He laughs. "I'm a country lad," he says. "Working with cows and goats gave me a great sense of the absurd."

On the surface, Werner's poems seem—well, almost—simple.  Yet as each line tiptoes to the next, he gently shuffles us into the playfully circumspect, the absurdly dark, the wistfully awry. Strangely, I don't think I've enjoyed playing poetic hide-and-seek—that ephemeral art of lyrical translation, more with any other poet.  At first Werner's poems slip under your skin unnoticed, then—possibly a moment, possibly an hour later—they boomerang back and tickle you, force you to break out in light sniggers or even hearty guffaws.