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- Herausgeber: Arc Publications
- Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
- Serie: Visible Poets
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017
It is no coincidence that the poet Volker von Törne was, for many years, the Director of Aktion Sühnezeichen Friedensdienste (Action for Atonement – Service for Peace), the German charitable organisation for education and reparation in countries throughout the world that have suffered under fascism and other oppressive regimes. His father had been a member of the SS in Germany in the Second World War, and as a consequence, his poetry is written from the perspective of someone who suffered, through no fault of his own, from terrible guilt after the war. This selection from von Toerne's collected poems is particularly significant in that it is a powerful and moving articulation of the psychological burden still carried by countless people today whose voices are not often heard, a burden which von Toerne's powerful, poignant and sometimes angry poetry helps us all the better to understand.
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Memorial to the Future
Published by Arc Publications,
Nanholme Mill, Shaw Wood Road
Todmorden OL14 6DA, UK
www.arcpublications.co.uk
Original poems copyright © 1981, Verlag Klaus Wagenbach, Berlin
Translation copyright © Jean Boase-Beier 2017
Introduction copyright © David Wheatley 2017
Copyright in the present edition © Arc Publications 2017
978 1910345 64 1 (pbk)
978 1910345 65 8 (hbk)
978 1910345 66 5 (ebk)
Acknowledgements
The publishers are grateful to Verlag Klaus Wagenbach for permission to reproduce poems from Im LandeVogelfrei by Volker von Törne both in the original German and in English translation.
Design by Tony Ward
Printed in Great Britain by T.J. International Ltd,
Padstow, Cornwall
Cover picture: Tony Ward
This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part of this book may take place without the written permission of Arc Publications.
The translation of these poems was supported by a grant from the Goethe Institut which is funded by the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Arc Publications ‘Visible Poets’ series
Series Editor: Jean Boase-Beier
VOLKER VON TÖRNE
MEMORIAL
TO THE FUTURE
Translated by Jean Boase-Beier
with Anthony Vivis
Guest edited by
Philip Wilson
Introduction by
David Wheatley
2017
CONTENTS
Series Editor’s Note
Translator’s Preface
Introduction
Wassili am Weg
•
Vasily on the Road
Endlösung
•
Final Solution
Deutscher Psalm
•
German Psalm
Abschied
•
Leaving
Wege
•
Paths
Rauch
•
Smoke
Was mir die Leute sagen
•
What People Tell Me
Erinnerung an die Zukunft
•
Memorial to the Future
An Hölty
•
To Hölty
Pogrom
•
Pogrom
Erinnerung an einen Oberlehrer
•
Memorial to a Schoolmaster
Krähenflügel
•
The Wing of the Crow
Am Wegrand
•
By the Wayside
Wege der Asche
•
On Paths of Ashes
Herbstfeier
•
Autumn Festival
Sieger der Geschichte
•
History’s True Heroes
Elegie (1)
•
Elegy (1)
Nachricht
•
Message
Arbeitgeber
•
Employer
An Attila József
•
To Attila József
Masurischer Sommer
•
Summer in the Masurian Lakes
Mittagslicht
•
Midday Light
Elegie (2)
•
Elegy (2)
Am Schreibtisch
•
At this Desk
Diesseits
•
Over Here
Im Fahrtwind
•
In the Rush of Air
Nachmittagsbesuch
•
An Afternoon Visit
Vaterlandslos
•
Free of my Fatherland
Epigramm
•
Epigram
Frühlingsgedicht
•
Spring Song
Flugblatt
•
Flyer
Selbstgespräch
•
Soliloquy
Rückzug
•
Withdrawal
Notstand
•
State of Emergency
Anrufung meines Engels
•
I Call upon my Angel
Beim Lesen der Zeitung
•
While Reading the Paper
Stunde der Wölfe
•
Hour of the Wolves
Gedanken im Mai
•
Thoughts in May
Bilder
•
Images
An Ahasver
•
To Ahasuerus
An Hölderlin
•
To Hölderlin
Notstandsübung
•
Emergency Drill
Eiszeit
•
Ice Age
Erinnerung an Carl Sandburg
•
Remembering Carl Sandburg
Auf dem Boden des Grundgesetzes (1976)
•
The Constitution (1976)
Kriegsspiel
•
War Game
Regierungserklärung
•
A Statement by the Government
Pastorale
•
Pastoral
Trinkspruch
•
Drinking Song
Liebesgedicht
•
Love Poem
Zu Beginn der Achtzigerjahre. Nach Catull
•
At the Start of the Eighties: After Catullus
Biographical Notes
Series Editor’s note
The ‘Visible Poets’ series was established in 2000, and set out to challenge the view that translated poetry could or should be read without regard to the process of translation it had undergone. Since then, things have moved on. Today there is more translated poetry available and more debate on its nature, its status, and its relation to its original. We know that translated poetry is neither English poetry that has mysteriously arisen from a hidden foreign source, nor is it foreign poetry that has silently rewritten itself in English. We are more aware that translation lies at the heart of all our cultural exchange; without it, we must remain artistically and intellectually insular.
One of the aims of the series was, and still is, to enrich our poetry with the very best work that has appeared elsewhere in the world. And the poetry-reading public is now more aware than it was at the start of this century that translation cannot simply be done by anyone with two languages. The translation of poetry is a creative act, and translated poetry stands or falls on the strength of the poet-translator’s art. For this reason ‘Visible Poets’ publishes only the work of the best translators, and gives each of them space, in a Preface, to talk about the trials and pleasures of their work.
From the start, ‘Visible Poets’ books have been bilingual. Many readers will not speak the languages of the original poetry but they, too, are invited to compare the look and shape of the English poems with the originals. Those who can are encouraged to read both. Translation and original are presented side-by-side because translations do not displace the originals; they shed new light on them and are in turn themselves illuminated by the presence of their source poems. By drawing the readers’ attention to the act of translation itself, it is the aim of these books to make the work of both the original poets and their translators more visible.
Jean Boase-Beier
Translator’s Preface
I first came across Volker von Törne’s poetry in the 1980s, when I lived in Germany. It was read in schools and by university students, but, in spite of being well-known enough to be included in Karl Otto Conrady’s vast 1977 anthology Das große deutsche Gedichtbuch (The Big Book of German Poetry) alongside the work of poets like Sarah Kirsch and Wolf Biermann, his work never achieved the fame of that of many of his contemporaries. Apart from one or two poems, his work has not been translated into English.
What first struck me about von Törne’s poems, and made me want to translate them, was their intensity, which was combined with the ironic distancing and the feeling almost of lightness that came from his use of common German idioms and colloquialisms.
The intensity comes from the weight of guilt and anger in so many of the poems. He felt personally guilty that his father had been in the SS and that he had, as a small child in the late 1930s, repeated the phrases he heard about German Nationalism, about the need for racial purity and the desire to conquer others. But he was also very aware of the collective guilt of the German people, and angry at the attempt of so many to try simply to forget or even to insist they had known nothing. Alongside the guilt and anger is often a strong sense of longing and nostalgia – longing for a world in which people would be able to face the evils of the past and offer atonement, and nostalgia for a time when he did not know what he knows now, at the time of writing. The sense of an idyllic world tainted, in one’s memory of it, with the knowledge of what then was still to come, is very strong in poems like ‘Summer in the Masurian Lakes’. For the translator, this depth of feeling, this weight of memory, needs to be carried over into English. Often it is a small, precise image – the approaching shadows, in the poem above, the headless hens in ‘Pastoral’
