Self Portrait With A Swarm of Bees E-Book

Jan Wagner

• Herausgeber: Arc Publications
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Seitenzahl: 88

Beschreibung

Self-Portrait with a Swarm of Bees combines the poet's unerring instinct for the surprising perspective on commonplace objects or events with a mischievous delight in the detail of the absurd. Wagner is a vigilant, yet playful, chronicler of the quotidian, his meticulous handling of image and sound forging a worldly, almost luminous palpability.

Leseprobe

SELF-PORTRAIT WITH A SWARM OF BEES

Published by Arc Publications,

Nanholme Mill, Shaw Wood Road

Todmorden OL14 6DA, UK

www.arcpublications.co.uk

Translation copyright © Iain Galbraith 2015

Translator’s Preface copyright © Iain Galbraith 2015

Introduction copyright © Karen Leeder 2015

Copyright in the present edition © Arc Publications 2015

978 1908376 82 4 (pbk)

978 1908376 83 1 (hbk)

978 1908376 84 8 (ebk)

Acknowledgements

‘champignons’, ‘des toten lenins reise nach tjumen’, ‘fenchel’ and ‘frösche’ from Probebohrung im Himmel (2001)

© Jan Wagner 2001 / 2015

‘giersch’, ‘versuch über mücken’, ein pferd’, ‘das weidenkätzchen’, ‘grottenolm’, ‘laken’, im brunnen’ and ‘selbstporträt mit bienenschwarm’ from Regentonnenvariationen

© Hanser Berlin im Carl Hanser Verlag, 2014

and poems from:

Guerickes Sperling

© 2004 Berlin Verlag in der Piper Verlag GmbH, Berlin

Achtzehn Pasteten

© 2007 Berlin Verlag in der Piper Verlag GmbH, Berlin

Australien

© 2010 Berlin Verlag in der Piper Verlag GmbH, Berlin

The translation of this work was supported by a grant from the Goethe-Institut which is funded by the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Design by Tony Ward

Cover design: Tony Ward & Ben Styles

Printed in Great Britain by TJ International, Padstow, Cornwall

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.

‘Visible Poets’

Series Editor: Jean Boase-Beier

JAN

WAGNER

SELF-PORTRAIT WITH

A SWARM OF BEES

SELECTED POEMS

Translated by

Iain Galbraith

& introduced by

Karen Leeder

2015

CONTENTS

Series Editor’s Note

Translator’s Preface

Introduction

champignons

•

mushrooms

des toten lenins reise nach tjumen

•

dead lenin’s journey to tyumen

fenchel

•

fennel

frösche

•

frogs

guerickes sperling

•

guericke’s sparrow

weihnachten in huntsville, texas

•

christmas in huntsville, texas

kleinstadtelegie

•

small town elegy

der veteranengarten

•

the veterans’ garden

smithfield market

•

smithfield market

regenwürmer

•

earthworms

kolumbus

•

columbus

störtebeker

•

störtebeker

der mann aus dem meer

•

the man from the sea

dobermann

•

dobermann

quallen

•

jellyfish

dezember 1914

•

december 1914

anomalien

•

anomalies

shepherds’ pie

•

shepherd’s pie

pâté chaud de harengs aux pommes de terre

•

pâté chaud de harengs aux pommes de terre

cheese and onion pasties

•

cheese and onion pasties

quittenpastete

•

quince jelly

der westen

•

the west

staniszów

•

staniszów

teebeutel

•

tea-bag

chamäleon

•

chameleon

historien: onesilos

•

histories: onesilos

gecko

•

gecko

von den ölbäumen

•

concerning the olive trees

amisch

•

amish

elegie für knievel

•

elegy for knievel

der wassermann

•

the merman

steinway

•

steinway

wippe

•

see-saw

meteorit

•

meteorite

australien

•

australia

giersch

•

bindweed

versuch über mücken

•

essay on midges

ein pferd

•

a horse

das weidenkätzchen

•

the catkin

grottenolm

•

olm

laken

•

sheets

im brunnen

•

in the well

selbstporträt mit bienenschwarm

•

self-portrait with a swarm of bees

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

Many years can pass between first looking into a ‘foreign’ poet’s work and the appearance of a book that will document the translator’s full engagement. But where does the translation itself begin? Perhaps there is a moment of ‘first love’, when a translator feels almost ineluctably drawn to a quality that is at once alluringly other and yet also hauntingly close – a distinctive tone of voice, perhaps, or a more than likeable subtlety of attention. “Something seemed to click”, we might later recall – a recognizable moment of quickening along the arculate fasciculus, the neural loop which scientists hold to be the site of our written and spoken language experience. And perhaps that thrilling early moment of heightened focus is necessary to throw open the doors to a deeper, more purposeful, and also more accountable kind of reading.

A translator’s reading – a reading or seeking for the object of translation – does not only pursue the usual, inward, connotative and cognitive pleasures that derive from transforming a unique distribution of script into sensation, representation, association, and idea. Unstilled by these gratifications alone, or, who knows, lacking the necessary autonomy to let the euphoria simply burn and fade, the translator will follow his or her insight, empathy, admiration and rapture, but also any number of less well advertised, yet equally powerful emotions – envy, rivalry or even anger (Laura Riding’s “rugged black of anger” which has “an uncertain smile border”) – to a risky, impossible, poetic head. What I mean is the task of facing the ‘source’ text on its own terms and sharing the reading experience in the target language. But also, crucially and in apparent contradiction to that ‘selfless’ service, the presumption of rebuilding the ‘foreign’ poem on the translator’s own terms and ground, bound in the target language by the constraints and demands that emanate from his or her own time and place. Thus the origin of a translated text is always dual in character, and the territory between its sources debatable.

When I speak of ‘facing’ the poem ‘on its own terms’, for example – might I really be facing it down? When I say ‘sharing’ – do I actually mean appropriating, incorporating, cannibalizing? And when I say ‘rebuilding’ – should the process I am describing more properly be called an ‘un-building’, piece by piece, an obliterating, a robbing of stones for my own building project? Finding the knife-edge which an ambitious translation – one that attempts to fulfil the demands of both poem and reader – will always feel keenly, a translator is never permitted to forget the duality of his or her position: it is Janus-faced, with an abyss at either side of the knife-blade. In the teeth of all that is obvious and yet oddly invisible – the absence in a translation of any word the ‘foreign’ text once contained – both the poem and its reader (i.e. of the translation) will generally hope for the same thing: “A tune beyond us as we are, / But nothing changed by the blue guitar”. Like the translator, the guitarist in Wallace Stevens’s poem ‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’ must serve and satisfy two masters, and his worldly knowledge of the way things change on the strings of a “blue guitar” does not diminish his accountability to both patrons. But again and again, in more inward moments, he returns to an apparent paradox, an unsettling mystery, one of the Muse-questions of guitarists, poets and translators alike:

Where

Do I begin and end? And where

As I strum the thing, do I pick up

That which momentously declares

Itself not to be I and yet

Must be. It could be nothing else.[1]

The poetics of translation inevitably entail much that will never be explained, or at least always explained differently. Perhaps because I am a slow reader, too, I invariably need a considerable time to work through these complexities and taboos in my effort to read productively, as a translator undoubtedly should, beyond the elation and fuzzy matching of the initial encounter: reading over time and through a language, reading for the primal syntax.

*

I first met Jan Wagner in January 2001 when we both attended a ‘literary’ gathering hosted by the British Council in Cologne. The date is significant for two reasons. Firstly, it was shortly before the young German poet published his first volume of poems, Probebohrung im Himmel (Test Drill in the Sky), and secondly because he was still, until 2003, the editor, together with Thomas Girst, of an especially eye-catching literary periodical, Die Außenseite des Elements