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- Herausgeber: Arc Publications
- Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
- Sprache: Englisch
Whether in poetry, fiction, radio drama or sound installations, Esther Dischereit's work represents a unique departure in recent European writing: a distinctive, off-beat syntax of German-Jewish intimacy with the fractured consciousness and deeply rutted cultural landscape of today's Germany. Sometimes a Single Leaf, mirroring the development of Esther Dischereit's poetry across three decades, includes selections from three of her books as well as a sampling of more recent, uncollected poems. It is her first book of poetry in English translation. In the words of her translator: "Esther Dischereit's poetry offers a visceral pathography of post-war continuities, spectres, amnesia and trauma. Her work builds on the poet's vulnerability and witness to a previous and ultimately un-sealable dimension – a dimension inhabited in a different way by the poetry of Paul Celan – in which the violations and degradation of the Shoah resonate with harrowing persistence in the detail of contemporary everyday life. At the same time, however, her poems test moments of personal and poetic redress, espousing forms developed in an incessant exploration of speech rhythms and images, celebrating the erotic and quotidian, experimenting with hope, seeking community."
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sOMETIMES A SINGLE LEAF
Published by Arc Publications,
Nanholme Mill, Shaw Wood Road
Todmorden OL14 6DA, UK
www.arcpublications.co.uk
Original poems copyright © Esther Dischereit, 2020 & Verlag Vorwerk 8, BerlinTranslation copyright © Iain Galbraith, 2020Introduction copyright © Iain Galbraith, 2020Copyright in the present edition © Arc Publications, 2020
978 1911469 70 4 (pbk)
978 1911469 71 1 (hbk)
978 1911469 72 8 (ebk)
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The publishers are grateful to Verlag Vorwerk 8 for permission to reproduce poems from Rauhreifiger Mund oder andere Nachrichten and Im Toaster steckt eine Scheibe Brot by Esther Dischereit, both in the original German and in English translation.
The publishers and translator are grateful to the editors of the following journals and anthologies, in which some of the translated poems first appeared: Dimensions2, Habitus, EinMagazinüberOrte, Sport, The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization Vol. 10 1973-2005, The Bitter Oleander, No Man’s Land, World Literature Today.
The translator is indebted to Irit Dekel and Michael Weinman for their insightful reading and guidance in several instances.
Design by 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 Translations’ series
Series Editor: Jean Boase-Beier
CONTENTS
Translator’s Preface
from
ALSMIRMEIN GOLEMÖFFNETE / WHEN MY GOLEM OPENED UP (1996)
‘Ich saß…’
•
‘I sat…’
‘Statt Milch haben wir…’
•
‘Instead of milk…’
Jüdische Renaissance I
•
Jewish Renaissance I
Jüdische Renaissance II
•
Jewish Renaissance II
‘Dünnwandig stand ich…’
•
‘Thin-walled I stood…’
‘Chabibi…’
•
‘Chabibi…’
Deutsches Lied
•
German Lied
Mond und Blau
•
Moon and Blue
‘Ich kroch unter Berlin…’
•
‘I crept beneath Berlin…’
‘Weiche Wörter…’
•
‘Soft words…’
‘Meine Augen sind…’
•
‘My eyes have…’
Gefangen
•
Imprisoned
from
RAUHREIFIGER MUNDODERANDERE NACHRICHTEN / HOAR-FROSTED MOUTHOR OTHER NEWS (2001)
Grünstichige Rosen
•
Green-tinted Roses
‘Ich trage den Schnee…’
•
‘I carry my snow…’
‘Weiße Vögel rasen…’
•
‘White birds race…’
‘Manchmal segelt ein einzelnes Blatt…’
•
‘Sometimes a single leaf…’
‘Der Tag riecht wie frische Minze…’
•
‘The day smells like fresh mint…’
‘Ich geh und lasse…’
•
‘I go, leaving…’
‘Ich springe durch…’
•
‘I leap through…’
‘Im Schlossturm von Darmstadt…’
•
‘In the Darmstadt Palace Tower…’
In den Steinen der Synagoge…’
•
‘In the stones of the synagogue…’
‘Ein heißer Sommer…’
•
‘A hot summer…’
from
IM TOASTERSTECKTEINE SCHEIBE BROT / THERE’SA SLICEOF BREADINTHE TOASTER (2007)
‘Im Toaster…’
•
‘There’s a slice…’
Fähre nach Wannsee – dann weiter
•
Ferry to Wannsee – then On
‘Sie kam aus der Ankunfts-halle…’
•
‘She came from the arrivals hall…’
‘Der Mond…’
•
‘The moon…’
‘Heute waren sie gekommen…’
•
‘They had come here today…’
Ich find das komisch
•
I Find That Kind of Funny
Plötzensee Strand
•
Plötzensee Beach
Marina Bay’s
•
Marina Bay’s
Klappernde Silver Towers
•
Rattling Silver Towers
‘Erstaunt, fast erschrocken…’
•
‘Astonished, almost shocked…‘
Ich renne über die Putlitzer Brücke
•
I Rush Across Putlitz Bridge
NEUE GEDICHTE / NEW POEMS
1866 Gasthaus zum Lamm
•
The Lamb Inn, 1866
‘Meinen Rücken…’
•
‘Stalks of grass…’
Kissing Terry in the Rain
•
Kissing Terry in the Rain
Über das Fahren im Schnee
•
On Travelling in the Snow
Gąski
•
Gąski
Nachwachsende Zeugen
•
Renewing Witnesses
‘Wir fuhren…’
•
‘We drove…’
‘Die Körper der Oliven…’
•
‘The bodies of the olives…’
‘Das Kleid der Zitronen…’
•
‘The frocks of the lemons…’
Die Gewesenen
•
The Once-weres
Biographical Notes
TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE
A little over halfway into Esther Dischereit’s second volume of poems, Rauhreifiger Mund oder andere Nachrichten (Hoar-frosted Mouth or Other News, 2001), comes a one-line poem consisting of seven words: ‘Ich geh und lasse meine Splitter liegen’ (literally: I go and leave my splinters lying). The abrupt appearance of this poem’s narrator is nothing if not wayward – someone, a first person singular, far from entering the scene is already leaving, making a break for it, signalling a fragmentary future. No less importantly, the poem announces a strategy of resistance – against extinction: the subject breaks but / and departs, while the part of her that had already come apart is left behind. Against abjection, the subject has the fortitude to survive the force that precipitates her “splinters” and walk away. After fracturing she speaks for herself.
Many of Esther Dischereit’s poems, and many of her sentences, leave a troubled trace on the reading consciousness. I find myself (sometimes in irritation) returning to her poems and looking at them from a different angle, forgetting or needing to forget the impressions of a previous visit. It is as if one were studying the several faces of a Cubist artwork (one of Dischereit’s essays is entitled ‘The Cubist Gaze: Who Writes when I Write?’), whose substance or assertion, one supposes, inheres in the many-faceted simultaneity of different aspects. Angled edges and surfaces break into the poems, sometimes into the syntax of a single sentence or phrase:
it’s neat and tidy here
paddle boats and rowing boats
for hire on Sundays
they hanged them in their underwear
filmed the whole thing
sitting at the bistro table two women
drinking wheat beer
(from ‘Plötzensee Beach’)
The reading eye stumbles, forced to reorient in a suddenly precarious environment (rip currents, mixed messages). The banality of the tidied surface splits, an abyss opens: one of Berlin’s shallow graves.
How then shall I translate the German sentence into English? Perhaps: “I go, leaving my splinters behind me”. But is this even a poem? A generic subtitle on the cover of the book tells us the volume contains Gedichte (Poems), and we are nowhere told that this sentence makes an exception to the rule. And yet the book’s title also speaks of andere Nachrichten (Other News): Hoar-frosted Mouth or Other News – not “and” but “or Other News”. So in one sense the poems (which may themselves be the “splinters” she leaves behind) could also be read as news, or messages, or even intelligence (somewhat darkly, Nachrichtendienst usually means intelligence agency or secret service). They are “Other News” – so not the kind of news that buries what is really going on under “the latest” distractions put out by media corporations, but news that stands in some relation to the ‘Hoar-frosted Mouth’ of the book title: announcements made in a hostile environment, messages spoken to concern us now and tomorrow, news that will stay news.
In an interview, the Scottish poet Edwin Morgan spoke of the “writer or the poet being in receipt, if you like, of messages, just like people listening for stars’ messages… Nothing is not giving messages, I think.”1
