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- Herausgeber: Carcanet Poetry
- Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
The Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation for Summer 2018 The Austrian poet and novelist Evelyn Schlag, whose 2004 Selected Poems received the coveted Schlegel Tieck Prize, returns with All under One Roof. Once more, Karen Leeder's brilliant translations render a selection of Schlag's most recent poems into English. The book draws on two substantial German-language collections, Sprache von einem anderen Holz (2008) and verlangsamte raserei (2014). There is also a new essay by the author in which she discusses the sources, politics and strategies of her writing. Love remains a central theme for Schlag, but an associative inward journey with new diction, and new orthography, is underway. Rüdiger Görner in Die Presse responded to the vibrancy of what he called the 'Sprachpulsate' (pulses of language): 'Evelyn Schlag's poems have a kind of discreet presence; once spoken they have claimed their permanent place in the lyric cosmos.' Leeder's selection traces a uniquely Austrian imagination at the heart of contemporary European poetry.
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Contents
ALL UNDER ONE ROOF
Translator’s Preface
It was always clear after the success of her Selected Poems, published by Carcanet in 2004, that Evelyn Schlag and I would work together again. That volume introduced Schlag’s poetry to English readers; charted her evolution as a poet across the course of four collections between 1989 and 1992; and won the Schlegel Tieck prize for Translation in 2005. This volume picks up where the Selected Poems left off and contains poems from two subsequent collections: her Sprache von einem anderen Holz (Language of a different Stripe) of 2008 and her verlangsamte raserei (racing in slo-mo) of 2014. Much has changed in the decade between that Selected Poems, which first brought her into English, and her most recent German collection. She has firmly established herself as one of leading contemporary Austrian writers and was awarded the Austrian Kunstpreis for Literature in 2016, among the highest honours that any Austrian writer can receive. She has written four novels; and in 2012 she was selected to represent Austria at the Poetry Parnassus held in London at the Southbank Centre.
Yet her voice, for all the differences that the last decade has brought with it, is still in some senses recognisably the same. It is quiet, elegiac and largely inward, though it accommodates passion, grief and rage. It is mysterious and humorous. It would be fair to say that hers is a singular voice in the Austrian context, without imitators or any kind of school. For all the discretion that also plays a large part in the poems and the emotional vulnerability, there is also a kind of stringency and radicalness that sets her apart: ‘find out what you do best / and leave it behind’ (‘Ars Poetica’). And while it has affinities with the Anglo-American tradition in many ways (notably in its interest in the concrete and in its irony), it is also a voice that runs oblique to the traditions of English-language poetry in other ways, rendering it strange and constantly surprising. At the same time, the two collections sampled here themselves see a distinct evolution in the form of Schlag’s language. Earlier work used a variety of recognised traditional forms. These collections progressively loosen the ties of convention, following instead ‘long years of that tiny private picking’ (‘Vita Poetica’) and pursuing a more singular inward path. The 2014 collection, verlangsamte raserei, for example, consists of cycles of strictly rhythmic poems without rhymes that rely heavily on line breaks and work with often surreal neologisms and playful sound patterns. What is more, they consistently reject the traditional upper-case of German grammatical usage and do away with almost all punctuation. All these things give a new lightness of touch, intensity and freedom to the language. The abolition of grammatical hierarchies also brings an increased ambiguity as lines can be read as connecting forwards or backwards at the same time.
The themes that she returns to are love, memory, landscape and art. Love is the central animating force of Schlag’s poetic (and novelistic) world. It appears in all sorts of familiar guises from the charge of the random erotic encounter – ‘once I would have said very forbidden things’ (‘Passenger’) – to the intimacy and ordinariness of everyday loving:
Then you embrace me
hardly leaving room for rosemary
or bag. Your face reveals a sudden flash
of how oblique the day is: slanted like a flight
of steps into the sideheart of the city.
Some of the most touching poems included here are those about marital love in old age.
But, in the spirit of her 2016 novel Architektur einer Liebe (An Architecture of Love), the poems do not simply thematise love but also try to echo the shapes we make as we inhabit these various relationships, as ‘we search for a new contour’ (‘Hesitant Prospect’).
As in previous collections, childhood memories loom large: sometimes, as in the sequence ‘Plaits’, also as a way of exploring larger historical events, when the fairy-tale tones of childhood meet with the cartographies of war. Memory of illness too finds its place as in previous collections, but explored with characteristic restraint: ‘No Pathos Please’. Many poems present themselves as travel diaries that range through Europe, UK, USA, Syria and Russia, knowingly testing the boundaries of autobiography and fiction. There is also a sequence responding directly to works of visual art, ‘The Jewels of Brazil’. But beyond these there is also a powerful sense of the poet negotiating a place within an international artistic tradition. The poem ‘If Bohemia Lies by the Sea’ is an explicit response to the Austrian poet Ingeborg Bachmann, for example, to whose tortured legacy (most akin in English to that of Sylvia Plath) Schlag responds in a characteristically blunt mode: ‘Ok, Ingeborg: that’s enough’. Schlag has written elsewhere about her difficulty coming to terms with Bachmann, though it would be true to say that many of her poems do in fact constitute an on-going exploration of this formative influence. Alongside Bachmann readers will recognise encounters with other, especially female, writers: the Austrian religious poet Christine Lavant (1915–1973) provides an inspiration for the bitter anger of ‘Conditio Divina’, for example. But Anna Achmatova and Elizabeth Bishop are also interlocutors, alongside painters and musicians across the centuries: from Johann Joachim Quantz, eighteenth-century German flautist, to modern American painter Thomas Moran.
If the natural world is a constant in Schlag’s work, it is by no means an idyllic refuge. It is marked everywhere by a profound sense of unease and ecological threat that finds sudden catastrophic expression in the wholesale slaughter of the BSE crisis in the UK, for example, or a tsunami on the Atlantic rim. New, though, is the acute awareness of a contemporary world of smart phones, shopping malls and inner-city violence. The changes in the new Europe over the last decade also leave their mark: ‘these are moments of political joy / you must lay down in your coronary arteries’. But for all the new logos in the East, the shiny consumer palaces and the dreams of the ‘shopperplankton’ (‘All under One Roof’), Schlag focuses above all on the victims: the widows of the Chechnyan war, the murdered Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya or the young women forced into prostitution and violence. She offers these images of contemporary life without any explicit judgement, however; rather, her acute understated images do the work. Memorable in this context is the ‘littlest girl’ at the end of the poem ‘Unarmed Civilian Security Service’ who watches impassively as the teenage town ‘hyenas’ engage in a brutal mugging before skipping off, satchel bobbing.
Anyone coming to Schlag’s work for the first time will be struck by the power of her images. The poems are conceived as intensely visual concentrates, with often surprising perspectives or humorous angles. For all their attention to the domestic or even frankly banal, this means they are also frequently mysterious. This mystery is enhanced by an often surreal take on language. In both collections, the playful half tones, neologisms and surprising word combinations act as an antidote to the language of media and everyday reality. But especially in the most recent poems, language has taken a further step: becoming less directly referential and following a logic of feeling or sound, rather than of grammar. Poems play through repertoires of overheard voices, with snatches of sense swimming into and out of focus; or pursue associative paths through sound: ‘Dowland like download’ (‘Renaissance Song’); ‘cirrus // or circus clouds’ (‘Cirrus’).
As with the previous English volume, I found some of the poems forming in English in my mind even as I read the German; others felt much more resistant to their new home. But overall I have the sense that translating these poems has been more challenging than in 2004, despite the fact that I know Evelyn Schlag’s work so much better than I did then, and that the process of translation accompanied many of these poems as they were being written and rewritten over the course of many years. Through all this I have been privileged to work closely with Evelyn herself, who has been enormously patient and generous with her time. We have I think both learned a good deal about this most delicate fetching across between people, contexts, languages and cultures.
