Pitch & Glint E-Book

Lutz Seiler

• Herausgeber: And Other Stories
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 50

Beschreibung

On its original publication in 2000, Pitch & Glint was widely hailed as a landmark in German poetry. Rooted in Seiler's childhood home, a village brutally undermined by Soviet uranium extraction, these propulsive poems are highly personal, cadenced, cryptic and earthy, evoking European history with undeniable force.

Leseprobe

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First published in English translation in 2023 by And Other StoriesSheffield – London – New Yorkwww.andotherstories.org

© Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am Main 2000First published as pech & blende in 2000.All rights reserved by and controlled through Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin.Translation and afterword copyright © Stefan Tobler, 2023

All rights reserved. The rights of Lutz Seiler to be identified as the author of this work and of Stefan Tobler to be identified as the translator of this work have been asserted.

Print ISBN: 9781913505769eBook ISBN: 9781913505776

Editor: Tara Tobler; Copy-editor: Robina Pelham Burn; Proofreader: Sarah Terry; Typesetting and eBook: Tetragon, London; Series Cover Design: Elisa von Randow, Alles Blau Studio, Brazil, after a concept by And Other Stories; Author Photo: Renate von Mangoldt.

Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following, in which some of these translations first appeared: Modern Poetry in Translation, New Statesman, PN Review, PROTOTYPE, Shearsman, Sheffield Telegraph, the TLS and Wet Grain.

And Other Stories gratefully acknowledges that its work is supported using public funding by Arts Council England and the translation of this book was supported by a grant from the Goethe-Institut.

Contents

I mechanics of the pictorial world latrine there was a kinship between our houses fin de siècle Greater Berlin, one spoilheap glow scissors knives and matches Felizetti’s garden summing up II in the East, Lisa Rothe what remains remains on the sheep track the sixth blue black August but it was good Berlin room in the east of the land pitch & glint where were you, Gagarin III my class, born in sixty-three, that Potemkin’s village bugs brain dead Sunday over mountains, over steppe, ventured we always said hello we answered grassland my gems, my boat, my canvas gym bag IV in field Latin Gera moss fire Sundays I thought of God Bols ballerina born ’fourteen / name / sex one o’clock on the towers stick boy poetry is my gun dog I’m tired V travel in the nineteen hundreds at night, among the noises Black Africa, the knee, the hers, for her man citizen of the world almost frosty still, yet Castlegregory / Co. Kerry just the way things are good evening Cape gravity VI sixty-nine, old century Translator’s NotesMemory Salt: A Translator's Afterword

Everyone has only one song.

Paul Bowles

‌I

‌mechanics of the pictorial world

taking down the swing

in autumn & putting it up

in April. day after day

the suburb commutes under

the trees and hour after hour

from the sky above courtyards

pulverised swallows fall & neatly

stuffed ones come up: the

gravity in their eyes hangs

raw as an egg

over the globe over

the man at the next table

(in sleep he leans his face

against the lamp) and over

the slender animals here

that each evening

creep down the avenue

& murmur

ev’nin into the dark as

if tucking the greeting away

in their warm almost

sleeping bodies

‌latrine

once, it was said, the root of her cough

shone down the narrow

stairs on us, feeble children

with cold

piss, butcher’s grandchildren in the night, who

loved the light in the radio & the clockwork’s

proclamations, eiderdown kids, steaming

birds, all that had been

her house, her tiredness too, if

it rained, was that the courtyard and that

the dog and

it was the butcher’s rope with

mother quietthe vertebrae

cracked apart, I was still

standing in the kitchen

behind her cupboard

and didn’t know if,

where I was, I could ever

be found again or

if I was already dead or was it

the others outside who had died

mother, father, Gagarin & Heike or

mother ahead standing ready not quiet

too tired for the humidity in the air &

her hand raised, as if

the animal was wanting

one last time to be

soothed by her, and yet

she had done that too and

had become even more lonely

with the road to the pass at her back

a bread van in the courtyard, the

opening & closing of tears …

‌there was a kinship between our houses

there were ducks on duckweed

and, miss, your seamstressing

between the silver heads of willows, there was

your basil laugh with sewing machine

with measuring tape and a couple of dummies. what

was there to laugh about? there was

nothing to laugh about, there was, sorry,

also nothing to talk about, there

were ducks on duckweed

and, miss, your seamstressing

‌fin de siècle

I walked through snow with all the nervous

post-war whip-cracked lamps behind my neck

across Vienna’s Mozart bridge and there

a tired Irish setter was still sitting

tethered he

was dead and waiting for me

I mean I untied his rope

from the railing base and began

to swing the creature a little

to and fro skin & bony light

the bells are ringing a flurry of snow

started I sang

a little song about the Danube over

and over (I was a child) the dead

setter circled now at the end

of my arm above the lovely

balustrade he curved

light and large into the nervous

post-war lamplight a rip

widened at his throat a whistling

got up and the rigid

skins on his eyes clicked

tiredly open and closed: oh, you’d

have loved the mechanics of the blink

and would have been lonelier still

above the snow, the bridge & the old song

‌Greater Berlin, one

the smell of the last allotments & heavy

lifting at the huts: some

hung sleigh bells on

pockets bulky and hard, late-

returning POWs’ greatcoats, we