Uljana Wolf

oh the skein of raggle-taggle village dogs: trickly
tails, stubbly legs, tough teeth fletching at the fence

yours is the street, the dust on an asphalt hem
yours the resonant night in the dormant valley
...

in meiner kehle sitzt ein lump, der jedes lied zu einer lüge um-verklumpt. wenn ich ruf: er wars, nicht ich, der log, rollt er mir grollend einen holzklotz auf die zunge. junge, brumm ich, du bist eine last, dann er: und du das letzte. darauf schweig ich, doch weiß ich, er bleibt dran, legt arge listen an, für jeden räusper, den er, und warum auch nicht, als einen anschlag auslegt, ein gedicht.
...

in my throat there sits a lump that clumps every lay into a lie. if i cry out: it's he who lies, not i, he gleefully loads a log upon my tongue, young man, i grumble, i grow weary of this fun, whereupon he: as do i. falling silent then, i know he'll go on laying snares, taking every last clearing of the throat as a start—and should he not?—that'll end a poem.
...

eine sünde, meinst du, wäre, schwäne hier nicht zu erwähnen: sechs ist schweigen, liebe sieben, und am ende bleibt am see ein flügel über. vielleicht nicht sinnig, aber ohne märchen wäre lange sense. darauf ich: siehe der spechte drittes lid, wie es sich seitwärts vor die linse schiebt! erwiesen ist, man kann damit auf alles pochen, die äugen fallen nicht aus dem kopf, die stille, nach dem ersten, flatternden klopfen, rührt einen nicht
...

still, it would be sinful, you say, not to speak of swans: six is silence, seven love, and in the end there's a one-wing surplus. seems silly perhaps, but fairy tales save us many a swan song. so i say: consider the woodpecker's third eyelid sliding supportively across its pupil. with its help, you can strike home any point without eyes popping from sockets. and after that first flutter of hard knocks, the silence cannot hurt you at all.

Translated by Susan Bernofsky
...

you mean it would be a sin not to mention the swans here. sex is silence, love—uh—seeping. at the end blips remain to be seen: a flag, a fling. we winged it! maybe not sensible, but without fairy tales, longer hair/langour/longueur of sense. death sentence. off from that i see the specter's bird lid: how it shoves sideways before the lens. which was to be proven: one can throb for everything, the eyes don't fall out of the head, the stillness, even after the worst flattening blows, could move the nothing: not not not not. in its end, its bedeutung. signed, hölderling.

Variation/alternate translation by Traver Pam Dick (previously unpublished)
...

aperture on october
window to courtyard:

biggest photo wallpaper
you ever sat facing

pigeons on roofedge
with clay feet

on god's conveyor belt
standing still

no wingpair none
whose beat reaches you

an old photo
in overexposed wind
...

we weave ourselves
between the
stations

gravel
and stems

on the switches
splinted kisses

against the train's
clattering on
...

as if you'd
sent your
lungs

a word
coughs
in a coffer

and the lock
balks at
the key

as if it were
your stubborn
mouth
...

I
berlin

when we awoke with nests
in our hair we named night

the convalescent fathers slammed
all the traps shut shovel-handed

the ovens slept without shep
herding us into their oblivion

*

II
glauchau

when we were sick from soot
and the dry-bulk of archives

we moved with our grandfathers
into a boarded-up signal tower

watched the old rail guards
set their hands on the lever

through the dead switch line
ran a tremble as of traveling

*

III
malczyce/maltsch

when the discarded wagons
on the sidetrack dreamed

of reloading point at the oder's knee
of freight chutes and culm

we stole one sluggish car
from its rail from its bed

letting sparks in empty warehouses
leap in our direction

*

IV
The small train stations without a town.
………………………………….Wolfgang Koeppen

but when we scattered out on
an open stretch between sites

since the stars too one says
stoke their ovens above us

we sparked through landscape
that lay like fly ash around us

once more the route through to
the house of the switch operator

*

V
legnica / liegnitz

when we traveled in trains men
who weren't our fathers carried

the country in hand-braided baskets
(mushrooms beers) drowsily in the compartment

the smoke from their mouths still
hung like night long stuck in our hair
...

we wanted to speak about little animals, to get on our knees for the little beasts, those made of dust and gooey fuzzle, in floorboards and cracks, shivering in grey coats, our animals made of thin air. we wanted to whisper very closely in your language and inside mine, tell me darling, did you vacuum today. no, we didn't wish to alarm our creatures, little like spots, are they spots, don't they have pompom tails, bunny ears, or bunny tails, tom-tom ears, didn't we want to smoke less, cough less, be less either or. yesterday the room's nook was lonely in its dreary croak. today it's a hoard, for tender hordes, un pont, we want, so let's be quiet, let's eavesdrop on our knees: our little creatures, how they swap their fluffy, moon-grey names.
...

we wanted to lean over this phrase like a charted city, to make a point, create a mouthspace, myth of hear or say: hier, in this net of tongues, one path was well-sprung, a mistake, mystique. lingua franca stuck on our foreheads, almost touching and already legend: you are here, ich bin wer, a game of routes, but whatever we said the words did not arrive. instead the red lines snapped, rolling back into their very own names: murmuring with the greek one, chartis, carta with the italian, and karte with me, meaning my card: looks like we're here. almost true freunde. and so we found, with the wrong sign, our site, and the rest of the city we folded, in the manner of this country, as they say, into maps.
...

winter came, stretched its frames,

wove misty threads into the damp



wood. fogged windows, we didn't

recognise each other by our arms



which were too big, too baggy, all

borrowed onesies, into which we would grow, if they fitted us,



which, eventually, they will. would.

a verb like the sound of sleeves over



wet glass. like wet sleeves in a mouth,

sucking. through the frames we saw



snow portraits of mothers in parks,

wind-ruffled, on the verge of, but held



by ribbons, which led to hats, in der

mitte of gloves. saw the supply-threads



of winter, linty. and tested our roles,

tentatively, along the midlines of mittens.
...

what is a domicile? a domicile is a star-

crossed ten of clubs. what is a crossing?



in the flubbed dialect of these forests

a crossing is the word tree. and why



do homelands play cards in the air? no one

ever saw the homelands go home. a tree



in the forest of neighbouring languages

is a club in this suit. out of its wood



someone makes crosses on a map.

the countries fill in their domicile and



put the stationery back into its pencil

case. what is stationary? put it back.



with nelly sachs
...

I

girl
your clothes
you fell
in the dunes

the sand
you lay out
in tongues

and between
your legs
nautical miles
anchor



II

the sky
a drunken
sailor
whose eye's
been gouged out

in murk
the white pearl

you sleep
with the cyclops
...

my dear: this is
our pothole love
our little border traffic
awkward under tongues
...

who says that poems are like these dogs
surrounded by their own echo at the village core

of the waiting and pawing at half moon
of the stubborn marking of language terrains -
...

mister, we've been to the zoo, but it was closed, wir wollten die entblößung unserer zähne trainieren, studieren das stimmhafte sehnen zum beispiel der zebras, weil alles zueinander anders sagt, mal so und mal zoo. zuletzt entdeckten wir, verzagt am zäun, ein echsenset. wir nannten sie ginger und fred. it seems, you said, they never called the whole thing off. das gab uns reichlich Stoff für den heimweg.
...

mister, we've been to the zoo, but it was closed. we wanted to practice baring our teeth, to study the voiced musings of the zebras, say, since everything says everything some other way, or two, or zoo. at the gate's zenith or azimuth we espied a set of lizards. we dubbed them ginger and fred. it seems they never called the whole thing off, you said. and this food for thought fed us all the way home.

Translated by Susan Bernofsky
...

mister, that's a zed in the zoo, not a zee, nor the zuider zee, not so bizarre. what's more, in a zed there's Ed. that said, we wear woollens and trainers, and you think us Brits coz our feet are well-trained and not sneaky. but why shoes and not shows? zap a bonspiel of zebras, zigzag in the saga, zip to the zócalo, in the ooze or ozone where zen zealotry zooms home like Jingles to Ed. A toast to the Ee, okay I agree! But after you've drunk it, don't get in a car, there's double zero tolerance (oo) at the border, so zip up your zipper, zoo's not very far.

Variation/alternate translation by Erín Moure
...