Sieben Dichter Aus Berlin
2010; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 55; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2327-5804
Autores Tópico(s)Literature and Cultural Memory
ResumoBerlin is a city in translation, of translation. Like New York, it is constantly changing; in fact it seems to exist only as a city in transition from one historical period to next, thereby reinventing itself and image of itself again and again--the decadent city, war-machine city and then war-torn city, divided city, reunified city, capital city of reassembled German state, city of artists, of culture, and even, according to a recent New York Times headline, new capital of art world. It moves as quickly as history moves; or rather, movement of history is visible each time city retranslates itself, and this is legible in architecture as well as consciously memorialized and inevitably repressed debris each transition generates. The fall of Berlin Wall in 1989--die Wende, or the turn--marked end of what Eric Hobsbawm called the short twentieth century. Now, twenty years later, Berlin is poised to commemorate removal of this border, even though multiple ideological divisions--racism, xenophobia, nationalism--continue to surge in both reconfigured Eastern Bloc countries (with their new democratic constitutions and globalized free-market economies) and in Europe as a whole. A city always situated between its past and its future is marked, at very least, by a certain atmospheric ambiguity, and perhaps this is one reason why so many poets make their home in Berlin (along with unambiguous fact that it remains one of least expensive places to live in Germany). In 2008 I found myself living in Berlin in order to write, to learn German, and to learn to translate from German, and in collecting material for this feature I began, simply, with where I was and community of young poets practicing there. My criteria for selection and inclusion were not fixed; since any method of selection maps exclusions, I wanted to allow my criteria to shift and change as I went along. That said, a few rubrics evolved. I decided to feature younger poets. I chose to narrow selection to seven poets in order to give work of each as much space as possible. And I wanted to be true to something that struck me as a particular characteristic of Berlin poetry community, namely, formal and aesthetic range of its poetics--where, for example, rigorous and uncompromising experimentation of Daniel Falb exists alongside willfully literary and self-mocking neo-romanticism of Steffen Popp. Lastly, nearly all of these poets are published by or affiliated with kookbooks, an independent publishing collective started in 2003 by Daniela Seel and Andreas Topfer. The frame began with a city, then narrowed to a network within city, which itself turned out to be part of another, larger network. Mark Twain once wrote that German should be declared a dead language because only dead have time to learn it. (His German, by now, must be passable.) The same might be said for translating from German were it not for fact that Twain's humor posits a notion of language mastery as an achievable terminal point, as opposed to an on-going, open-ended process, much like--exactly like--facility in one's first language. If one sees writing of translation along similar lines, if one is mindful of what Venuti (following Schleiermacher) called dangers of domestication, then notions of error, failure, and untranslatability become part of translation process. This is when, at least for this translator, it evolves into a real and living practice. The gap between languages is rich because it prevents foreclosure of possibilities in either language. This is one reason why twin practices of poetry and translation generate so easily drive to theorize: both have, at their core, a lacuna, a void, or what Rosmarie Waldrop termed, with Dickinsonian brevity and acuity, a lavish absence. Ich sehe keinen prinzipiellen Unterschied zwischen Handedruck und Gedicht. …
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