NELLY SACHS ~

                                                        Nelly Sachs, 1938

HOW MANY HOMELANDS

play cards in the air

as the refugee passes through the mystery

How much sleeping music

in the wooded thicket

where the wind, all alone,

plays the midwife.

Lightning-split

the alphabet-spurgewood

sows

in devouring conception

God's first word.

Fate twitches

in the bloodcoursing meridians of a hand —

Everything is endless

and hung on the rays

of a distance.

_________________

Nelly Sachs

Flight and Metamorphosis

translated by Joshua Weiner

Farrar, 2022

RAINER BRAMBACH ~

from Also in April

The year still young. I'm seized by a boisterous mood,

rainwater vat rhymes with sunshine in March

warming my back

and drying the moss-covered stone bench —

This springtime too will bring me by the by

plenty of quiet work round the garden.

What else?

Patience, Rainer, patience.

-

Not wanting to be part of it sometimes

making off into the underwood

past many a silly cow —

Then, lying in the elder shade, timeless,

not giving a damn

if one and one are three.

-

Surely the summer has other names

not just summer.

For instance Olea, a name

combining corn yellow, rye red,

meadow and forest green

in one.

-

To write a poem

without ballast

for instance late autumn

empty snail shell cobwebs

something falling silently

amid the whispers of the trees.

-

Free time working time dinner time

and the time to sleep —

The fast trains the slow trains

the coming and the going —

Early November and yet it seems

I heard the cuckoo just a little while ago.

-

A postcard from the Caribbean

taken out of the letter box —

oh well, Caribbean,

while I — all blessings come from heaven above —

have a white Black Forest in front of me.

-

Ten degrees below zero

and again a hearty

sneeze into the handkerchief

wiping my watering eyes

and skipping and hopping

until the ice puddle cracks

and a delicate spinet rings

persistently in my ears —

-

Never put to paper and yet unforgotten

the soft light of the gas lamps in the evening

the snowball fights won and lost

the downhill races on the wooden sledge

the roast hot chestnuts

in the newspaper cone

and the Hoorays in thoughtless songs.

Beauty of our childhood years, they won't come back.

translated by Esther Kinsky

______________________

Rainer Brambach

Collected Poems

Seagull Books, 2021

Rainer Brambach (1917-1983) grew up in Basel and left

school at the age of 14 to become a manual laborer. 

He spent much of the Second World War in prison and 

labor camps, an experience which greatly influenced his writing. 

Recognition and awards notwithstanding, he remained an 

outsider in the literary world and lived for many years in poverty.

GUNTER EICH ~

Inventory

This is my cap,

this is my coat,

here's my shaving gear

in a linen sack.

A can of rations:

my plate, my cup,

I've scratched my name

in the tin.

Scratched it with this

valuable nail

which I hide

from avid eyes.

In the foodsack is

a pair of wool socks

and something else that I

show to no one,

it all serves as a pillow

for my head at night.

The cardboard here lies

between me and the earth.

The lead in my pencil

I love most of all:

in the daytime it writes down

the verses I make at night.

This is my notebook,

this is my tarpaulin,

this is my towel,

this is my thread.

____________________

Gunter Eich

Valuable Nail

translated from the German by

Stuart Friebert, David Young & David Walker

Field, 1981

GUNTER GRASS ~ XENOPHOBIA ~

Xenophobia




As millions of displaced persons

with little lullage,

burdened by memory,

were forcibly resettled

in what remained of the fatherland,

many of the locals, feeling cramped

by their arrival, shouted:

Go back where you came from!

But they stayed, as did

the well-worn cry: Go, get out!

Soon it was aimed at foreigners

who came later, and later still

from far away,

speaking in strange tongues;

they too remained,

settled down, and multiplied.

Only when the natives

began to feel foreign too

did they also begin to see,

in all those foreigners

who'd slowly learned

to bear their foreignness,

their own selves,

and start to live with them.



______________________

GUNTER GRASS
Of All That Ends
translated by Breon Mitchell
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
2016