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NLA News - home February 2005 Volume XV Number 5

MEETING AT CROSSROADS

Diana Giese reports on an intriguing anthology of Australian literary translation

click to enlarge

Ivor Indyk and Uwe Kolbe during a Sydney Harbour cruise in May 2004

Photograph courtesy The Goethe Institut, Sydney

Mouth to Mouth is a product of the German–Australian Poetry Project. It’s an anthology of contemporary German poetry translated into English. The project paired the work of 10 Australian and 10 German poets, in both languages. In June 2003 they spent three days together in Berlin, translating each other’s work. The European poets came from Switzerland and Austria as well as Germany, and their starting point was a literal translation of chosen poems. Then, with an interpreter, dictionaries and the Internet, and through close personal exchanges, they produced work for performance. ‘There was an almost physical sense of language as exchange, of the words bouncing between poets and translators,’ says Ivor Indyk, editor of the Australian literary journal Heat, and a catalyst for the project. ‘Usually translators are separated from writers by time and place. And poets generally work in isolation.’ Here they were up close, in each other’s faces. There was ‘a real buzz’ in the dynamic between the players.

The workshops were organised by the literaturWERKstattberlin as part of the annual Berlin Poesiefestival. ‘The translations made the poems live again, as a new poem in a new language,’ says Indyk.

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The poets at Government House Sydney, for the launch of Mouth to Mouth

Photograph courtesy The Goethe Institut, Sydney

The poetry project was part of a much larger initiative in Germany, involving dance and visual arts and sponsored by the Australia Council for the Arts. Karilyn Brown, of the Audience Marketing and Development Branch, speaks of also working with dancers, choreographers and other writers to produce ‘a wonderful, dynamic multi-faceted festival’ over a two-year development period. ‘There is huge curiosity about Australian contemporary art and culture in Germany, but limited knowledge,’ she says.

Brown talks enthusiastically of the excitement of ‘brokering marriages’ between poets from different places. ‘Many emotions enter a space where strangers live and breathe in the same room for three days’, working on poems. ‘It takes extraordinary trust to hand over your precious work to somebody else. You must try to be true to the other person’s work, but also add a dimension,’ she says.

In Mouth to Mouth, with German and English versions of each poem printed side by side, it’s possible to see the poets grappling with the original languages, their expressions and forms, and transforming what is said into their own poems.

Bahnhof Verstehen

Wir werden zurückbleiben wenn schwer
Beladen die Tender
Mit dem Schüttgut der Kriege
Rangieren, zurückbleiben wenn
Erz für die Vater, Koks für die Söhne,
die Asche der Enkel
Wagen um Wagen besetzen. Eingleisig
Fährt mit verspiegelten Scheiben der
Glücksexpreß
Aus der Welt. Auf verbogenen Zehen
Gehen uns die Tauben an
Um ein Fressen. Mäuse im Schienenbett
Tragen die Meldungen weiter wohin
Soll die Reise gehn Russland
Schafft Durchzug und Polen steht offen,
nur wir
Bleiben zurück weil wir nicht wissen
Wohin ja wohin Im Fundbüro
Wohnen wir zwischen vergessnen
Signalen und hören
Wer sich davonmacht wenn’s pfeift.

—Kerstin Hense

Desolation Station

We will stay behind
when the coal cars
heavily loaded
with the rubble of war
shunt

We will remain behind
when car after car
is crammed
with ore for the fathers,
coke for the sons,
ashes for the grandsons

With mirrored windows
the Joy Express
flashes out of our world.

On hidden toes
the pigeons pester us
while the mice
in the railbed
pass on the message
where is it going?

Russia blasts
a corridor.
Poland flings open
her door.

Only we remain behind
blinking and bewildered
where are we going?
where, where?

At the lost property
office
we crouch between forgotten
signals
but can’t escape hearing
who takes off
when the whistle shrills.

—Dorothy Porter

 

click to enlarge

Luke Davies and Uwe Kolbe

Photograph courtesy The Goethe Institut, Sydney

Gudruna Papak of the Goethe Institut in Sydney organised the book’s launch at the 2004 Sydney Writers’ Festival, as part of a brief to build relationships with the Australian community. The Institut also subsidised its publication. She speaks of the ‘enormous intense contact between people’ which ‘built personal bridges between countries’. ‘Poetry is perfect for this intimate exchange between writers and translators,’ she continues. ‘It wouldn’t work with something longer, like a novel.’ The Institut also paid for four German writers to be part of the Writers’ Festival. They performed in the splendid setting of Government House.

Ivor Indyk sees many commonalities between Germany and Australia. ‘Germany is in the middle of Europe, a crossroads between east and west, north and south,’ he says. ‘Australia is also a crossing point between Asia and Europe.’

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Joanne Burns reads while Ulf Stolterfoht watches

Photograph courtesy The Goethe Institut, Sydney

Many of the themes of the poems key into the preoccupations of the new Europe, where so many people are on the make and on the move. As in Luke Davies’ translation of Uwe Kolbe’s ‘Sofia: A Psalm’:

And always these beautiful ones go away, just when I meet them, rows of them cheerfully marching off to the Miss Europe contest, off they go, and so do the strong, dark
men, hundreds of thousands
of them
out into the big wide world, to Leipzig and Paris and Canada, sending back cash whenever they can. And always I want to dance here with these beautiful ones, and here with the One, but I’m always in transit;
and though I feel that old familiar urge
to put down roots in a foreign place,
nothing will come of it. I am too few.
And always I’m writing letters to Maria and Mirela and Vesselina, Galja and Emilja, And always with the dream that somehow we might one to the other be a language.

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Sam Watson and Raphael Urweider

Photograph courtesy The Goethe Institut, Sydney

Kolbe and Davies were paired for the project. Kolbe is an East Berliner, born in 1957. In 1981, he was forbidden to publish his work there, and in 1985 he moved to West Germany. There he won many prizes. Luke Davies, born in 1962, is also a prizewinner, the latest being the 2004 Age Book of the Year award. No stranger to translation, his own poems have been translated into Spanish, Hebrew, Thai and French, as well as German.

The most senior poet in the chosen group was Peter Skrzynecki, who was born in Germany to Polish forced-labourer parents, in the dying days of World War II. The youngest, Raphael Urweider, was born in 1974. In between writing for literary magazines and arranging music, he has performed with the hip-hop group LdeeP.

The other participants epitomise the liveliness and diversity of both literary environments. They bring to their work a wealth of tradition and cultural reference. Samuel Wagan Watson, for instance, was born in Brisbane to parents of Irish, German and Aboriginal ancestry. Joachim Sartorius was born in Germany, but grew up in Tunisia, and has lived in New York, Cyprus and Istanbul.

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Luke Davies and Uwe Kolbe

Photograph courtesy The Goethe Institut, Sydney

The German collection of contemporary Australian poetry that resulted from the project is Hochzeit der Elemente, drawn from Anthony Lawrence’s poem The Wandering Albatross. ‘In the poem, Lawrence imagines the coast of Australia, from its depths to its heights, washed by the richly laden currents of the ocean and the wind, ridden by a great bird which is itself forged out of the elements,’ the book’s Introduction explains. It is fascinating to see how the German poet–translators contend with the Australian work, seeking to define its qualities: ‘elemental forces’, ‘high energy’, ‘a celebration of inter-relatedness’, ‘a trading across the boundaries between the human and the natural worlds’.

Discussing the workshop, Ivor Indyk’s Introduction talks of the ‘power’ of the readings, and says that the act of translation ‘not only conveyed the energy, the imagination and the play of irony characteristic of the original poems, but … actually enhanced these qualities, giving them new life’.

Of the paired writers, Luke Davies and Uwe Kolbe are currently working together in Berlin, as an extension of their work for the original project. Other long-term relationships have also been forged.

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Raphael Urweider from Switzerland

Photograph courtesy The Goethe Institut, Sydney

Gudruna Papak would like to involve the Goethe Institut with more literary translation work. Although Australia has many talented translators, it’s hard for their work to get published here, she says. ‘Literary translation doesn’t have a huge standing.’ By contrast, in Germany it does, with scholarships offered so that people can work in comfortable environments with the best possible equipment. ‘We would like to send more translators to Germany to improve their skills.’ She also sees many fruitful possibilities for exchanges of writers-in-residence between the two countries.

Ivor Indyk would also like to keep the lines open between Germany and Australia and other places. ‘Australia could become a hub for literary translation,’ he says. ‘After all, we have so many first and second generation migrants who are fluent in at least two languages.’

As Tobias Lehmkuhl and Thomas Wohlfahrt, editors of Mouth to Mouth say: ‘Language does not now and never did stop at political borders … the poet is constantly on the move, thinking globally and historically, travelling through traditions.’

Mouth to Mouth, edited by Thomas Wohlfahrt and Tobias Lehmkuhl. Giramondo Publishing, Australia, 2004.
Hochzeit der Elemente, edited by Ivor Indyk. DuMont Verlag, Germany, 2004.

DIANA GIESE, a fourth generation German Australian, works across cultures, through libraries, museums and educational institutions.

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