German Poetry Now: A bilingual online-anthology, featured by DAS GEDICHT chapbook
Birgit Müller-Wieland
Clumsy little fir cone men*
Each year at the end of November she led me
deep into the forest, a tiny dandling witch,
with a headscarf and basket; she knew every name
and all the right places to the brown little men,
as she called them, my grandmother piloted me, I
stumbled; some fell down on our heads.
We collected other treasures as well,
until I, too, was walking hunchbacked.
When going home, smoke rose up,
and twilight was among the tree trunks.
Always she found the way back out.
The other day I pointed with golden fingers to
my decorated advent landscape:
the forest as fine as green teddy bear fur
of moss, stone, and orbs, fir cones, painted over:
»Tschurtscherl«, as she called them, glistening.
* »Tschurtscherl«, the title of the German original, is a dialectal word used in the alpine regions meaning fir or pine cones.
translated by Paul-Henri Campbell
+ German Original / Das OriginalBirgit Müller-Wieland
Tschurtscherl
Jedes Jahr Ende November führte sie mich
in den Wald hinein, eine kleine schaukelnde Hexe
mit Kopftuch und Korb, die alle Namen wußte
und die richtigen Plätze, zu den braunen Männlein,
wie sie sagte, lotste mich meine Großmutter, ich
stolperte, manche fielen uns auf den Kopf.
Auch andere Schätze sammelten wir,
so lange, bis auch ich bucklig ging.
Beim Heimgehen stieg Rauch auf,
es dämmerte zwischen den Stämmen.
Immer fand sie den Weg hinaus.
Anderntags zeigte ich mit goldenen Fingern
meine Adventslandschaft:
Fein wie grünes Teddybärenfell der Wald
aus Moos, Stern und Kugel, Tannenzäpflein,
Tschurtscherl, wie sie sagte, glänzend übermalt.
© Birgit Müller-Wieland, München
aus: DAS GEDICHT Bd. 22 / Oktober 2014
+ About the author / Zum Autor
Birgit Müller-Wieland was born in 1962 in Schwanenstadt in Upper Austria. She is the author of poetry, prose, libretti, and radio features. She studied psychology and German literature at the University of Salzburg. In 1989, she earned a PhD by submitting a dissertation seeking a feminist approach to Peter Weiss’ seminal work, »Ästhetik des Wiederstands« (The Aesthetics of Resistance, a copious three-volume novel that dramatizes anti-fascist resistance). Birgit, married to the composer Jan Müller-Wieland, has in various essays extensively reflected on the status of poetry within the operatic musical form. She has been awarded quite a few grants, such as the Adalbert-Stifter-Stipendium, or residencies that took her to the Villa Stonborough-Wittgenstein/Gmunden or Lviv and Chernivtsi in the Ukraine. Some of her poetry has been set to music as well or originated in response to visual arts, such as the paintings and sculptures by Birgit Knappe. The Neue Züricher Zeitung commented on her volume of poems, »Ruhig Blut« (Innsbruck 2002): »undoubtedly these poems accentuate the notion that no home, no homeland exists, which may offer safety and shelter against the angels of evil and their earthly envoys. The death and dissolution in the dungeon of being is in the method by which Birgit Müller-Wieland cuts out the vanitas mundi out of the murky light of a nocturnal sun so corporal, so luridly pressing that searching for an unsentimental voice of her kind [in contemporary poetry] will be futile.«
»Lustful Things – Geile Sachen!« im Archiv
»Lustful Things – Geile Sachen!« is an online collection of contemporary German-language poetry in English translation. All poems were taken from issue no. 22 of the German poetry magazine DAS GEDICHT, focused on the Poetry of Things. New English translations by Paul-Henri Campbell as well as the German originals are published here every Wednesday. All poems of this online-collection will also be published in a special print-edition. In order to read previous poems in this series, click here.
»Lustful Things – Geile Sachen!« ist eine Online-Sammlung zeitgenössischer deutschsprachiger Dinggedichte in englischer Übersetzung. Alle Texte sind Band 22 der Zeitschrift DAS GEDICHT entnommen. Jeden Mittwoch erscheint ein neues Gedicht, das von Paul-Henri Campbell ins Englische übertragen wurde, zusammen mit dem deutschen Original. Die Beiträge dieser Online-Anthologie gibt es auch als Sonderausgabe in Buchform. Alle bereits erschienenen Folgen von »Lustful Things – Geile Sachen!« finden Sie hier.
»Lustful Things – Geile Sachen!« im Archiv
