German Poetry Now: A bilingual online-anthology, featured by DAS GEDICHT chapbook
Richard Dove
Full thread five
The black shirt
blacker than Tristan’s sail,
than Hamlet’s melancholy,
the most awesome fashion statement
in your wardrobe,
wavering daintily around your opulent torso,
superciliously forsaking the seamstress –
forced to continue practicing her art
in a sweatshop in Bangladesh
despite the increasingly widening fissures –
that now in the violet dress with the pink shawl
is buried beneath
more than seven thousand tons of rubble.
translated by Paul-Henri Campbell
+ German Original / Das OriginalRichard Dove
Fünf Fäden tief
Das schwarze Hemd,
schwärzer als Tristans Segel,
als Hamlets Schwermut,
das coolste Fashion-Statement
in deinem Kleiderschrank,
umflattert lässig deinen wohlgenährten Torso,
verleugnet hochmütig die Näherin,
die man im Sweatshop in Bangladesch zwang,
trotz der immer tiefer werdenden Risse
ihre Kunst weiter auszuüben,
die jetzt in violettem Kleid mit rosa Schal
unter mehr als siebentausend
Tonnen Bauschutt liegt.
© Richard Dove, München
aus: DAS GEDICHT Bd. 22 / Oktober 2014
+ About the author / Zum Autor
Richard Dove was born in 1954 in Bath, England. He graduated with a dissertation on August von Platen from Oxford University, having studied German and Romance literatures. He then lectured in German and English at the Universities of Exeter, Regensburg, and Wales before moving to Munich in 1987. Around that period, he began to primarily write in German, continuing to translate major German and Austrian writers such as Michael Krüger, Ernst Meister, Friederike Mayröcker, Ludwig Steinherr, or Reiner Kunze. He also edited two German editions of Michael Hamburger’s oeuvre and was a driving force behind its enormous posthumous appreciation in the German speaking world. Fascinating essays on contemporary German literature and literary theory have been featured in the Modern Language Review (Cambridge), German Life and Letters (Oxford), or Modern Languages in Translation (London). In Richard Dove’s own poetry, the reader may encounter the melancholy, albeit highly-reflective tone of a cosmopolite spiced by an unmistakably postmodern lust for phantasmagorical juxtapositions and the fluid passage of philosophical ideas, observations, and shifting voices. His most recent volume of poetry is entitled, »Syrische Skyline« (2009). He was elected a Corresponding Member of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts in 2006.
»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 are also 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
