GOING OUT
Easy although clouds threaten
cumulatively, from the opulent
and laugh the acre & simul-acre
the brow the slope the little eyes woundwort
Never believe or in a bank of clouds
The pure mist the wet feet
In another woman’s shoes
Paved hiking
A crow mobile
EQUIPMENT
The jay took off, the wren stayed.
Boards, grayed. Lend a hand. Equipment.
Stood around until madness was reached.
The strange inclination of what’s sawing, what’s planing.
Sawdust. Sawhorse. Strong position.
The gaze, the hand full of tension.
Overall over all good-natured waistcoat
& the career from brown to white hair
on the temples, also dusted by wood flour.
***
Existence is
handing, handing out, stretching out, having an end
to spare, instead of holding out . . .
Horizontal, and out into the weather, the verticals
extend & out of it in every direction
up to the apex . . .
Growing. Meaning tree.
Nimble in the wind, fixed underneath. Bush! Stem!
PULSE
Soft, soft seeming, without
Silently being soft seeming without
camel humps chaps eye boat,
down over the fence.
The place is unfazed, pulsates.
Light rings. No one escapes.
The high spine, patronizing
humps seemingly nodding.
The panoramic view.
Camel hair over the ship’s belly, belly.
LOOKING INWARD
Outside along the fence, wire mesh, but what’s inside?
Head bowed, the eyes two empty funnels, tunnel
toward as far as I’m concerned inward.
Closed eyes, with hands on hips,
but what’s inside?—Obviously something’s on the outside
in front of the legs, an herb, dark, nettles?
Inside along the fence, shoulder-high already, the new
wild roses.—Prohibitively enclosed, this property.
Firmly firmament, therefore lit.
INSCRIPTION UNDER THE SKIN
Small, miserable, crying, not crying,
Custom trap, custom clamp,
high shimmering trees, slender dance,
myself, me, seed
Frustration, seed equals frustration,
Frustration in the grain that doesn’t sprout
& boredom acre
Gruesome forest dull wood, stretched
out cells, hollow, in the elderberry
pith, white, full of holes, unstable perspective.
Young, miserable: never.
Grain of a rich harvest.
The foot’s tootsie. The fretting hand. The deer
on the wall. Streams babbling outside,
streams spreading rumors below and so forth.
OUTCAST
Hog mast and service mast—
even so, I do see one thing
doing as it pleases in the sky:
the poor schmuck will end up with nothing.
And those worldly goods without relation
should become obsolete!
HARMONY
The wooden legs the limbs timber
without malice mallets mash together
in unison solemnly swearing side by side
they prepare the keys together
solemnly swearing in support, no different than
both bodies
in unison like throw wood no No no
woes foregoing the show
NOT HAVING THE WORD
As old as the acres so over and over
so off and around and new and there
Don’t state the fertilized state of the crop rotation
Don’t report the rampant edge of the fat-hen
Maintain the caked topsoil strained
with grades
WARNING
The world is full of fishhooks. Folksong & in chorus.
The world is full of folk singing. The valley is more vacant
Deer antlers. I dream of creaking carriages. Sunny
morning, dream of carriages creaking.
Behind the house the lea a bare ribcage. Rising
and falling with breath. Ribs
from Sonance
Elke Erb
translated from the German by Shane Anderson
Click here for poetry by Elke Erb, translated from the German by Sarah Edinger, in our Spring 2014 issue, and here for poetry by Uljana Wolf, translated from the German by Shane Anderson, in our Fall 2013 issue.
More on than off for a period of four years, the German poet Elke Erb practiced a form of écriture automatique. For precisely five minutes, she wrote down whatever crossed her mind: walks in the forest, work in the garden, illness, loneliness, sadness, death—or nothing at all. She could even document the allotted time by writing the same word over and over, and though this never came true, the mere possibility granted Erb a considerable sense of freedom: she could be free to address anything and everything, no matter how big or trivial.
Elke Erb’s Sonanz (Sonance), which was published by Urs Engeler Verlag in 2008 (and again in 2019), collects more than 500 poems and short prose texts that were reworked from these notes. In this book, Erb tackles a number of sociopolitical, cultural, historical, and economic themes that are characterized by spontaneity and jarring dissonance. Ideas, emotions, and events appear, then disappear, or are briefly interrupted. This writing strategy might be a form of mimicry, of mimesis—whereby Erb’s writing reenacts the messy loops of the brain—but it is more likely the result of Erb being guided by the rhymes, alliterations, assonances, and consonances of the German language as well as her encyclopedic knowledge of idioms and their historical usage. This “tonal thread,” as Erb has it in the preface to Sonanz, often surprised her: “I watched the poetry it produced as if from the outside and thought that I would have had a hard time pulling that off.”
With Sonanz, Erb has created a musical work that is startling in its absolute presence and I have tried to find a corresponding language in English. The poems are hermetic in their openness—but then, isn’t life?
Elke Erb’s Sonanz (Sonance), which was published by Urs Engeler Verlag in 2008 (and again in 2019), collects more than 500 poems and short prose texts that were reworked from these notes. In this book, Erb tackles a number of sociopolitical, cultural, historical, and economic themes that are characterized by spontaneity and jarring dissonance. Ideas, emotions, and events appear, then disappear, or are briefly interrupted. This writing strategy might be a form of mimicry, of mimesis—whereby Erb’s writing reenacts the messy loops of the brain—but it is more likely the result of Erb being guided by the rhymes, alliterations, assonances, and consonances of the German language as well as her encyclopedic knowledge of idioms and their historical usage. This “tonal thread,” as Erb has it in the preface to Sonanz, often surprised her: “I watched the poetry it produced as if from the outside and thought that I would have had a hard time pulling that off.”
With Sonanz, Erb has created a musical work that is startling in its absolute presence and I have tried to find a corresponding language in English. The poems are hermetic in their openness—but then, isn’t life?
Elke Erb is winner of the 2020 Georg Büchner Prize. In her own words: “Born in 1938 in Scherbach (Eifel); migration to Halle (GDR) in 1949, farm work from 1958 to 1959, teacher’s exams in 1963, work at a publishing house between 1963 and 1965. Freelance writing of short prose, poetry, procedural texts, translations, poetry adaptations, editing since 1966. Lives in Berlin.”
Shane Anderson is a writer and translator living in Berlin. He has translated works by a number of contemporary German writers, including Elke Erb’s A poem is what it does (Wallstein Verlag) and Ulf Stolterfoht’s The Amme Talks (Triple Canopy). His translation of the Spiegel Bestseller, The Great Nowitzki by Thomas Pletzinger, is forthcoming with Norton. His writing and translations can be found in 032c, 6x6, Asymptote, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Nation, and elsewhere.
