A Book Announcement and Another Translation from Eugene Jolas

It flames and fleurs

A Life Not Demanded

I've got a new book of translations coming out soon: Territories of the Soul/On Intonation by Wolfgang Hilbig. It will be released through Sublunary Editions on June 18th. You can preorder from the publisher here. Territories…/On Intonation collects two chapbooks of prose and lyric poetry, both published by Friedenauer Presse in 1986 and 1990, a crucial period for the East German writer. In 1985, Hilbig received a stipend and a one-year visa to work in the West. This marked a decisive break from his past as a laborer and working-class critic of the GDR and the beginning of his career as a professional writer. Traveling between the two Germanies, Hilbig’s emigration was, both in a mental and physical sense, never completed, his feelings of guilt and dislocation remaining even as Germany became a unified nation again in 1991.

These pieces—a mix of lyric poetry, personal essay, and gothic horror—reflect the writer's fierce ambivalence towards his new life. Without nostalgia, Hilbig looks back on his youth in the mining country of Thuringia and his first halting attempts at poetry. He ruminates on the family he left behind and the disgust he feels at the shallow consumer society of the West. These are familiar subjects for Hilbig, but the compact and eclectic nature of this collection makes it stand out, and that was what drew me to these slim and substantial books, brought together for your readerly convenience, my first attempt at translating a contemporary writer.

In September, shocked I managed to get so far, I resumed my search for a clearing in the forest. As if brilliance would encounter me there also, I searched for a boulder on whose warm body I once had reclined.

What I had once thought, dreamt, I believed, could be dreamt of again. I knew that life wasn’t demanded. I didn’t demand it, not in the least, none of us demanded it. Without resentment perhaps, I thought for a strangely long while about the meaning of these words. We have not demanded life, and we will not find our destiny.

One More from Jolas

Last week, I published a few short translations of the French-American modernist writer Eugene Jolas. Check them out if you haven't already. The originals are notable in a number of ways. They were written in German, the product of Jolas' childhood in Lorraine, where he learned the language as a compulsory subject in school and as a vernacular, a fluid element, like the borders themselves, of that zone between Germany and France. The collection I Have Seen Monsters and Angels, my source for the pieces, is a kind of gnomic dream journal, switching in Joycean fashion between French, German, and English, a language Jolas did not learn (at least not permanently) until he was in his late teens.

Stelleise

	Ich trickle schlafelig durch Astarwelt.
	Jemensch ruft: “O sieh die rote Schaukelstella”. 
Ich schimmeräuge Rausch. Es fleckt und flunkt. Es flammt und florrt. Es brast in Grabenschwiffen lüst.
	Dann klingelingts. In Schwillerluft musikt es glyph. Glas plirrt das Licht. Ein Leisleid tränt.
	Nun bin ich mellnacht-umgloht. Mein Hirn necknickt in Nebelau. Der Wurzelgeist verblust.
	O dass der Weltenbaum doch immer steilen könnte!

Feldkirch, Vorarlberg, Austria
Autumn 1931

Stillplace

	I trickle somnambulant through astarworld. 
	Someman says: “Oh see the red swingsite”.
I shimmer eyento drunkenness. It stains and swindles. It flames and fleurs. It embrayzens in trenchtails. 
	Then it dingalings. In airswills the music glyphs. Light jankles glass. A stillsong tears.
	Now I'm muddlenight-illuminated. My brain napnods in the fogpatch. A rootghost mumblemolders.
	Oh that the worldtree could steepen ever higher!

Blooming Gorse by Wilhelm Gustav Friedrich Hasemann (courtesy of the Augustiner Museum)