Anthogist-Translation: Elena Pallantza
Preface: Dirk Uwe Hansen
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Charlotte Warsen, Levin Westermann, Maren Kames, Anja Kampmann, Georg Less, Kathrin Bach, Sonja vom Brocke, Lara Rüter, Christoph Georg Rohrbach, Tobias Roth, Jan Skudlarek
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After a long time, German poetry is currently in bloom. This turn of events, while extremely fortunate, seems paradoxical at a time when book sales are constantly in decline, major publishing houses avoid poetry because there is no commercial interest for this genre and bookstores rarely feature poetry books in their stock. Nevertheless, over the past few years, Germany sees more and more editions of important high-quality poetry compilations.
There is one explanation for this phenomenon – or two, if we want to be more accurate. First of all, due to the “digital revolution”, the whole project of publishing a book is no longer a risk with unpredictable outcomes, as it used to be in the old days. Second, digital printing makes it affordable to publish of a small number of copies and to promote books online, circumventing the channels of the physical marketplace. This led to the emergence of many small publishing houses from 2002 to 2015 that focus on poetry exclusively. The majority of these publishing houses were the product of bold initiatives of individual publishers who were actually poets themselves, such as kookbooks in Berlin, luxbooks in Wiesbaden, Reinecke und Voß in Leipzig, Parasitenpresse in Cologne, Edition Azur in Dresden, gutleut in Frankfurt, hochtroch, and more besides. In fact, some of them, for example Elif in Nettetal and Peter Engstler in Oberwaldbehrungen, aren’t even based on major cities. The new online platforms, such as poetenladen, hyrikline and fixpoetry, constitute another innovation of the digital era that was particularly beneficial for the poetry genre, because they allow unrestricted access to the literary scene for writers and audiences alike. Thus, the limited number of copies and the short range of the texts – elements which, back in our analogue past, would be regarded as disadvantages – make poems the most suitable and popular genre of the digital age.
In my opinion, however, the most important of all is the fact that the easy access to texts offered new opportunities for communication among poets, regardless of where they come from. Contemporary poets, no longer hauled up in their attics or the airless dives of their lot, finally enter the field and interact with their peers in the market of the poetic community. Naturally, as in every other market, there are frictions and disagreements among the patrons; above all, however, there is interaction and osmosis of poetic ideas and manners – naturally, I am grossly oversimplifying things, maybe even romanticizing them a bit, but I would forthrightly describe the current German poetry scene as a field of experimentation, a diverse and powerful process of investigation and testing towards the discovery of new forms of expression and admixtures.
The experimental nature of this poetry is sometimes frowned upon, under the pretext that the works of young poets are “overly intellectual” (verkopft) and “only slightly world-encompassing” (wenig welthaltig) – and I would bet good money that these maudlin German words cannot be translated with a single word. The accusation in itself, however, overlooks the huge importance of basic research in any science. Furthermore, if we wish to draw parallels, perhaps it would be apt to compare poetry with the research part of literature, whose mission is to find the foundations, on top of which new knowledge and new means of expression will take form. This is why such criticism ought not deter us, nor reduce our joy for the transgressions attempted by contemporary German poetry. Because it is true that these poems abound with transgressions, since they tackle with common technical terms and foreign words, preexisting or invented linguistic material and forms, both traditional and new, that now become liberated from the grand standards of the poetic canon of the past.
In any case, one anthology cannot possibly showcase the true extent of pluralism and activity within a community of poetic peers. Nonetheless, we can safely say that the young poets collected in this book are capable of offering readers a quintessential view of this diversity: Kathrin Bach, with her dreamlike accuracy of individual observation and objectified events of her poems, Maren Kames, who stitches together a family circle from images of nature as seen through the viewpoint of a child, Christoph Georg Rohrbach, who experiments with the strophic form of the ode as he makes his way through the borderlands of Polish, Czech and German history, moving from perfect imitation to voluntary deconstruction, Charlotte Warsen, who is equally natural in exceeding the limits between poetry and prose as she does with the limits between page and verse, Jan Skudlarek, who playfully dredges up treasures of contemporary language and at the same draws a map of a wide range of reality, Levin Westermann, who fills the void of poetic loneliness with paradoxical verses and gives life to the dead from Homer to Marina Tsetaeva, Georg Leß, who drags readers into a vertigo of the most varied associations while constantly coining new and unexpected words at the same time, Sonja vom Brocke, with her almost surreal adjoining of words that are gracefully spinning on the verges between text, image and sound, Tobias Roth, the merry poeta doctus who knows how to inscribe his poetry both within the context of contemporary reality and in the Latin literature of the Renaissance, and finally Lara Rüter, who is prolific in the way she associates the most hidden layers of the skin, the meninges and the cerumen with the surrounding world.
I hope that these poems will find many readers in Greece. Moreover, the fact that Elena Pallantza’s translations may spark off an exchange between Greek and German poets makes me particularly glad, because I am more than certain that both communities will have a lot to talk about.
Dirk Uwe Hansen