Translations by ANDREW DUNCAN

Poems from Manuskripte: unhämische Mauerschau


Paul Wühr

Sirens
Since long ago there has prevailed among men the not very noble 
endeavour to gnaw away at the Sirens and their credibility, by 
roundly accusing them of falsehood: false in their song, deceitful in 
their sighing, only apparently present when touched, this was said to 
be their character, overall without true existence, and in such a 
childish way non-existent.     Maurice Blanchot, The Song of the Sirens

His

cunning gaze at the
testimony of antique authors
between

ever and again formed
knees of very young
girls

who in any case when they
start to sing
must

take into account that
out of their silk stockings
feathers

grow up them to their
genitals after
a

thorny music.


A

God loves beyond
lust the goddesses too
if it is true what
the latter pretend the sex organ
blooms

where lust must wither
which only lives where dying
takes place we are
much more
ashamed

of death


One

must not forget
the breasts which
pour

their joy
over all joy

how they must 
be pressed
these

bells are to summon
a god

into the bedroom


You

know the Sirens
as divine beings 
make 

men hear desire
out of music
they

utter sounds
to disappoint
they allow

men
to find the death
they themselves

do not die


Whose

ancestors drove him far
from God
into life he

must listen to flowers
which sing in wings
must

write with blood
in the air, the wake
of the Sirens

must draw himself
along the sky
by the ears


Sing

they do, all three,
the clothes off his back naked
he arrives in their song to

die of shame
as he stands in the middle there
with everything mortal

of him his fate
in the immortal singsong 
is always

the worst


When

I lift you up
by your feathered
knee-backs

he says your
second hole sings
death

when the first
begins to cry
and

the third buries
the listener


What

you will see if
you watch their song
you think

can let itself be
exposed to you
without consequences

when she loses
through lust the hair
between her legs 

you will see 
only skin not sky there
no

Tabor only fat without 
Jordan only desert what
else



Max Gad


Out of Play
Twelve Passives


I
Our land is settled on other stars
No-one trusts the other bodies
here no-one lies in plenty
The animal abandons dark chance out of envy
Everything is in best case sudden
paced out to its extent: the rejected fullness
If someone truly wants an answer of how much
In the light, one can assert, places hum
The disadvantage stares at new red dawnings
Weather makes for melancholy, performs on stone
a being of the morning
We remain a tribe in the forests

II
From afar the message of affectionate rottenness
Glorious medals are bestowed on organs
Data for especially boundless sympathy
The pious gawp into the shaky lighting. From
Conversations flicker against every beginning
The wind fills out and bends
The boats reach deep into the home of appearance
Clans without haste in the other space
Over swamps lips murmur run dry curses
Too late at the beginning
No-one is more conscious than the crooked that:
Asking is arrogant, chance is bestial

III
Deep beneath blue the duty and readiness
Those you have to go and get
All victors with frail names are seen through
And through in the march-up of writing
Hovering over the times
they express comfort, only then the shame
The pendulum never misses
In shops the tobacco burns high
Forbidden, they change the spaces beneath it
A next finger-post into the false
The clocks slide into the veneered darkness
Are set off

IV
The call to the meeting in the minefield
A deceptively small cry
Without colour no anger and joy
The hard paper glue of Romanticism lies around
Above the moon is busy eating
The collector remains chained to hunger
He will gladly stop by
tomorrow too or even later
His knowledge turns to service of hatred
Curses from dried up countries, multiple bellowing
That wants to become an exit into gay colours
And transiently good

V
Roses, quoted, are tinted with forgotten colours
Laughter, darned into shimmering rubber
Too many borders and trains
too much road verge in the head
Uniforms, chasing places, get lost
Strength in the n-times broken arms
The settled bill
Once again, I don't understand myself
Revealed as the makeup of a shout
The time has a bald patch
Glances which allure, no, outlaw
And a bird's neck to turn around with

VI
Someone comes from the wrong angle of the light
The plants are just before their downfall
Green cracks, and unable to brake, on your cheek
Here tanks roll over pumpkin fields
In the field nearby a misty lust
The many march wearily into the alienating
Landscapes, as they loyally submit
After the blows it is quiet around the houses
That was known before the signs
stood written in the dust
The mouth echoes again
The grass in its heavy rest

VII
What wishes does the mask leave behind it
In twisted muscles history pulls
Speech-pose over places and relatives
The march out, it was close and quick, was wet
Epochs seal themselves off from each other. And off
Assent is soon out of our minds
The walls stand well, there is no tug any more
Dumbness flourishes rankly
In the void convinced of directions
No bites from missed wildernesses
There it blossoms richly with no past
No measure ever flows by

VIII
No reaching for weapons today
Shares and bonds lie round the heart, pricked and warm
That has, even though invented, to be said
The gods of the approximate are dangerous and welcome
One sticks it out beneath the woman, where it reverberates
Hear the shy beginning of plants
The criminal has come, guest and friend
Rich hospitality, but work brings no reward
Just the other way
The scent in the seesaw of the loins the best
Every murderer knows

IX
Since time is at its lowest, one of us
has not been seen by us
The waters were still safe to walk on, empty streets
Calls carried further than the eyes
Soft white mildened distorted faces
and gave belief in a We
It's a grey quaking in the mouth, someone said in jest
Where it hurts, he is justified
Gauges which never lie say that their parting was freezing
Over the distance to torture trusted rascals run
Depressed mouths allow no escape 
into songs

X
That slackness, they say, seeps out of canals
It starts with a personal pronoun
A human being is at home there as you are
Messages grow stiff with decline
and amazement, lightning and rumble
The crookedness of the body restricted
There eyes, there rivers, there edges and growth
There food, how gaily it flourishes
Ships, pressed into the silted up harbour
Decay applauds the stone
Humanity rumbles: Let it be winter
And echo, sky, and rottenness be as one

XI
The promised animal is on its way
The signs hum, spin round and round
We are gathering reserves for the fat years
In the knowledge: you will never see them
Obstinately the chains drag homewards
Searching lies in every air as a duty
Cunning laughter, that shrilly denies itself
to the way, a twig grabbing
The direction is called backwards
The battles are coming with a thunder sound
And scraps of lost syllables
In the middle achieved lies, warm as hay

XII
The middle ways carefully marked out
With flutes, padded to the last hole
Party dressed, I wait for a female rhyme
My face leant on the docile animal
Patience until the speech out of reflected time
Scatter sweetness on geometry
Swansongs of tires in serpentines
Then figures flow through red
The gaze seizes possessions for itself
Is imprecise and disturbs nothing any more
Struck on the vizor by the question
Where the stupidity of my happiness comes from


Gerhard Ochs


Samye

The sky of diagonals and glass
has more than eight storeys.

Exciting closeness of the begetters. In
moments when their litanies
are lying on their backs when their
piety is rattling down they rise up
in anxieties, with anemones
wait for notes and for someone to
recite them. 

By the lift the stretcher-bearer is 
waiting with the colour of ashen pale.


Convex

There comes an attempt to arrange
a parallel grating before the facial

oval to touch the holy earth 
with the right foot so as

to bring it to flowering or
to lay red garlands around the neck

of someone condemned to death
for most people are confused.


Cooper

Tug the carved stool straight
I sum up: Your growth is too

narrow your will too long you curse
and tread on the mirror which glows

in conversation with someone. If
the highly verbal voice then dies

through your rage you adapt and peacefully
draw the blind summer nothing else

the endless roadway nothing else
the southern sleep nothing else. 


Stalactite

Statues don't move from the spot
not from the spot turn their collars up

softly oxygen and in their wax
wings keep their pains quiet.

A short breath in the trail linked
to the weather an acrobat the

morning trips circles fill out
and days in paradise where stones are

carried back and forth.


Drifting sand

Why we were exercising in the dry
why the battle was a 
yawn. So far as you know what's
left of Golgotha is the fiddlebow
for another two centuries. C flat
with hearing and without any support.
(Chronologically ordered grains of sand.)


CDEFGAHC

Song on your walls the dark one
in the full brightness of the beam.

Listened to the hardness and the cold.
To the fear. The origin.

Found the tones again and they were
suddenly from a firm position. Farewell too

gave calm for the sake of
the slow turning of the wind. Wreaths
placed of soft breath. And we the
crowned airs at a steady height. 


Defenceless

Arrived the confusion of voices of the psalms
and the attached people across the

plain. The most glaring day promising
snail marched with them. The

goal already foresaw the burden and the
yard of the balance broke.

Promptly the pains wandered into their
transformation. And while

the water, long forgotten,
loosed the bonds in secret

black smoke climbed up.


Calcutta

We gather there where
everyone is alone with the dumbness

which is surrounded by blackberry-
coloured heat cold-blooded

sitting and the trident
strangle growth of stifling

Out of this silence we draw
comfortless water for the fallow horse


Blue Reptile

Secret tribe. Everything was
fever. The mouth. The burning

moon. The eye ruby. Until the
living flowed into one like

late swords when the
gladioli of the evening went
to rest through a goldenhair.


Coral summer night

Goodnight goodnight goodnight unknown dark-
motley flower plant as far as the breaking morning.

Goodnight dumb crown loudly spared
by the hours' theft. Here I sit with you without you

knowing and seek you nameless a name for
you. Sometime between midnight and sun-

rise you will begin an era a second
long (a name lights me up) you will

ride along the beam of my gaze into the sea
and suddenly out there far out the beauty

of a lightning bolt dazes you that mocks
its own death and becomes
one with you.


Feather white

There is no death here
in this dark-
ness as we see.

These days with you
are tender spots
on the scratched
cushions of the children.

I follow them
to everywhere.


Gingerbread man

O heart dredger. O midday with parsley.
O women with twitching grimaces when they

leave the house. If they came back
they made soups with green things added.

The children suddenly without torments were
joyful and showed the roses of their faces.

We the fathers don't dither for long and
snatch them up for ourselves one after the other

with pride.


Gemini

I assure you: The gleam will not
come from the colour of the single brocade

and not from the feather of a Comanche
nor from the word-mastering fruit of

the lemon tree or the wave of the hammered
sea nor from the roof of a young plane-tree. The

gleam will come from what is in the sky.
From fire and crystal. From everything which

is a source. Gold and bread. From everything which is
right. Smoke and passing away. From 

what is on earth. The ore of repletion
and the cinnabar of death.


In the cradle or desert or in the sky

In a hand's turn or doing nothing. Spit the poison
out of your unique ugliness. Scream

at your body. Find not even one
smooth spot on it. Curse about it as if 

it was a cataract and go on being what you still are
from long ago: The clumsy voyage onto the reef.


Hanuman

The animal's body stands up. It had lain
in someone else's head but too briefly
for it not to be able to grow.

Leg for leg putting on fur and thickness of the fore-
arms. From solstice to solstice he had
waited for it in peaceful dialogue with himself.

Now again his teeth show a series of things
which were tasteless before. Sweet leaves above
the strides of the air. An old shoe dances along.

The animal's body can already smell the pleasure of the
wet children the pleasure of the path on which
it is raining the pleasure when he reaches for the sea.

How at last the animal's body runs. That is
a world so full of soft transitions. 


Annette Brüggemann


then, youth happens that way... 

I

Hold the knife in our faces.
A bunch of red roses. Murder
you say? I want to speak
to my lawyer. My good demon. An
angel doesn't fall from heaven 
so easily & your hands will realise
they're folded. In the mirror it's winter 
& behind the cracked panes
a child has hidden. I know, I 
put myself in question in
a wedding dress, just don't eat at
my head, mama, and hold yourself in,
this is not a film & the train
goes as fast & is as long as this
sentence, which can hardly still be
pronounced: that I am your daughter.



Felix Philipp Ingold


Triolets

Narciso

In the puddle between your shoes
the face as it was
before mankind came into the world


Art
Laughing with eyes
teeth hands navel prick and
all failings at once. And then to keep your dignity.

Feeding

A handful of freshly picked eyes
served to this speciality sow. Briefly, the rarest glitter
in the sty. And now it's been eaten up.


Love

If you hang
my picture up on the floor
I'll be happier.

Bloody

Already on the threshhold a dog
runs up and eats the fresh wound
off my hand. How true.


Martina Huegli


Swing round


I have long since plucked the bouquet growing
out of a dream, many times moved round
the furniture of my pool. What is there left to do?
Flat and hard, I swing like the tree under the woodpecker.
Bark grows on my stiff knees. I would like
to stop the circling of the planets until
you say; I love you. 
You don't say anything. I stuff bits of proof
like knives in my belt and hook myself
into the jagged line of suspicion
like a ratchet wheel.

But you tease and tickle my root
like wild garlic: the ground begins
to give beneath my feet. I pant
and jump out of my bark
in the fork of a bough. We play
somersaults over treestumps, our shoes
turn green with pollen. You push
mint through my earlobe. We stand
with our backs to each other, a meadow
spurts up between us, and I would like to eat grass from the stalk.


South

Waking flows alongside dream like
a straightened riverbed beside the old one
The eyes come out of their hollows
and want to close beauty inside themselves in two parallel worlds.

I don't want to pull chewing gum threads out of the sun any more-
Come, let's go to the south
there you suck the milky morning air
through a straw and look at
a kite with flattened tail
writing ornaments through the sky
in frozen plaster, which stays liquid.

See, we are lying in the grass, pull the plain towards us
roll it up to a package, out of which we pick strawberries. 
Hang on, I'll just push one in your ear...
Our inside flutters over the meadow. Now and then
something familiar joins us-just look
at the butterfly-liver on my shoulder...
The light-inhaling meadow takes
my left lung to itself and pulsating
bends the colours of the flowers.

Skinless, we are poured into ourselves, are
other over each, tied into the ganglia net of things.
We break the crusty bread of the horizon
and red wine gushes towards us
warms up the steady warmth with becoming.
With red-shut eyes, without drinking, we look at
the breathing skin of the universe from inside
and turn into its pores.


Finding of a place

At knee height over the landscape and hot
we let landscape draw past us
pulsing dissolved in iridescent petrol, and I
open the window and lay my gasping hand
on the black-glowing roof, to share in
the boiling with its ban on fires.

Our angel bites its nails, the car
grinds bonily on the curves and stops him.
I can't match up the dream- and 
waking-map on my lap, you cluck and
screw your eyes up. Routine glue is drawing
filaments on our hot backs; tied in,
we sit in our square brackets, one pair each,
coupled together by a stroke for thought.

The valley closes up softly
in a lying knee-hollow.
We climb out and round
the corner of a house, which wasn't there before,
the place finds us. Between you and me the cleft which is
running in fright down the bank into the forest
is swallowed by the mountain and spat into the river turquoise
a balcony among roses levers us up high on which
I prune withered pictures, evening after evening,
and watch others come up in the morning.

The balcony has no railing, we stand together
by an abyss, which was always there. Our sunglasses
fall off. My hair turns red in 
the evening sun, you are growing a beard.
The sun mountain turns grey before our eyes,
the moon cliff glows embaying behind, to which
the old man sends his strength in the echo of the valley. Verbs turn 
blue
on both sides in the house of stones
and give their will up
to auxiliary verbs: We are...



J P Jacobs


The unquiet night of the female harpist before the departure of 
the poet for the Alps

A commissioned work

I
The table is sad
the chair is crazy

the man is dancing
the lady is putting make-up on the candles

the dog thumps on the table
the harpist falls out of the clouds

II
The hamster bumbles along
the carpet quakes

the clouds swallow
the bearer
the goldfish is alert

the lady saws up the chair
the vase shatters on the cliff

III

The alien carves the joint
the light wears out

the lady rubs cream on herself
the sea comes away from
the wall

the cat poses
the man falls
from the chandelier

IV

The ballerina pours the wind
into the amphora
the nightmares hobble
into the room

the statues ring the bells
the lady gilds
the mussels

the windows lose their intelligence
the heating bursts

V

The table collapses
the lady laughs

the pheasant flies out of the tapestry
the man clears up

the cat lifts its wig
the dog vomits
into the poem

VI

The lady puts her makeup on
the nightmares patch the nets

the stag comes in
the geraniums are demented

the saltsticks are squabbling
the sofa is eating snacks

VII

The statues are bleeding
the hamster is shining
the man bites into the column
the dog is dead

the goldfish swims
around the sun
the ceiling falls down

VIII

The alien takes his mask off
the man clings onto
the lady

the stag is doing embroidery
the library is up
in flames

the jellybears are raining
the ballerina unfolds
the moths

IX

The moon has risen
the poet falls off the sofa

the man puts his makeup on
the lady blows into the horn

the porcelain clown shouts
the cat is dead


X

The walls ripple
the man undresses the bat

the stars are sparkling
the cupboard collapses

the saltsticks are flickering 
the alien is listening
to the nightingale

XI

The ballerina
has fallen asleep
the forest is climbing up

the windows blow apart
the nightmares are dolling themselves up

the lady is riding
on the stag
the man is going to the hunt


XII

The statues throw their snow coats on
the poet tears himself
to pieces

the lady shouts
the gods are sitting
on the sofa

the rats come out of their holes
the harpist stretches herself
downwards

XIII

The sky opens
the mirror embraces
the nightingale

the wind blows lonely
the walls are
demented

the porcelain clown
undresses
the tenor wakes up

Ute Eisinger


River, crossing ARCH.  (from the cycle Bow)

Trap

The bursting full soul doesn't
   let the ball in flight tip
      out of the practiced route
         in the arm of the river.
      Landed: there is no more call.
   (Only to siblings: brother.)
Only caught.

Calls

So after we crossed,
   travelled downstream with the night.
      To land by the arch
         far down means:
      to reach my brother
   before nightfall;
where the bank wakes up to one.

Doppler effect

Under the path of the bullet
   the cast of script
      tunnels through the detonation.
      Word, fallen,
  on the track of sound
outspeeds answers.


Risk of exchange

The bridge hangs over the course.
   Penny, apparatus, often used?
     Does the arch, reached, hold fast?
    Becomes true, durable, currency, the more often used.
 The bridge exchanges the banks.

Coupling effect

The cupola creates,
  internally fledged, interior space.
    Therein what once fell down ("winged")
      responds many times over.
    The hall is in the arch,
  in pace and universe cur-
ving laid on.

Ford

So before we cross,
   let's sail upstream until night.
      To come alongside
          the arch far up means:
      to reach the morning
   on the further shore; there,
where my brother wakes up.


Soul, Penelope, Bellows

Arriving in the sublimity
  of the torture-game in the sign of the swallow;
     with strained sinew, how it punishes with:
         "reaching means: slackened. Succumbing."
     taut string with its behaviour
  of tensing against pressure, vibrating, at the feast:
harp; raising a column of sound.



Helwig Brunner

Untitled poems


READING INTO THE face how the skin
is written on from the inside, the shimmering off-
sounds of looking spread out: your breath,
then. Adapting oneself, perhaps, to a present,
mutual, fabric, without unlicensed
access to the grid-net over the landscape, some
quadrants without inhabitants, the coordinates pair
without a place, fictional lucky numbers. Fingerless
I grope the length of you, fingerless and quite tightly
under the skin of your face, when I hear and listen to
the stories: it's a dead certainty I would go
mad, if you suddenly told that one fairy story,
that wakes up the colours of your image in the blind spot,
of which it is suspected that I am in it,
at the spot where the evidence runs out. 


NOT A TRULY INTACT space: and what is present,
goes into these mistaken routes, in which then every text
looks for a context. Leaning on a morning, a door-
frame at an angle, the pain, pressed under the skin,
of a false dream narrates its dimensionless
story, which spares no-one the glimpse of understanding nothing.
As if true assertions were a living-room,
someone bangs a nail into a wall, whistles a song,
since no song is needed on the far side of mankind. 
No cock crows for anything, and everyone thinks
more or less about themselves: the door still creaks a bit,
recalls the evening, which was intimate, but now
a bit of the roof flies off every minute, and no-one knows
why this hard wind blows out of people's heads. So air
stays in the frame, we have picked the picture
and hung it up.

ACH, TRANSLATABLES have snarled up much
in their wake, which draws it from its sites,
exposes it: creeping sound-shifts, Babylonian murmurs,
starting narrow like a spring, which trickles
down, swells, leaves nothing said
on banks swept clear. Rejection is the word under-
foot, grief in the eyes, blindness;
a ruinous land, sowed with dead
and dying doves, the ochre-coloured
Streptopelia, sacrifice to its immigration,
tarred and feathered on black roads.
So listening to far-fetched languages, sub-
tracted from words, developed as an
eloquence in breath pitches, many steps
per unit of time, one stretches over the
other like an umbrella-


HARD TO PERCEIVE where the old now ends,
a new so-called and so still nameless begins.
It is the single detail against which the questions
pile up more boldly, just as windows pivot on hinges
to side changing, escapes perhaps, just to look at
the objects of sight freshly. The old models weary,
two-dimensional nets: and the securities and snarlings
in knots, without leads. And I press up towards
the act, how high would the rope be stretched, how far
the view of the ground, the shame torn out of
the red of my own blood; but what is undeniable, flares up
sparingly in the wounds. Then what our encounter means
stands out, readable in contrasts, there between
pasture and sun, out beneath the wind: giving names away
in vain, well, so the new would simply be something we
have to admit.   

Max Gad b.1954
Gerhard Ochs b.1944
Annette Brüggemann b.1973
Felix Philipp Ingold b.1942
Martina Huegli  b.1969
JP Jacobs  b.1941
Paul Wühr  b.1927
Ute Eitinger b.1964
Helwig Brunner b.1967

Manuskripte (1998/9) - 1960 till now.