POETRY TRAVELS with Anna Blasiak and Lisa Kalloo: CYBORG by Volker Braun, translated by Karen Leeder and David Constantine

How may I address you, friend? my dear
Swan with the welding seam, from the improvement works
A phantom pregnancy, extra-uterine
Expecting (‘to the ending of oppression’)
Which bears you to yourself. The One and the Other
Without regulation, not able to be categorized
That is a multiple thing, fraying threadbare
Fluid
     Donna Haraway takes pleasure in
Reading the body again in its
Ironic dress of silk and tin. The dance
On the grave of gender, East – West – and zygotes
Which cross the frontier the strip along the wall
She observes how white American
Men at their computers behave like animals out of
Hatred out of jealousy of the machine But
Why should the body end at the skin or
Only take up what is sewn up in skin, e.g.
Me who never stops touching your skin?
Reluctance, to be nobody’s sleep
Like the rose, the pure contradiction
To change sex with a speech-act
But not the world, the trans-
                            atlantic Amazons
On the ramp ascending to victory over the flesh.
Am I still in my house asks the poet &
Captain in Schlesien before the Reichsbahn’s
Wagon is loaded with the dead man Am I
Still in my body, the machine-man speaks morse
In his life-lengthening techno-look.
An Urmensch, a mane, stooping walk I’m searching
Along the beach for a spare part for evolution
Washed in from a shipwreck, an implement
For love, a living thing like death.

By Volker Braun

Translated by Karen Leeder and David Constantine

From Volker Braun’s Great Fugue (Smokestack Books, 2022)

Born in Dresden in 1939 in the former GDR (East Germany) Volker Braun worked as a labourer before becoming a dramatist and director at the Berliner Ensemble (with Brecht’s widow, Helene Weigel) and at the Deutsches Theater, also in Berlin. He is the author of numerous plays, volumes of fiction and essays, as well as ten volumes of poetry, most recently: Auf die schönen Possen (2005). Rubble Flora: Selected Poems, translated by David Constantine and Karen Leeder (Seagull Press) appeared in 2014 and Great Fugue (Smokestack Books) in 2022.

He is one of Germany’s foremost lyric poets and has received numerous major awards for his writing: including the prestigious Georg Büchner Prize (2000) awarded by the German Academy for Language and Literature. Braun is an avowedly political poet, in that from the beginning his work has been filled with rage, grief and a determined hope in the face of history in the making. But his poetry has also simultaneously always transcended national and political borders, seeking out the possibilities for being human in poems that insist on the love, humour, grief and beauty of the everyday world.

Karen Leeder is a prize-winning translator of contemporary German literature: including Evelyn Schlag, Raoul Schrott, Michael Krüger, Durs Grünbein, Volker Braun and Ulrike Almut Sandig, and has been awarded residences in UK and Germany. Most recently she won the English PEN award and an American PEN/Heim award for her translation of Ulrike Almut Sandig, Thick of it; the John Frederick Nims Memorial Prize For Translation for her translation of Durs Grünbein; and an Austrian award for Evelyn Schlag’s All Under One Roof and services to Austrian Literature. In 2021 she received the Schlegel-Tieck Prize for Durs Grünbein’s Porcelain: Poem on the Downfall of my City. In 2024 she has a Building Bridges residency for translation in Dresden Hellerau sponsored by the Goethe Institute and the Freistaat Sachsen.

David Constantine is a freelance writer and translator, a Fellow of the Queen’s College, Oxford, and was co-editor of Modern Poetry in Translation from 2004 to 2013. He was awarded The Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry for 2020, presented to him by HM Queen Elizabeth in 2021. He lives in Oxford and on Scilly.

His poetry titles include Something for the Ghosts (2002), which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Award; Collected Poems (2004), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation; Nine Fathom Deep (2009); Elder (2014); and Belongings (2020). He translated Henri Michaux and Philippe Jaccottet; Hölderlin, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, among others. His other books include A Living Language: Newcastle/Bloodaxe Poetry Lectures (2004), his translation of Goethe’s Faust in Penguin Classics (2005, 2009), his monograph Poetry (2013) in Oxford University Press’s series The Literary Agenda, and his co-translation (with Tom Kuhn) of The Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht (W.W. Norton, 2018).

He has published six collections of short stories with Comma Press, and won the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award in 2013 for his collection Tea at the Midland (Comma Press), and is the first English writer to win this prestigious international fiction award. Four other short story collections, Under the Dam (2005), The Shieling (2009), In Another Country: Selected Stories (2015) and The Dressing-Up Box (2019), and his second novel, The Life-Writer (2015), are published by Comma Press. His story ‘Tea at the Midland’ won the BBC National Short Story Award in 2010, while ‘In Another Country’ was adapted into 45 Years, a major film starring Tom Courtenay and Charlotte Rampling.

Photo by Lisa Kalloo

Check out the Poetry Travels book list on bookshop.org.

Read previous poems in the Poetry Travels series:

AVATAR by Laura Fusco, translated by the author and Alan Dent

SCATTERED by Floriana Ferro, translated by the author

OX AND MANDARIN // A COMPENDIUM by Milla van der Have

ROYAL PEACOCK by Veroniki Dalakoura, translated by John Taylor

SNAKE DEATHS by Monika Herceg, translated by Marina Veverec

ON THE WAY TO THE SHOP by Marija Dejanović, translated by Vesna Maric

*** (MY LOVE, YOU SAID YOU WERE A WOLF) by Ruzanna Voskanyan, translated by Nieri Avanessian

RED ZONE by Iryna Tsilyk, translated by Vitaly Chernetsky

THE SPIDER by Danae Sioziou, translated by Panagiotis Kechagias and Mania Meziti