Born in Scuol in 1944, Leta Semadeni writes concise, luminous poetry in both German and the Vallader dialect of Romansh. She is equally at home in, and slightly removed from, both languages and publishes almost all her poetry in bilingual editions. Semadeni does not translate her Romansh poems into German, or vice versa, but recreates them in the other language, so that the shifting ground under the reader of both versions seems to give only a small shrug. Indeed, a sense of ambivalent familiarity runs through all of her work. She is an acute observer of the natural world, often discerning kindred souls in the animals around her but resisting the temptation to anthropomorphise them. Animals, like words, open new realms of perception for her. Words are like animals, she has noted, ‘inasmuch as they have their own lives and can be very stubborn’.
Leta Semadeni’s poetry and her novel, Tamangur, have been recognised with a number of awards, including the literary prize of the Canton Graubünden, the Schiller Prize in 2011, and the Swiss Literature Prize in 2016.
Words
Some words
extend their illuminate bodies
from books
Build nests
inside me
Feed off me
Fast growing
fluorescent mushrooms
From In mia vita da vuolp – In meinem Leben als Fuchs (Chasa editura rumantscha, Chur 2010)
That’s why
Because we
are different
from each other
tensed in skins
we need
so many words
From RAZ (Verlag Martin Wallimann, Alpnach 2011)
City Vixen
Every night the vixen
devours the remains
of the day cleans
the bowl paws
at my polished
sleep
From Poesias da chadafö – Küchengedichte (Uniun dals Grischs, 2006)
Village Butcher
Upstairs after the slaughter
to wash the blood off
with Smetana
This bath in the Moldau
refreshes drowns out
the lowing
Along the banks graze
the calves’ ghosts
The stream becomes a torrent
And he kneads
the white flesh
of his wife to
quiet the roar
From Poesias da chadafö – Küchengedichte (Uniun dals Grischs, 2006)
By Leta Semadeni
Translated by Tess Lewis
Leta Semadeni was born in Scuol, Switzerland and studied languages at the University of Zurich. She taught at several schools in Zurich and Engadin and worked in Latin America, Paris, Zug, Berlin and New York. Since 2005 she has lived and worked as a freelance writer in Lavin. Semadeni has been awarded several prizes for her work, including the 2016 Swiss
Tess Lewis is a translator from French and German. She has translated many Swiss writers including three winners of the Swiss Book Prize: Jonas Lüscher, Monique Schwitter and Melinda Nadj Abonji.
Photo of Leta Semadeni © Yvonne Böhler