Delighted to feature this new translation of the poem 'aber hi' which we looked at the workshop with Ulrike Almut Sandig when Landschaft was visiting Oxford. Thanks to Chantal Davies. Featured here and permanently embedded on the Landschaft page.
Dedicated to Friederike Mayröcker
into the light-blue that is to say with tender swallows
I sense birdsong albums in the dark
the Spring of this sinister year.
Friederike (wasn’t she here just a moment ago?)
greeted the swirling larkspur: hi!
but I am spurned with anger and lose the thread
on my little hat of fury, I’m so in the diamond.
the full of moon of yesterday floats over us both
sweetly dented the middle of its pupils black
like your hair in which sit two sisters:
the love and the sharpened magnificence of language
and illuminate for us a way through
a little wood in the heart = a dark decade
of fury and fear. but hi! despite this I dance
despite this I write gleefully: this month of the iris,
2022, war-week 16, anima mundi, head bowed
(c) Chantale Davies