by Yoko Tawada
In German, people talk about a “word treasure.” Words that we know and that know us are precious treasures. Among these, there are words that sit heavily on the stomach or are carved into the heart. Most words we keep in the brain, however, and though this is the organ of knowledge we don’t know how they are stored there. Are they arranged in alphabetical order, or thematically? Or, like in a botanical dictionary, ordered by color or by season? In any event, for each new language we attempt to build a new word treasure chamber. I myself am particularly anxious not to mix up the meaning of English words with those of German words. Apparently, I must have built a watertight wall between the two languages. Otherwise I cannot explain why I never heard the English word “eagle” in the German word “Igel” until I read Uljana Wolf. She developed a new order (or disorder) for the chambers in the language center. She is an excellent interior designer of multilingual poetry. When she interconnects words with elegant lines and steps over the borders between languages, an unexpected formation appears as poetry. It’s like the constellations: between the individual stars there is a distance of millions of light years but because their light reaches our present at the same time, we can detect an image.
But how does Uljana Wolf single out the words that are suitable to become stars? She is a Master of Similitude. We learn to ignore certain similarities, to avoid confusions. The English word “bad” has nothing to do with a German bathroom (Badezimmer) and a German letter (Brief) is not necessarily brief. Uljana Wolf is not afraid of similarities. Quite on the contrary. She welcomes each confusion with open arms as an opportunity for a new friendship.
“Weder im guten noch im bad” [Neither in good nor in bad”, Falsche Freunde, page 11]. Reading this text passage in the poetry collection entitled “Falsche Freunde,” [“False Friends”] I was reminded how a Japanese publisher had been very interested in my novella “Das Bad,” which at that point had only been published in German, and I couldn’t fully understand why. Later it turned out that it was because of the title: Das Bad [the Bath.] The publisher, who did not know German, thought that this was a novel about a bad girl.
Uljana Wolf plays with obvious similarities that normally are collectively repressed. Here is another example: “liegt aber eine strähne im brief, gar eine lange” (“but the letter contained a strand of hair, a really long one”) (“Falsche Freunde, page 11). The English word “brief” and the German word “Brief” [letter]: are they etymologically related, distant relatives perhaps? Or do they just look similar by chance? The hole in etymological knowledge brought up a personal, somewhat embarrassing memory, in which I had mixed up these two words. Once we have learned the meanings of the words “Brief” and “brief,” we no longer see the similarities, even though they are obvious, or precisely because they are obvious; just like the purloined letter of Edgar Allan Poe.
We don’t want to get confused, we want to avoid mistakes at all cost. False friends could lead us to linguistic mistakes, and, as a general rule, it is embarrassing to make mistakes, especially in the English language. Those who dream of international success must speak the language, but not play with it, let alone make embarrassing mistakes in it. Did anybody ever ask the English language whether it is happy in this role, or whether it wouldn’t prefer to experience a new poetic adventure with Uljana Wolf?
Some people think that authors, unlike translators, do not need a dictionary since their words must come directly from their hearts. In truth, poets and poetesses spend a lot of time with dictionaries. Oskar Pastior once told me that he was immersed in dictionaries for days and weeks on end when he was writing poetry as he was translating Petrarch.
The term “multilingual poetry” conjures up the image of a poetess at the breakfast buffet collecting tasty words from different language platters for her own plate. In the case of Uljana Wolf, I don’t think of a breakfast buffet so much as a desk on which many dictionaries are placed closely together. Translating is an intriguing, but difficult, dangerous, and unthankful job. Not every translator can or will last long in that particular open situation in which the seemingly stable meanings of the original appear to be dissolving while a new word from the target language is nowhere in sight yet. Those in this situation are directly confronted with the materiality of language. There, language can be touched in the form of letters. An almost menacing intimacy without any security whatsoever. This is the “Ellis Island” of translation. It is not certain yet that a word, or what once was a word, can build a new future in the new language. Translators, for whom this situation is uncanny, quickly want to reach the target language and quickly want to forget the menacing transitional period. Uljana Wolf takes her time at the threshold of translation, at the Ellis Island of language. She maintains the original language as a movement and steps mimetically into the target language. What emerges is not a translation as a finished product but a kind of corporeality.
“Translation for me has increasingly turned into such a walk in the garden, and that in two respects. On the one hand, it is essential to walk together with and next to the original poem, that is to say, to give more importance to the walking, striding, jumping of the poem than to its speaking, puzzling, calling. I am not talking about the objectively countable verse and feet (though that too), but rather the rhythmic-gestural imprint that each line, with its rise and fall, its cadence, leaves on my body.” (“Translating Isabel Bogdan,” from the newsletter of the VdÜ).
For a literary prize that is awarded for “poetry as translation,” the thought that poetry would be a radicalization of translation, is particularly interesting. Uljana Wolf writes about this. “To leave translation behind me and instead step into where nothing is working anymore and everything goes, and play with an “impurity” which has been proliferating in my poetry for some time now.”
I imagine a radical translation that knows of no way other than to cross over into poetry. There, not every single word of the original text has to be replaced by a word in the target language. There, you don’t have to serve readers only represent the process of translation as an artistic act. There, you don’t have to compromise to find an answer but can leave open all open questions.
Impurity is a counter-measure against the cleansing of the national language, or the Apartheid in the brain. English words are allowed to be visible in a German text, and not simply as loanwords with a visitor’s pass.
In this movie theater there is no longer a strict division of labor between the original language and the subtitles. How absurd this question then sounds: “In which language do you think?” Don’t we think simultaneously in all languages, that we know and don’t know?
False friends can often be found between two related languages. That is why they are also called “false brothers” in German. English and German are closely related languages, Polish and German also belong to one family, the family of Indo-European languages. The poetess is not interested in measuring the distance to the self. Rather, she questions the concept of one’s own language, of what is called the “mother tongue” but in reality belongs to the “fatherland.” In a lecture at Humboldt University she talked about “Falschländischen” (“falselandic”) as an alternative to “Vaterländischen” (fatherlandic” or national): “Well, I do write in German, but despite having studied German at the university, by no means in a vater- but rather falschländisch manner.” (REDE SELTSAM ANGEZETTELT, speech held at the graduation ceremony of the Philosophy Faculty II of the Humboldt University in Berlin on July 16th, 2014)
One knows that proximity is sometimes more difficult than distance. Uljana Wolf’s language has a smoothness that knows how to deal with a difficult proximity.
Most Germans overlook Polish words when they encounter them. One could endlessly list the reasons for this ignorance. The language is too foreign, the cities are too boring, it does not qualify as vacation destination, the life style is not cool, there is no money to be made, small countries should learn the language of the bigger countries and not the other way around, etc. But what stops us from looking into them when the words are already in front of our eyes? Why doesn’t one try to write them down and get inside their heads? Uljana Wolf looks at and works with neighboring West-Slavic words. Even if you don’t know the Polish word “kochanie,” you can immediately understand what the book title “Kochanie, I bought some bread” means, since you can detect the English word “Honey,” in the word “Kochanie.” “Honey, I bought I some bread.” The word “co-lover” ought to exist, “kochanie” therefore as well. For a small child no language is inaccessible. It pick ups every word, looks at it closely, turns it around, takes it apart and eats it. The child works tirelessly with the language. Why do we loose this skill? Why do we avoid foreign languages, except for when we can abuse them as proof of accomplishment? Uljana Wolf’s interaction with languages is very appealing, liberating and stimulating.
I, on the other hand, work with two languages that are rather far removed from each other: Japanese and German. The distance between the two languages is not of a geographical nature. Because in Eastern Siberia, not far from Japan, the night is called “Ночь.” The Polish word “noc” is clearly related to the Russian word “Ночь” but also to the German word “Nacht.” The Japanese night “yoru” has no common root with these European words. For German-speaking people, there is, in other words, no reason, to exoticize Slavic languages.
Uljana Wolf works with Polish words and dares to take half a step into the night. “Half” sounds derogatory in German, but I mean it in a positive sense. Because “half-night” means “mid-night.” One reaches the midpoint from which the moon stands as close as the sun.
In the poem “Herbstspiel” (Kochanie, page 56) the word “Herz” (or “heart”) rhymes with the word “Scherz” (or “joke”). A poem full of emotion that makes me not the least bit sentimental. The heart persists as a percussion instrument, it joyfully plays richly varied rhythms. Still, we are not dealing with “Lautpoesie,” or sound poetry here, Uljana Wolf does not write loudly, she writes loudly and softly. The poet Ernst Jandl refers to this as “laut und luise” or loud and louise. I remember how he once turned the Bible into sound poetry. “Him Hamflang war das Wort (“Am Anfang war das Wort,” or “In the beginning there was the word.”) I still hear this sentence in Jandl’s voice. In Uljana Wolf’s poetry it reads a little differently: “ am anfang war, oder zu beginn“ or “at first there was, or in the beginning.” The word “begin” changes into the dance “beguine” and, indeed, the feet of the poem start demonstrating new steps. I don’t know, if there was a word at the beginning, and if so, what word that might have been. But how about beginning with translation instead? Because multilingualism characterizes our present. Some still view it as divine punishment, but in the process of radical translation every single one of the many languages can become my beautiful “Lengevitch.”
Translated by Bettina Brandt