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Global Voices Interviews *Germany* Andra Schwarz & Caroline Wilcox Reul in conversation with LIT’s JP Apruzzese
A dialogue between authors and translators
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Last month Andra Schwarz’s poetry collection In the morning we are glass (Am morgen sind wir aus glass, 2017) was published in English by ZephyrPress thanks to a wonderful translation by Caroline Wilcox Reul. At LIT, we were delighted to publish five poems from Schwarz’s collection in March 2020. It is tempting when first reading these poems to assume they are about memories of a childhood home or reflections on the irretrievable past.
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Four “Corn Songs” by Kinga Tóth (translated from the Hungarian by Timea Balogh) Drawings by Kinga Tóth
Corn Songs
song five
they pierce the ground with spoon straws
that’s how the roots will breathe
that’s how they’ll pull them out when they’re ripe
the others arrive behind the diggers
they write with felt pens
take away the dialect and unsettle everyone
they piss with their legs apart
and that’s when they forget what
they talked about at harvest time
they take the tongues out of their mouths
with which they were understood
and take pictures till they are distracted from the conversation
only the spoon-holding hands remain
squatting they examine the air-bagged roots
this will serve as amnesty and the writers
will be the only ones permitted to speak -
Five Poems from “In the morning we are glass” by Andra Schwarz (translated from the German by Caroline Wilcox Reul) Artwork by Hannu Töyrylä
In the morning we are glass
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Am morgen sind wir aus glas
My hands reach into emptiness what is left under earth
I walk to the black mill at its edge the spring
nothing moves I still hear the grinding of wheels
the spray of water and how they revolve decades
in the millworks the building the dismantling the change
finally the child from then no one knows what might have been
every year another ring grows wolves prowl in the
forest now that I’m gone everything is large &
