Winter
- Winter
I’m getting to know myself, at this moment My apartment that’s seen At least three generations, its windows Always curved at the top, with narrow sills Scarcely fit for foliage in pots The walls Bear layers of paper Like the age rings of a tree All the way down at the bottom art nouveau, in-between Spoilage newspaper reports Outraged readers on whorehouses Two lines on the burning of the Reichstag Then just more wallpaper, the workmanship Got worse. Or the view out Onto the roofs (hardly an inch of sky) Those before me had that, and presumably Similar rain and snow made the asphalt In the yard black, turned the brickwork red Others Should see it yet, a cat’s been My companion for a couple of years What does she know of me she loves my perfume Or just this spot where I sit I am not very good, but As a kid I learned patience From watercolor painting: Unless you wait, you lose the image— And on occasion My heart moves among the hanging pages When I see a strange place Hear of people who are brave Or someone asks a question: I love my shuba my fur-lined boots And my sad expression [End Page 39]
Sarah Kirsch (1935–2013) was one of Germany’s most powerful lyric poets of the postwar era. She lived and worked in East Germany until 1979, when, after political persecution, she moved to the West. In Ice Roses (Carcanet, 2014), comprising around a hundred poems from the ten collections Kirsch published between 1967 and 2001, the translator Anne Stokes introduced Anglophone readers to the full range of Kirsch’s poetry. “Winter” features many elements of what was dubbed the “Sarah sound”: speech cadences, colloquialisms, and a free-flowing syntax that reflects Kirsch’s lifelong resistance to constraint and convention.
Anne Stokes’s most recent book-length translation of poetry by Sarah Kirsch, Ice Roses: Selected Poems (Carcanet, 2014), features over one hundred poems from Kirsch’s ten collections, and was shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld and the Popescu European Translation Prizes in 2015. Her translation of Monika Rinck’s poem “pfingstrosen” [“peonies at pentecost”] was awarded the Stephen Spender Poetry Translation Prize in the same year. She recently translated into English the German bestseller This House Is Mine (St. Martin’s Press, 2016) by Doerte Hansen. Stokes teaches German and Translation Studies at the University of Stirling in Scotland.
