Nicosia, 
- Nicosia, and Hamburg–Berlin
Nicosia
taxis sleeping behind the border, the sand bags in the vacated houses are sated with land.
early evening, and the chant of the muezzin comes in from the north. beer drinkers of the south listen in silence on their plastic chairs, behind them the fridge, a humming white god.
in a side street nearby you see the tailor unfurling his stuffs like a general his maps, while the lamps outside sew the evening into the streets, stitch by stitch.
darker, these palms in the park, the trees. now and then a wind pokes wearily at a blaze of oranges— the journey westward is like a dream, past the new building sites, the dead cats as flat as shadows. the gorse begging at the side of the road. [End Page 45]
Hamburg–Berlin
halfway there the train came to a halt. someone outside stopped turning a crank, the land around us was as still as a painting pending the third fall of the gavel.
a village with its back to the day. the trees, dark-hooded, in groups. rectangular fields: cards laid for a monstrous game of solitaire.
in the distance two wind-turbines were conducting a test-drill in the sky: god was holding his breath. [End Page 46]
Jan Wagner studied English in Hamburg, Dublin, and Berlin, where he has lived since 1995. A poet, essayist, and translator of British and American poetry, he has published six volumes of poetry including, most recently, Regentonnenvariationen (Rain Barrel Variations, 2014). His collection of essays, Die Sandale des Propheten [The Prophet’s Sandal ], appeared in 2011, and a selection of poems in English translation, Self-portrait with a Swarm ofBees, came out from Arc Publications in 2015. He has received many awards, including the Wilhelm Lehmann Prize (2009), the Friedrich Hölderlin Prize (2011), and the Prize of the Leipzig Bookfair (2015).
Iain Galbraith was born in Scotland, and studied languages and Comparative Literature at the universities of Cambridge, Freiburg, and Mainz. A winner of the John Dryden Translation Prize and Stephen Spender Prize for Poetry Translation, he is also editor of five poetry anthologies. His own poems have appeared in Poetry Review, PN Review, Times Literary Supplement, New Writing, and other journals. His book-length translations include Alfred Kolleritsch’s Selected Poems (Shearsman Books, 2006), W. G. Sebald’s Across the Land and the Water (Penguin, 2012), and Jan Wagner’s Self-portrait with a Swarm of Bees (Arc Publications, 2015), for which he received the Popescu European Poetry Translation Prize.
