"The poet is of no party." Baudelaire
Shortly after her second daughter was born in fall 2016, the German poet Uljana Wolf found poems about motherhood beginning to take shape.
“I was jotting down lines in mental states of exhaustion and absurd motherly multitasking, or formulating lines in my head in strange physical states, for example bent over the crib with my head hanging down because my daughter, for a while, needed to feel the tips of my hair with her thumb to fall asleep.”
Those jottings became the basis for Wolf's 2023 book muttertask (kookbooks), a volume often in dialogue with her award-winning first book from 2005, kochanie ich habe brot gekauft, recently published in a bilingual volume by World Poetry Books as kochanie, today I bought bread. The original German poems sit next to Greg Nissan's dazzling English translations, giving U.S. readers new access to the poet.
The two books share the theme of family. “If you shrink human life down to its last few elements, family is on the short list,” says translator Susan Bernofsky. “Even if it's the absence of family, it's a primal thing.”
Uljana Wolf was born in East Berlin in 1979. Her memories of reunification are unclear.
“A lot of things were not talked about, it was a difficult time for everyone to readjust,” says Wolf. “So a child will pick up signals and decode them many years later.”
Wolf started writing at 12 and attended weekly workshops from age 14. At 26, Wolf won a top German poetry prize for kochanie, published while she was still in college. Having become a respected poet across Europe, she has also translated writers into German including John Ashbery, Yoko Ono and LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs1.
Wolf's poetics administer slight shocks via poems that can feel playful, sorrowful, or sinister.2 Wolf has described a poem as a “space walk” and translation as a “bouncy castle,” as in kids' backyard birthday parties. A place that throws you, knocks you off guard.
“[Wolf] grew up in East Germany where there was censorship and control of language, propagandistic use of language,” says Bernofsky. “Which there also is in the United States but we're not so aware of it. In East Germany, it's right in your face and you cannot escape that. She thematizes that in her work.”
kochanie opens with “displacement of the mouth,” where a 4 a.m. view of dawn over a house and forest is figured as a mouth. Eyelid-thin lips close, the “sky cracks back its jaw.” The woods (“die wälder”) are the tongue-arch of the yawn. “A long held breath unravels” as rain-speech, emerging as mist from a mouth, as if through eyelashes.
Nissan sees a theme of “formative entries into language at different levels,” including some “emergences received as silences.”
In a “recovery room” sequence, babies (poems? people?) are born into the “chill of historical judgment,” where they are carried around by “nurse-judges,” writes Valzhyna Mort in kochanie's introduction. A “postnarcotic sniffle” never quite goes away.
Wolf decomposes fairy tale logic in a series called “my cadastre.” While traditional fairy tales resolve tension—children love them repeated exactly the same way—Wolf's are false starts, a signature device. They “exclaim at the unyielding lock: hrrrr, agghhh, nnnh!”
fruit
translated by Greg Nissan
one can never
says father herr father
hold the family of fruit
in his hands
he can only
says father herr father
hold one offspring
apple or pear
in his hands
herr
“[kochanie] is about daughters responding to patriarchal fathers, or responding to a certain heaviness in history,” says Nissan.
Wolf's responses reference her personal canon. Familiar poems and stories are an antechamber leading from the known to “nowhere.”3 The poems can feel explicitly theatrical—Wolf says she “is interested in creating myths and masks”—invoking familiar characters from films, novels, and plays.
One such personage is Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, in Wolf's four-poem “wood lord shaft.” Titus was a Roman general who won a war against Tamora, a German queen. To avenge his 26 sons killed in war, Titus orders Tamora's son killed. Tamora's lover Aaron then orders the rape of Titus's daughter Lavinia, calling her a “dainty doe.” Lavinia is also mutilated; her tongue is cut out and her hands amputated. After the crime, Lavinia opens her mouth, and blood flows “as from a conduit with three issuing spouts.”
wood lord shaft II
translated by Greg Nissan
don't say rome and roe don't say dainty
doe chant hunt not pluck a flower plow
a field not plunder back or bedyard not judge
absolightly but take flight in waterworks: to tug
the plug out of the captainless speech out
of the faithless stuttertrough which spills
forth lavinia red the legend you are and are
not oh conduit with three issuing spouts speak:
dark torrents flush your word into the ground
dark with blazon and blahblah from the fountain's
floodmouth blundering now and ever blinder
i greet you later, your reader i your re-offender
Nissan extends Wolf's signature neologisms into English with “absolightly” and “stuttertrough.” (Read a neologism enough times and it starts to feel like a familiar word.) Nested negations “don't say … don't say … not” yield to rushing fluid rhythms. Shakespeare's phrase “oh conduit with three issuing spouts,” quoted twice, is like fluid spurting unevenly or hitting rocks. The ominous final line reveals an 'I', a reader (Titus? a contemporary reader?) who will harm Lavinia again.
In the sequence's final poem, Lavinia's corpse is a gray shape across eyes watching the play on a computer screen.
in livestream Lavinia we read and in all eyes
you were cataract, the dread-gray star.
The last third of kochanie moves to Silesia, an area on the Polish-German border. On the eve of World War II, Wolf's paternal grandmother, a German-speaking woman from Maltsch (now Malczyce), daughter of a station master, met her future husband, an apprentice land surveyor. He was from Glauchau, five hours away by train. A series called “The Ovens Slept” has one poem each for four places: Berlin, Glauchau, Maltsch, and Legnica. A train switches rail lines throughout the series.
“Silesia is where Robert Walser worked as a butler in a castle in a German-speaking context,” says Bernofsky. “It used to be very multilingual and predominantly German-speaking but there was always a mix there. The towns had German names. The town now called Wrocław was called Breslau. A smaller town, Opola, used to be Oppen. [After 1945] the German speakers who lived in that territory were displaced and had to move west into main Germany, of which there's still a lot of resentment. The Poles did everything to remove the German language, and it's now totally Poland.”
Wolf took several trips to Poland as a student and then as a poet. She did a book tour with a Polish-German poetry anthology in 2002 and studied in Kraków in 2003. She got to know many Polish poets and literary critics. ('Kochanie' is a Polish term of endearment, and a series of love poems mark a change in tone and style from the earlier parts of Wolf's book.) In 2004, she had a three-month residency in Kreisau, on what had been the estate of an anti-Hitler German lawyer executed in 1945 for planning a coup.
Wolf ends kochanie with a trio of poems focused on birds and dogs, creatures that (merrily or obsessively) travel to find food. These dogs are frenzied yappers and “cassandras,” marking their language territory (“sprachrevier”) with echoing, billowing sound, as in these lines from “to the dogs of kreisau”:
jedes echo gehört euch: der zuckende rückstoß
von klang an den hügeln hierarchisches knurren
und bellen in wellen: heraklisch erst dann hünen
haft im abklang fast nur ein hühnchen das weiß:
Here are the same lines in Nissan's translation:
every echo is yours: twitching blowback
of sound from the hills, hierarchical snarl
and billowing bark: herculean at first, then a bit
leaner, at last but a chicken who reckons:
One dog bites Wolf, leaving his mark on her, “as if a leg were but a page.”
Nissan's translation was developed on and off over ten years, first as an undergraduate at Brown, then after World Poetry Books decided to publish the book in English. It was an unusual and lucky experience to be able to spend that length of time on a project, he says.
The book's German title does not include the word “today.” Nissan wanted the title to feel like something “unfamiliar and foreign, but everyday.”
“Wolf's sense of that line is that you enter into language with a sort of excitement: 'I learned to buy bread in language!' ” he says. “[Adding 'today'] brought it down to earth, because the 'kochanie' is a little bit further [for an English-only reader] than it was for Uljana. Also we did it for sound reasons.”
“Uljana has both a really tight and sharp ear, but also a wild playfulness with sound too,” he adds. “Often her poetry takes place at the nexus between centrifugal wildness of language and this more centripetal structuring force of the rhyme that's really tight.”
Wolf's chosen constraints were hard to recreate in another language. That meant a lot of reinventing in English.
“Some things in translation become closer to home, some things become further at the same time,” Nissan says. “What you lose you gain elsewhere in different ways.”
“Greg has a really good ear for contemporary American poetry,” says Wolf. “His translations could dock onto something [in English]. When I wanted to make a line more melodious or longer, he had the right intuition to let it end just before.”
After Nissan finished his translation, Wolf told him the stories behind the poems, like the time a Kreisau village dog actually bit her on the calf.
“It was fun for me to say, 'Ok, we've put on the show, let's peek behind the curtain a little bit,' ” he says, “And say, 'Oh I had no idea that's what that was!' We were careful not to let those get into the translation too much. [They were] present in the German only in a transformed way.”
Wolf was 26 and working part-time jobs when kochanie was published in 2005. She had not yet graduated from Humboldt University. The following year she won Germany's prestigious Peter Huckel prize, which “was a little bit of a shock.”
The award made it easier to write a second book by going in a completely different direction. After the lyrical kochanie, Wolf says she “wanted to push myself into new forms.”
Around 2007, Wolf met her now ex-husband, the poet Christian Hawkey. She moved to Brooklyn for most of each year, a pattern that continued for the next 10 years. She found Brooklyn's poetry scene to be less institutionalized than Berlin's. Social life, university life, and poetry mix together in New York, whereas in Berlin, the state subsidizes events and publishers. Wolf connected to other poets interested in multilingual poetry, including poets like Don Mee Choi, who came to read at Pratt, where Wolf worked. American poets explored many forms. Wolf was influenced by greater use of the prose poem, a more conceptual approach to serial composition, and different layouts on the page.
Wolf's second poetry book, falsche freunde, followed in 2009. “False friends” are homonyms, words with the same sounds but different meanings in different languages, like 'gift,' which means present in English but poison in German. Wolf wrote 26 prose poems based on these word confusions, one for each letter in the English alphabet.
In “Subsisters,” published in falsche freunde, Wolf crafted seven dazzling pairs of prose poems4, some hushed and confiding, others remote or irreverent.
“Subsisters” began as an investigation into dubbing. In Germany, the film industry uses dubbing, “mostly thanks to the U.S. and French allies who invested in dubbed film after the war to help ease the Germans into denazification and learning about 'democratic culture,' ” explains Wolf.
Wolf found it hard to represent dubbing in poetry—“there is only one language left”—so she switched to subtitling, which makes translation visible to most of us every day.
“I took the experience of watching subtitled films and applied them to these poems, setting up rules for myself: i.e. one poem is the Original version (OV), one version is the OmU (Original mit Untertitel) version—it's the same film but the language gets messed up a bit as if you're watching it only half-knowing the language, and then there's a subtitle to further confuse you, in another language.”
Wolf has described the OmU subsisters as “less obedient, less coherent, with more messiness and desire.” Wolf says she “didn't have clear persons in mind as speakers for these poems. It's more of an ambient subsisterly 'I', something that speaks from the cracks of translation—the space between language and representation, a longing that allows for playful distortion of gender roles, if that makes sense.”
Watch the films and the poems expand: The Big Sleep, Clash by Night, All That Heaven Allows, Lifeboat, Morocco, Imitation of Life, and Laura. Only one features an actual sister (Lauren Bacall's in The Big Sleep). The rest are more ambiguous figures: in Clash by Night, Marilyn Monroe is dating Barbara Stanwyck's brother. Tallulah Bankhead has a sisterly dynamic with another character in Lifeboat. Marlene Dietrich has two highly racialized dolls she places on a bedside table in Morocco. The Imitation of Life speaker may be the quasi-adopted, white-passing black daughter/sister.
In Wolf's poems, the names of stars are used to narrate events that happen to characters, as if words play meanings like actors play roles. The effect is apparent in poems such as “Subsisters VII,” translated by Sophie Seita, which is based on Otto Preminger's Laura and Gene Tierney's biography.
Original version
gene's a genie, bashful. i want to paint her portrait but she doesn't stay still. her coat is white, her hat is white, and then the quiet, grey flicker of the fireplace— it's hard to find her contours, a shadow's cast on the fauteil, he shows us his credentials. gene said I don't waver, we leave the canvas, which we call laura, to him, and run past his immobile face, the old grandfather clock and the testimony of the false interior.
Original version with subtitles
gene's a genius, embarrassed by her genes. neither she nor i can picture that. a white coat, that yes, fires the pace a whit, we quiet the hot bickering, not hard to call it borderline. not even the color of the armchair lends us credence, released from the canvassed witness, the aura of a false name, gene and I wager that our interior shadow will pass, we clock him, steadfast, granted there's no further fuss.
Electroshock? Sister, being in the picture doesn't mean you have to play a painting.
The near–Mae West intonations of “Sister, being in the picture doesn't mean you have to play a painting” is an eye roll at Tierney's cool remove. One subsister notes Tierney's depression, her “interior shadow.” Tierney was given multiple rounds of electroshock therapy, giving “white coat” a second meaning.
When asked who is speaking in these poems, Wolf can only speculate. “Perhaps the 'subsister' speaking the Gene Tierney poems was in my imagination the portrait hanging in the room with the fauteuils. Not actually, logically, but internally.”
Wolf is a co-translator of the Austrian experimental writer Ilse Aichinger. She admires Aichinger's “humor … of suffering” that is “always lightly slanted, [with] hellish laughter.”5 The subsisters recall “The Mouse,” a nervously observant character in Aichinger's story of the same name. The Mouse is hiding, likely in a wall, but can distinguish child from adult footsteps. It is trying to calculate risk and danger. The subsisterly 'I' watches and speculates.
Between 2007 and 2017, Wolf was moving between languages multiple times each year. She wrote doubly and triply distorted poems that knock language off its moorings, even if only while you read the poems. Some poems written during these years relate to Wolf's shame at speaking imperfect English.6 Others, like babeltrack, look at children's preverbal phase of development.
“I was interested in the early stages of parenting, the permeability of my boundaries, the acute sense of not being one anymore but being another being also,” says Wolf. “And on speech formation, preverbal and early stages, as before formation of 'mother tongue,' as a site of multilingual possibilities. I was experiencing writer's block and also a sense of attrition in my own language after living in New York for some years, and writing through or thinking about the babel of child languaging allowed me to explore deeply rooted notions about language correctness or mastery, the 'monolingual paradigm.' ”
In 2012, Wolf and Hawkey published sonne from ort (kookbooks), paired erasures of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese and Rilke's German translation of the poems. Barrett Browning presented her poems to the public as if they were translations, although they were not. Wolf and Hawkey's title, mixing German and English, means “Sun from Place.” Annette Gilbert has said that the poems show “the inextricable interlacing of voices across eras, generations, languages.”
Bernofsky has translated Wolf's “false friends” sequence and “Bring Your Own Blendling,” an unpublished 2019 essay on translation. In “Blendling,” Wolf notes that Schleiermacher thought that a “form of humiliation” was inherent to the role of translator. She quotes Schleiermacher at length on this:
“To make the foreign perceptible in the target language, the translator, according to Schleiermacher (but he uses the word 'writer'), must enter into '... the most extraordinary form of humiliation to which a writer of some quality can subject himself, since his creation must necessarily bump up against the boundaries of what we can expect or even endure … Who would not like to make his native tongue appear everywhere displaying the most splendid characteristic beauty allowed by each genre? Who would not prefer to beget children who would purely represent their fathers' lineage, rather than mongrels [Blendlinge]?' ”
Wolf argues for the mongrels. For her, language is always internally hybrid and “dirty,” and better off for it.
“The hybrid is the richest,” says Bernofsky. “The supposedly ugly children are actually the most beautiful. It was a misunderstanding all along to think they were ugly.”
Asked what she means by her recurring phrase “dirty bird language,” Wolf says, “I don't know. I picked up the colloquial phrase that I thought meant that something was done a bit messily or not accurate. Of course it mostly sounds good, the rolling 'r's after the 'y' sound. Birds will carry traces of seeds or fruit they picked up on their beaks, their claws, their feathers, in their poop, sometimes over hundreds of miles. They fertilize, cross pollinate, disperse, change context. And of course, they can be migrants. In that sense maybe dirty bird language is language migrating, smudging clear boundaries, leaving traces sometimes unawares.”
Wolf's last residency was at a family-friendly program in Rome, from 2017 to 2018. She went back to living in Berlin fulltime in 2018, the same year that Brooklyn's Belladonna* press published selected poems in an English translation by Sophie Seita, as Subsisters. As Wolf re-engaged with kochanie around Nissan's English translation, she became immersed again in meter. This in turn informed her work on muttertask, which she designed as a collection entirely about motherhood.
“Mutter” is a word in both German and English, while “multitasking” lurks in the background of Wolf's title as well. “Mut” means courage in German, but the English “mutter” means mumbling, a form of language that kind of communicates. It connects to the “good enough mother,” a pop psychology concept Wolf has referenced when arguing for a “good enough poetry.” Something less than ideal, but hopefully adequate.
“The word 'task' is not a German word,” observes Bernofsky. “And 'task' is a word that I associate with Walter Benjamin. He is important for her also. The task of the mother is already one of translation.”
Looking back at her work, Wolf sees kochanie as lyrical, her subsequent books as experimental, and muttertask as a combination of the two. This is most obvious in a suite of matryoshka poems that pair a metered poem with a prose one. The polyvocal matryoshkas are cousins to the subsisters. muttertask also references Medea, Athena, Emmy Henning, Max Beckmann, Hannah Höch, and a Hölderlin fragment about Christopher Columbus. One chapter, written in 2010 before Wolf became a parent, contains erasures based on a (presumably fraudulent) chapbook of letters said to be written by Calamity Jane to her daughter.
The title poem contains the lines “die abende sind fort / die morgende sind fort. Alles / geborgene von sich selbst / nur geborgt,” which roughly means: “The evenings are gone. The mornings are gone. Everything that you borrowed for yourself was just borrowed.”
Wolf had retrieved something she'd lost: “As time went by, I returned to the couplet form, with obsessively constructed same line lengths (purposefully ignoring dynamics of lines as sense units or line breaks as pauses or accents).”
In one bilingual poem, “jane spricht motherese,” the couplets play with singsong patterns:
wo s beginnt bist du horny
wo s endet bist du matter
wo s beginnt bist du maid
wo s endet bist du mad
Nissan sees “the expansion of [Wolf's] formal techniques … even greater resonance of form and content with [the matryoshka poems] as nested devices. You feel the little phonemes that fold into one another. And that was so difficult in translation. You have to start making sounds in your head, rhyming things, seeing what comes out of the English to make it have that effect.”
Literary and other cultural institutions often commission speeches from Wolf, several of which were collected in the prize-winning collection Etymological Gossip (kookbooks, 2021), which is being translated by Sophie Seita for Nightboat Books. The “gossip” of the book's title refers to “the secret histories that words bring with them,” says Bernofsky.
“In German, you're very conscious about what is a Germanic root word and what is a Latinate word, because the Latinate words stick out and if you use them you sound kind of academic,” she explains. “In English, we're not really so conscious about the words we use. Because our language is such a mishmash of Anglo-Saxon and others, we're [used to hybridity]. I'm in the middle of doing a translation of the Magic Mountain and I'm thinking hard about the etymology of the words. I've begun to actually look up the etymologies of the words I'm using, for example translating the German word 'vernichten' which has the word 'nicht' in it—no or not. That word can mean destroy, but I decided to use annihilate because the 'nihil' also means not, nothing. Thomas Mann picked that word [because] it had a 'no' in the middle of it. Making non-existent, making not. We understand the difference in tone between destroy and annihilate even if we don't know why. The why is in etymology. The etymologies of the words shape the history of the usage of the word, and through the usage we understand the difference in tone between different words.”
Wolf's life now consists of teaching (both workshops and university courses), raising her daughters (with her mother helping with childcare), and trying to make time to write and translate. Yet she continues to wander in new regions of language, primarily through translation. As different as their histories are, Germany and Korea both experienced a form of Cold War partition, and Wolf now focuses on contemporary Korean and Korean-American poetry. South Korean government subsidies make such translations more financially sustainable for publishers. Wolf and German-Korean writer Sool Park are working on Korean poet Kim Hyesoon's Autobiography of Death for Fischer-Verlag. Park will write the first draft, Wolf the second, and they will collaborate on the third. With Charlotte Thießen, Wolf will translate MacArthur fellow Don Mee Choi's English-language Hardly War for Spector Books.
“Once the internet made it possible to reach a wider audience for cheaper, suddenly all these smaller presses sprang up and a lot of them are very translation-centric,” says Bernofsky.
Wolf is often described as a poet of liminal spaces between languages. This is entirely true, but it should not obscure her poems' vitality and primal power. She explodes the singular idea of “place” into a web of meanings in a “star shaped formation” or “constellation,” in Yoko Tawada's words.
“When we talk about places, we are perhaps talking more about something that happens in time,” Wolf has said. “Perhaps we should do away with the concept of place, and talk instead about intersections, nodules and tendrils. And of languages.”
| 1 | https://www.lyrikline.org/en/poems/damn-right-its-betta-yours-11988?showmodal=de |
| 2 | https://www.thecommononline.org/september-2023-poetry-feature-uljana-wolf/ |
| 3 | https://cagibilit.com/interview-with-uljana-wolf/ |
| 4 | "Trios" in Sophie Seita's English version |
| 5 | https://cagibilit.com/interview-with-uljana-wolf/ |
| 6 | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAddJoTQOrQ |