Issue 6 – Summer 2004 – Gregor Laschen

Gregor Laschen

Translated by Andrew Duncan

Gregor Laschen (born 1941) has taught since 1971 at the university of Utrecht, in the Netherlands. His preoccupation with the landscape, as something dwarfing humans and bringing their concerns into a true perspective, may put him into relationship with Johannes Bobrowski; his concern with liberty and the oppression of language may connect him with Erich Arendt. Jammerbugt-notes. Working grounds. Mortal substance is a long poem about the threat posed by the unification of the two Germanies and by the revival of German nationalism, where abiding natural processes comment on the hysterical nature of humans in masses. The image of bird migration, in “The Bird Text”, comments on cycles also inside human beings, and takes us back to nature poets of the Thirties such as Wilhelm Lehmann – almost nothing could be less in fashion.

 

Bosch

This skull-opening in the history
of Europe, painting in the marble quarries of angst:

in the eye the winter rat turned grey,
betrayal under the tongue like an oil-stain, fishes
of lead and blood like tar, cowls, crosses

genuflections and sweat as the entry into
the nest of the summer rats, overheated cathedrals
against the enlightenment there ahead: Bosch is fighting.

“I will not warn my eye, this chicken top-heavy
on the gallows. I am displacing my own happiness
into tomorrow, into
the next picture.”

 

Ebb I

In the middle of the violence of sleep
is the hole, two eyes deep under water. Bottomless
the wind goes to the edge, the long chewed up
middle, where my skull dissolves in clauses.

 

Ebb II

Behind the ebb, in the built-in reverse gear
the last movement, word-
flatly intermeshed for passing the time
until this flood comes over us.

 

Beacon Buoy

Some kind of idiot like that, crooked-
Mouth with a deep sense, the raven of bad luck
In German history, orator
And philosopher, beautifully and thoroughly rotten egg, credit
With whores in the red,
Sent the beacon buoy in front of our hearts
Right when setting sail 
Outside like his fellows. In the sandcastle
In these parts always a 
Year old, made with his own fair hands, we take
The poem 
On our shovel, beautifully and thoroughly
Mistaking the deep sense. The fairway
Out there
Waits for colossal
Sinkings.

 

Fragment

The beautiful story of the old poems,
precise breathing in and out.
And reality dancing before so many dolls,
days beaten into position
in the sour sweat of lordship.

(We turn speech around and take it home
into the promise, we aren’t going to make it,
skaters in summer, won’t get through.

After we learn to stagger then we stand 
in the caressing fame of language,
and go on talking, relaxedly we talk.)

The beautiful story of the old poems,
we know it by heart. Precise breathing in and out
the wind always drops for a moment while
the rulers hold back the air.

 

Uckermark, deeper back

This huge plain green then, green at the end
of the region, sated hanging from the far distant
mountain shoulder of the land, shaking
in the thunder of rebounding metal: in the green part
of memory the rivers and forests
go still untouched a verse long.

Quite early river crabs naturally in their red, heated
up, eels black as tar, rocking quite relaxed
in the through-flow, compliant to the knife and
gooseberries as big as heads were rawness
on the tongue, at the end of the table, at
the end of history. In the existing books still
granary of the country, going thick-skulled
for land, while the quick
flatfish rolls in the hot fat
early in the morning, its open belly fed
with heads of dill and parsley, later nettle
soups and long recollection of fish
swimming belly-up, at the end
of history, no books.

The sky above quite quiet, when I threw
the ball into it, and war, the foreign word, came through
in worn-out shoes, the ball didn’t come down again,
when quite suddenly the usual
comparisons were missing and in the river behind the house
the man was swimming, belly up and breastways
his fatherland’s medal was glinting in the sun, the
duckweed whorling was thickening between
his straddled legs, the uniform grew over and
a story began, a vomiting
lasting two days, childhood over, the foreign came.

This huge plain then in its green that
burnt, left over picture, green at the end
of the region, that grew larger over the years and
deeper back, the foreign remained.

 

From an old Poem
(on the sense of the fragment)

The storm, led on by death, always comes high-stepping
Into the mills in whose darting shadows Panza
Wraps himself as if in life.

Between the flat stones the axle writes
the rotating history of dust.

The injured angels in their beautiful fat
rub and cough.

To rest concerned on the tip of the knife.

Formerly 
snow fetched straight away the howling of wolves
in the mirror on the wall. Precise trembling. Precise
living. Precise dying.

Calligraphic OH!

Written off duration and death. Us a light luggage
one more time.

 

The migration of stones

On the sea bed the stones listen out, chewed
to shape by done with ships and
their corpses and see the old rivers coming
and have had no rest since the beginning.
Only sight.

Here: Kattegat
and Skagerrak,
driven together.
And the times don’t change.

So the stones listen on the sea bed,
chewed into shape for the trip to shore, where they
fall once again under the teeth of the wind
and have had no rest since the beginning.
But only sight.

 

The Bird Text

Across the sky as it always used to be the strokes
frozen into the white, far after them the sounds.
The earth, last region of defeat, blue-
and grey-seamed bed of ashes, from which now
individually, at times clumped by the wind
the last feathers rise up, gather over
the hasty vestige of the feet in the iron, in
the book of lava, unread, traces swim past. So
life goes. Driftsand comes into the picture
with the oilfish in the sky, behind it the shores of Palestine.
Africa’s fresh graves. Skies
standing on their heads. Very individual and sometimes
clumped the feathers
over the region, writing under the surface,
signpost for this old blind flight. The bird’s
text is ahead of my text, just a
little bit, a few eye-lengths.

 

 

Gregor Laschen (born 1941) has taught since 1971 at the university of Utrecht, in the Netherlands. His preoccupation with the landscape, as something dwarfing humans and bringing their concerns into a true perspective, may put him into relationship with Johannes Bobrowski; his concern with liberty and the oppression of language may connect him with Erich Arendt. Jammerbugt-notes. Working grounds. Mortal substance is a long poem about the threat posed by the unification of the two Germanies and by the revival of German nationalism, where abiding natural processes comment on the hysterical nature of humans in masses. The image of bird migration, in “The Bird Text”, comments on cycles also inside human beings, and takes us back to nature poets of the Thirties such as Wilhelm Lehmann – almost nothing could be less in fashion.

Andrew Duncan is the author of Anxiety Before Entering a Room and Skeleton Looking at Chinese Pictures and is a translator of German-language poetry. To see more about him, visit www.pinko.org

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