Andra Schwarz, trans. Caroline Wilcox Reul

from In the morning we are glass

 

There are no pictures of this place just landscape
traced in gray and signs that warn
the old sit in the village stiff necked & tight in the lung
off to the side the young play backgammon
toss the dice for luck: there’s nothing to be had here
except the view of the river’s rise into the mountains
greenhouses scattered fruit trees scarlet over the meadows
beyond them the BORDER no-man’s-land militias
everything ends here, even our view
we close our eyes and return
to the village to the others behind us wind sweeps

From the river we reach the nahle
where the water is shallow & bright
seven year scars of thatch spread out
under our feet braids of gravel
by the running yard nature connected
right through the middle the hauling of freight
five times daily signals sound trains plow past
into the blue a swallow veers
it flees from the downwind what had been

Words disappear from the houses here
to the tongue the old remain baba and šeda
vacant sounds in the mouth no one understands
the symbols on the signs anymore sorbian names
we count them off brĕtnja, michałki for years
we’ve been walking along streets we don’t know
but sometimes on paths through the marshland
to the river bed of the elster they ripple out
in our heads circle back to you

You come from the luminous figure of birches
after their stand in march bark youthful again
sap high in the treetops above the cottongrass
stars in the background the mountains of kamenz
this view will remain at the center of the land’s
topography it takes seed in the peat
of your cells decayed ground it pools there
a vision of light from the past instilling itself
in your tracks a fracturing: where everything clouds

Look around you do you still recognize it three
mile length of forest the curl of the road cords
of coal & sulfur back then it was lines of
boundary stones & wire that curtain the view
the net patches itself together in the ground
with a different stitch abandoned graves & holes
the wall descends on all sides everywhere naked
ears & eyes under asbestos the dust of four
decades the stopwatch still ticking behind ribs
bugs hide and suck in the quiet at you

Translator’s Note

Andra Schwarz was born in 1982 and raised in Upper Lusatia in Saxony, Germany, where, as a child, she experienced the fall of the Berlin Wall as well as the upheaval preceding that event and its transformational aftermath. She is of Sorbian descent, a Slavic ethnic minority that has held onto its languages and cultural expression throughout centuries of alternating hostility and support by various governments but is now facing the twin dangers of coal policy and urbanization. Her work reflects this (dis)connection between land, culture and self.

The speaker in Schwarz’s poetry recounts timeless and silent landforms that are plundered by the modern world but remain resilient, a quality the lyric “I” seeks. Birches, bogs, and rivers hold memory that eludes the speaker. Time flows with the land, manifesting itself as scars of thatch, a downwind, a too-deep bog, the view of mountains and stars, and resists human industrialization merely by waiting it out or intertwining itself into works of engineering.

The lyric “I,” however, is not so lucky. Their loss of cultural identity and homeland through pit mining, deforestation, population drain and ethnic marginalization, is not recoverable in these pieces. Schwarz writes that birds can “fly without forfeit,” but to the speaker, flying means giving up something of one’s essence, yet clinging to what’s been lost results in untenable stagnation. The landscape, though beloved, seems to suffocate the speaker through its ability to endure and as a reminder of what was, where the speaker as a searching presence can’t quite step out into the uncertainty of the future.