Happy 70th, Joachim Sartorius!
Joachim Sartorius is one of Germany’s most elegant poets and, besides diplomatic service in New York, Istanbul, Prague and Cyprus, as well as becoming director general of the Goethe Institut in 1996, he also directed the Berliner Festspiele from 2001 to 1011. Sartorius is further the editor of the Collected Works of Malcolm Lowry and William Carlos Williams and has translated, among others, John Ashbery, Wallace Stevens and ee cummings. Below, a poem of his translated by Andrew Shields & borrowed from the Poetry Foundation’s website. Below that, the Perlentaucher’s list of Satorius’ latest books. His work is in dire need of translation.
Graves
From here into the north, the ways are
dry. Yellow grass,
thirst in the roots. In the hearts.
It’s all simple, but false.
When I try to think history,
the enormous vertebrae
of the dinosaur behind the purple beeches
in Invalidenstrasse,
Bismarck in marble,
and Benn, a nameplate on Bozener, lifeless.
In the depths of the bunkers
on Potsdamer Platz in Berlin
are the shoes of Hitler’s favorite horse.
Profile of power: armor and helmet.
In our pants pockets, we crumple
the banners. Full of satisfaction
we hear the flags splinter
in the fabric’s darkness.
Don’t forget the poets’ loaded dice.
When iron rules again,
we will have to console ourselves,
adorn stones with smaller stones,
the heart with water.
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“Todesguge/Deathfugue”
“Interglacial Narrows (Poems 1915-2021)”
“Always the Many, Never the One: Conversations In-between, with Florent Toniello”
“Conversations in the Pyrenees”
“A Voice Full of Cities: The Collected Essays of Robert Kelly.” Edited by Pierre Joris & Peter Cockelbergh
“An American Suite” (Poems) —Inpatient Press
“Arabia (not so) Deserta” : Essays on Maghrebi & Mashreqi Writing & Culture
“Barzakh” (Poems 2000-2012)
“Fox-trails, -tales & -trots”
“The Agony of I.B.” — A play. Editions PHI & TNL 2016
“The Book of U / Le livre des cormorans”
“Memory Rose Into Threshold Speech: The Collected Earlier Poetry of Paul Celan”
“Paul Celan, Microliths They Are, Little Stones”
“Paul Celan: Breathturn into Timestead-The Collected Later Poetry.” Translated & with commentary by Pierre Joris. Farrar, Straus & Giroux