On Translating Jan Wagner

Jan Wagner and I have collaborated on translations of his books since 2009. The result was The Art of Topiary (Milkweed Editions, 2017), which appeared just before he was awarded the Georg Büchner Prize, a distinction ranking him among writers in the German language like Ingeborg Bachmann, Max Frisch, Günter Grass, and Paul Celan, fellow recipients of the honor. Our first efforts took shape slowly, earnestly, stopping and starting, like learning to swim. Wagner drew up a formal grid—always at the top of the page—and below that a literal version, followed by connotative notes. The attention to form was paramount, requiring that I reinvent idioms, retool alliterative patterns (“bindweed” had to morph into “clover,” to spin into “clever,” “over and over,” and “cleave”), add language (for example, “precarious”) to satisfy irreplaceable rhyme-words (“buphagus”). Though he writes free verse and prose poetry, Wagner composes largely in received forms: sapphic stanzas, sestinas, rhymed quatrains, and sonnets. All the same, the poems resist their containers—words chop suddenly in half, lines revolt against their boundaries. The poems in this selection come from our new collaboration, Wisp.

Wagner’s "tires" (rhymed sestets) and “portrait of the rain” (free verse), presented us with similar challenges of past years, though our strokes had grown more confident in the choppy waters of what Octavio Paz called “the immobility of the sign,” the peculiar problem of timing when translating poetry. In “tires,” the immoveable words were difficult to rhyme, resulting in creative responses such as “staunch” and “paunch” for the literal meaning, “splendid” and “belly.”  Thanks to happy accidents of the Latinate, some fell neatly into place: “borelli”[osis] and “pirelli.” Free verse offered other challenges, perhaps harder to navigate because there wasn't a clear hierarchy in the outcome. “portrait of the rain” seeks to capture the spray of language and imagery around the rain, the world-pollen carried in each droplet, the soliloquies of the trees. Always after swimming with his poems, I come away slightly breathless, my hair a bit more green, my eyes more open to startling. Wisp was completed in the summer of 2023 in Berlin, where Wagner has lived for nearly three decades.