Editor's Note
There’s an Eisensteinian effect in Helminger’s poetry. Landscapes move like a bird’s eye, cutting abruptly to extreme close-ups of conversations or other scenes. Whereas the events are real and concrete, and the imagery evocative, the poems point to something beyond themselves, including to their own dissolution. Helminger calls it ‘synapse zapping’ to express how the poems recreate the moment of experience. New thoughts begin in the middle of a line, the jumps marked like a sentence. The translations leverage the style of the German poems. A good example is the poem “Trip to Greece” where enjambment is doing what is more frequently possible in the German i.e. each line has significance while the sentence maintains its integrity.
— Mani Rao
The Bombay Literary Magazine
Translator's Note
Guy Helminger’s volumes of poetry display conceptual continuity. They build on one another. In the beginning, the recreation of a moment of experience and the associated process of thought formation took centre stage. But in subsequent books, the poems increasingly moved towards the ultimate outcome of this “synapse zapping” and, in the most recent volumes, are wholly devoted to the fully accomplished outcome of this reconstruction. This results in verses replete with haunting imagery which, despite the concrete nature of events, move within a field of intuition and hence point beyond themselves to established references as well as to spaces as yet unknown. This poetry is volatile, yet also narrational and balladic. But at its heart is always the haptics of experience. The finding of language always incorporates its dissolution, because what is known encompasses so much that is unknown, and that, in turn, must now be explored in a new step. Or as Guy Helminger puts it: “The crazy thing about poetry is its reflectiveness”.
— Delphine Lettau
The Bombay Literary Magazine
What approaches
is a towering summer with trees
on the bell mound that people here
call Saturday choir The well-hung
light in the barns winds its way into the
leftover hay flickering with forgotten
opinions West of the village the woods
the furrowed thinking of the tree bark
and further on the town with the triggering
moon liquids that we drink in our sleep
with their humming for land
At the stable door towards evening this
boy flutters with the wind-pale hope of his
parents like an alien grain planted too deep
in the field In front of the shelf with the
book of poetry he supposedly asked his father
“Which of these verses are we?”
One with silence full of cashew nuts and
the rustle of rarely worn
clothes Or your livestock has bolted
to where the cinema grows into the landscape
I might well have answered
because I was at peace with the evenings that quietly
make off into the bushes
Purchase
There was crunching when she broke the bread
The sparrows had withdrawn
yet now our bicycles stood in front
the door chains filled with landscapes From
them the days we had travelled
turned like obscene ink sketches of our
devotion Since we found a shell at that
bakery we have believed in
the water inside us in the spray like
icing sugar on our heartburn
that the pain is good for something
even if only to sing psalms She
however speaks our names like hot
pastries and we feel the oven inside
us that fires ceramic ashtrays from
all the troublesome souls The very
day after, the temp raises a
Snow White cake as if remembering
her first communion Beneath our
gaze: the dry eternity of a
shaven armpit
Love Poem
It is loud in the economy of the stars
with rims and wind turbines on the shelves
of the night We were lying in our bed at
eye level with the cats My heart
was shaped like a mountain on its slope
a cherry plum tree like a woman in a
polka-dot dress What sounded as if she were laughing
was a fake excerpt from the world of birds
The dunnocks by contrast sang the things
between the birches: sound nomads that
clung to the leaves and banished
danger With a cloth of field we dried
our bodies and grew into the weary
year outside the rooms I spoke
to her in my sleep so she would not
become the house in which we lived
In the morning the cherry trees cited
the colour of her lipstick The wasps
stupid as a box of rocks she had to remove
from her mouth at breakfast
Trip to Greece
The house hosted two cats with
fur patterns showing the portraits of the deceased
owners In her opinion that was a bad
omen in mine art The olive trees too
divided us the gill smile of the
trained sales assistant wrapping the mackerel
in tales of the weather
the pomegranates that hung biblically in the
chatty afternoons and were to her liking
Once she threw a Coke bottle
at me Such romantic skirmishes leave
unexploded ordinance and we promptly threatened
to internalise took on the colour of the beach
beneath our bodies grew dark
as the sunsets of cinnamon and
petroleum On the nineteenth day a
seagull with two tiny beats of its wing drove
the shard-smooth silence back into the sea
To this day we wait beside our wishes
that stand shelved like atlases for a
repetition tinted plastic glasses
both drinkers I would say
I have never been to Tokyo
My hair is the colour of
pickled ginger my skin pale
as rice paper
when the wind thrums over it
in the lightly lignified shrubs
Mishima on the bamboo shelf and the
flower bed laid out as a haiku
within reach
Ever since I bought a samurai sword
well-cut Japanologists have
shown an interest in me
Acknowledgments
Image credits: Lauren Litwa. Night Barn Painting, Oil on Wood. 101.6 W x 76.2 H x 5.1 D cm.
Lauren Litwa likes to paint barns. It will be recalled that E. B. White also made the barn one of the central metaphors of Charlotte’s Web. The novel ends with a recap of all the things that can be found in a barn, and ends with: “It was the best place to be,” thought Wilbur, this warm delicious cellar, with the garrulous geese, the changing seasons, the heat of the sun, the passage of swallows, the nearness of rats, the sameness of sheep, the love of spiders, the smell of manure, and the glory of everything.” The glory of everything. Lauren Litwa’s painting and Guy Helminger’s poems both reminded us of this truth whose telling lies just beyond the speaking tongue. We felt they belonged together.
Author | GUY HELMINGER
Guy Helminger was born in 1963 in Esch / Alzette (Luxemburg) and studied German Literature and Philosophy in Luxemburg, Heidelberg and Cologne. Helminger is the author of several books in prose, poetry, travel journals, books for children, screenplays, and plays for radio and theater. He co-hosts the “Literary Salon International” in Cologne, where he lives.
Translator | DELPHINE LETTAU
Delphine Lettau is a bilingual dual national who attended university in Cologne, Oxford (LMH) and London, reading English language and literature and general linguistics. Following a brief stint teaching English language and literature to university level, she worked in BBC radio (London) as a presenter, script writer and producer and in TV for Deutsche Welle, Transtel and WDR (Cologne). Her freelance translation career took her briefly to L.A., where she worked on film scripts in pre-production. Generally, the focus is on the spoken word and (especially Luxembourgish) poetry, with more recent ventures into children’s books and academic studies.