Aktuelle Rezension
Whoever Drowned Here: New and Selected Poems by Max Sessner
Translated by Francesca Bell
Red Hen Press, 2023. 94 pages.
Reviewed by Lee Rossi
Once upon a time many years ago I taught in Germany, not far from the Harz Mountains, haunt of the Brothers Grimm and Heinrich Heine. To my surprise my students in the Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik admired Charles Bukowski above all other American poets. He seemed to be the only English-language poet they enjoyed reading. Which, when I thought about his straightforward narratives, demotic language, and German heritage, made a lot of sense. He was the American Brecht, without the politics. They also liked Hemingway, ease of reading being an important qualifier for transnational popularity.
One feels a similar undertow in Whoever Drowned Here, Francesca Bell’s excellent translation of the German poet Max Sessner. In an interview with Sessner she says, “I found a great number of [contemporary German] poets writing in what seemed to me to be a very vague, abstract sort of style. It’s a style I am not very drawn to, frankly, and it is a style that I despaired of being able to translate well.” Finally, she chose Sessner, after resonating with his straightforward, colloquial style. But there were also similarities in their backgrounds: neither of them has formal literary training nor an academic affiliation. And indeed Bell’s translations are as straightforward, colloquial, and pungent as Sessner’s German.
At times these poems remind me of Charles Simic or Thomas Lux. But Sessner also demonstrates an imaginative freedom I associate with Wyslawa Szymborska. Evidence of a surrealistic bent abounds; the reader encounters dreams, fairy tales, and myth. As Sessner declares in the interview with Bell: “I always imagine that the objects that surround us daily lead a life of their own. Very philosophical, very tolerant. That they would like to understand us exactly as we would like to understand them.”
Sessner has written three books, each of which is sampled in this translation. Newer poems complete the selection. One senses growth in the handling of themes, in the clarity of expression, but high points abound throughout.
“Our Fathers,” from Kitchens and Trains, Sessner’s first book, sketches the queasy relationship between fathers and their children. “Our fathers die and grow back in / the front yards of our houses,” he tells us as matter-of-factly as if he were reporting the weather. But these are restless, aggressive spirits: “bring us with you when you wake / they whisper and we thrash in our sleep / and start to sweat.” Aggressive, and also possessive, the speaker sensing internal movements not entirely his own: “on the way to work later . . . a sound of steps in us / a slamming of doors within.” It’s all a bit creepy.
“A Tidy Guest,” another poem from Kitchens and Trains, seems at first headed in a different direction. The speaker receives a visit from Death, who, somewhat unexpectedly, is cheerful, friendly, and generous, and yet the speaker feels eerily transformed. No longer comfortable in his own skin, his body no longer belongs to him: “like a borrowed coat [it] doesn’t quite / go with your shoes.”
Simple words, yet the simplicity is deceptive. If anything, it invites the reader to ponder the ultimate meaning(s) of the piece. These poems are short, requiring usually no more than a minute or two to consume, yet they echo in consciousness (and in the subconscious) spilling and spreading meaning in multiple directions.
Later poems often start with the ordinary and familiar and then veer into mystery. The speaker walks into his “Childhood Room” only to discover that “whoever cleans / here feeds this / room with time,” a proposition that invites puzzlement and interrogation. A colloquy with his childhood bed ensues: “lovely to see you,” the bed tells him, “but / is it really you” and the poet asks himself, “how does one explain to a / bed that one thing leads / to another when one / least expects it”. We notice how the constant enjambment re-inforces the poem’s sense that time is running away from the poet. And in fact, the absence of punctuation and the frequent enjambment create a sense of weightlessness in the reader, a sense that one never lands where one expects to land. Moon weight, not earth weight.
Death is everywhere in these poems, but also love. In “While Leaving the Café” we learn how much our things love us:
The girl takes
the umbrella or
does the umbrella take
the girl
lead her out into the wet
evening and
touch her softly on the hand . . .
the wind plays with the
girl’s hair
and the umbrella is speechless
with joy
Speechless? Of course, the umbrella is always without speech, but how often is it with joy? If we think on it, we realize that someone might have given the girl the umbrella, someone whose giving included at least some love.
Everything is loving, if seen from the viewpoint of love. Whoever Drowned Here offers a representative body of the work of an important German poet, a poet who risks (literary) obscurity by refusing to be obscure, by writing for the Everyperson in all of us. And we can thank Francesca Bell for offering English-speaking readers the opportunity to ponder and enjoy a writer who plumbs the depths of everyday life.
