By Ulrike Almut Sandig
Translated by Jari Niesner
of the shimmer of the trees in the light I won’t
say anything, nor of the trees in themselves.
no word of the beech tree in the backyard of the doctor
whose daughter dies in the bedroom, no word
of the foxglove tree in my own yard, under which
I and you sit until late at night and do
as if the daughter of the doctor is real in the poems
I write down, only. of the shimmer of the trees
in the light I will divulge only the crowns
the crowns of the trees in the spiralling wind and
the needles, which are always green, on them. I will
do as if only the fervent, flickering light
is stitched into the crowns of the spruces, all real.
but not their close-standing trunks underneath, never
slim shadows, the wood, the trees in themselves.
Ulrike Almut Sandig was born in Großenhain (GDR) in 1979 and now lives with her family in Berlin. She started publishing her poetry by pasting poems onto lamp posts in Leipzig and spreading them on flyers and free post cards. After completing her Magister in Religious Studies and Modern Indology, she subsequently graduated from the German Creative Writing Program Leipzig. Two prose books and four volumes of her poetry have been published to date. Previous publications include radio plays and audio-books of poetry and pop music. For her performances she works with various composers and musical artists. Ulrike Almut Sandig has been invited to many international literary festivals and exchanges, been granted a literary residency in Helsinki and Sydney, and her fiction and poetry has been widely anthologized. In spring 2015 she was Writer in Residence at the University of Nottingham. In 2015 Ugly Duckling Presse (Brooklyn, USA) launched a selection of her early poems in Bradley Schmidt’s translation. In 2016 Karen Leeder’s stunning translations of Sandig’s latest poetry Thick of it won the English PEN translation Pitch and have been awarded with an PEN America/Heim Translation Fund Grant.
Jari Niesner (*1991) started writing serious poetry after he went to Tübingen to study philosophy and English in 2011. He worked as a volunteer at Arc Poetry magazine in Ottawa and at the Ottawa Little Theater in the winter of 2014/15. Then, he moved to Hamburg for two directing assistances and went on to study dramaturgy with a focus on music theatre. Productions include medea.redux (Neil LaBute), Insight (Aigerim Seilova) and Medeamaterial (Heiner Müller). As a writer, Jari presented himself, among other things, in 2015 at the cultural festival in Baden near Vienna and in 2017 at the International Summer Festival at Kampnagel. The premiere of the chamber opera Die Toten-Farce by Niklas Anczykowski at the Hamburger Sprechwerk in February 2017, for which he also provided the libretto, was his first free production as a director. In November 2017, he was a resident at the cultural center in Kražiai, Lithuania. He is currently writing a libretto for Benjamin Helmer and preparing other stage work.
