Tag: Lutz Seiler

The only possible way: from In Case of Loss to Pitch & Glint by Lutz Seiler (and much more)

Some writers pass through your reading life and move on, perhaps appearing by chance now and then over the years, others ignite a clear desire to read more, if not all, that you can get hold of. That might be a small library of volumes to collect, but for those of us drawn to writers in translation—writers we often discover as a direct result of following a known or trusted translator—it can mean watching and waiting for more work to slowly emerge in English.

For me, one such writer is German poet, essayist and novelist Lutz Seiler. I first encountered his poetry about two and half years ago through Alexander Booth’s translation of his 2010 collection in field latin. At the time, the only other title available was his first novel Kruso which was, when I first checked, out of stock. Yet, when UK publisher And Other Stories announced they would be publishing Seiler’s debut poetry collection, Pitch & Glint, his second novel, Star 111, and a collection of essays, In Case of Loss, in late 2023, I took note. Then, when I had the opportunity to read Star 111 this year in advance of its North American release from NYRB in October, I quickly set about acquiring his other work. And, as these things go, while reading the poetry and the essays, I was inspired to add work by two of the poets Seiler writes about or honours—but more about that later.

Born in the Thuringia region of the GDR in 1963, Seiler’s poetry is rooted in the rural landscape of his childhood, scarred by years of uranium mining, sensitive to place and relationship to family, as child and as a parent. However, unlike many writers, he had no interest in books or literature when he himself was young. He did not start reading poetry until he was completing his mandatory military service in his early twenties, having already trained as a bricklayer and carpenter. He was certainly not writing, not even jotting the odd observation down, but something was brewing. As he says in his essay “Aurora: An Attempt to Answer the Question ‘Where is the Poem Going Today?’”:

Yet a good ten years later, I wrote poems that had been, in that earlier period, when poetry did not feature in my life, gathering and storing their subject matter, their materials. Doubly hidden from me at the time, clearly the poems had been, even then, making their way towards me. What is different these days is that I have become more conscious of the signs of a poem being on its way. I am aware of what situations, materials and substances it might respond to, what it is likely to ingest—for later use.

For a poet who came to literature somewhat unexpectedly, Seiler’s writing about writing, and about the poetic art and process is excellent, presumably of interest to other poets, but also, and perhaps more critically, for those of us who enjoy poetry but sometimes feel inadequate to examine a poem without a strong literary vocabulary and the requisite coursework (assumed to be) required to read and write it. In Case of Loss contains several essays about the work of other poets. One, Peter Huchel (1903–1981), was new to me. I was aware that Seiler is the custodian of the Huchel House in Wilhelmhorst near Berlin, but knew nothing of Huchel himself, one of the most an important German poets of the post-war era who ended up running afoul of the government of the GDR and was eventually allowed to migrate to the West. The title essay is an account of Seiler’s first impressions of the house itself after breaking in with Huchel’s widow’s blessing and his coming into possession of a notebook the poet kept all his life in which he recorded images, metaphors, lines, and tentative sketches, all categorized by theme. The manner in which Seiler traces some of the formative elements that will, often years later, appear as shadows or echoes in a finished piece is fascinating and a testament to the gestation period a poem can have. Of course, I wanted to read more, so I sought out These Numbered Days, Huchel’s 1972 collection, released in 2019 in an award winning English translation by Martin Crucefix (who is also the translator of In Case of Loss). His poetry often draws on the landscape of his youth for atmosphere frequently in concert with mythological, historical, and Biblical images to create crisp, even chilling poems. Although they are generally spare, one can sense that they have been carefully shaped and honed over time, each word or phrase carrying much weight, very often political—something confirmed by both Seiler’s insights, Crucefix’s notes, and Karen Leeder’s Introduction.

At the edge of the village the wind
flung its ton of frost
against the wall.
The moon lowered a fibrous gauze
on the wounds of the rooftops.

Slowly the emptiness of night descended,
filled with the howling of dogs.
Defeat sank
into the frozen veins of the country,
into the leather-upholstered seats
of old Kresmers in the coach sheds,
between the horse tack and grey straw
where children slept.

(Peter Huchel — from “Defeat”)

In addition to an unusual back to front reading of a book by Ernst Meister, the other poet Seiler devotes an essay to is Jürgen Becker. I had already read Becker’s fragmentary poetic novel, The Sea in the Radio, but a dedication to the poet (who very recently passed away) in Seiler’s collection Pitch & Glint, called to mind a collection of selected shorter poems, Blackbirds in September, which I was able to track down and read alongside the essay “’The Post-War Era Never Ends’: On Jürgen Becker.” Here Seiler takes a more personal approach acknowledging Becker’s influence and his own friendship with the older established poet. He traces his own process of learning to read and appreciate Becker’s poetry. Born in Cologne in 1932, Becker was a member of Group 47, the organization formed to promote young German writers after the war. He employed an experimental, open form of writing with an emphasis on landscape and the persistence of memories of the war in German land and history. His language tends to be spare and his poems have a calm, light feel, but that is only the surface.

But the landscape is rather quiet.
Invisible the destruction, if in fact
there is destruction.

And the time is passed
which the subsequent, the subsequent time produced.

But you never speak of Now.

Probably in the summer. At that time of year
we remember. Fence posts follow the paths,
or turned around, all of it belonging
to the landscape . . . who owns it? The landscape
leads into landscapes, from the visible ones
to the invisible ones which await us.

(Jürgen Becker — from “A Provisional Topography”/translated by Okla Elliott)

Other essays of particular interest in this collection (which gathers a selection of Seiler’s nonfiction from across twenty-five years) include “Illegal Exit, Gera (East),” a return in memory and in more recent years to a landscape that is being transformed and remediated, and “The Tired Territory” which begins as an exploration of the history of uranium mining in his home state, but turns into a meditation on the distinct poetic sensibilities that he had to define for himself after what he describes as the difficulties encountered in his “brief  career as a doctoral student in literary studies.” The categories that hold his fascination are intangible: heaviness, absence, tiredness. Understanding this for himself is essential:

Writing poetry: a difficult way to live and, at the same time, the only possible way.

One aspect of all this is that the poem engages specifically with what cannot be verbalised. The mute and non-paraphrasable and its unique, existential origin: the particular qualities of any poem arise from these two subtly interwoven elements. The poem travels towards the unsayable, yet this is a movement without an end.

It is not only the reading and writing of poetry that slips into Seiler’s essays—to a greater or lesser extent—but the final piece tackles his slow transition to prose. “The Soggy Hems of His Soviet Trousers: Image as a Way into the Narration of the Past” chronicles the year he moved with his wife and children to Rome for a period of dedicated novel writing. He dragged along boxes and boxes of books, research and paraphernalia he had gathered in preparation for the writing of his first novel. He’d planned to draw heavily on his own experiences moving to Berlin in the aftermath of the fall of the Wall and the more he describes his intentions, the more it sounds like what would eventually become his second novel, Star 111. But it’s only 2011 and our would-be novelist is staring at an empty page day after day. It is not until he finally gets out of his room, into the city, that everything changes. A suggestion that he write a short story set in a location he had not previously considered soon conjures forth an image so strong that ten pages become 500 and he has what will ultimately become his first novel Kruso.

Finally, if I return now to own Seiler’s poetry, in field latin and his debut collection from 2000, Pitch & Glint, more recently released in Stefan Tobler’s translation, many of the allusions in individual poems become clearer in light of having read his essays and the autobiographically influenced novel Star 111. But neither is necessary. Seiler’s poetry has a natural appeal. I wrote about in field latin here, and this earlier work (ten years separate the two volumes) is likewise rooted in the East Germany of the poet’s youth—the wildness, the strict schools, the land with its slag heaps and detritus of mining. Yet, for Seiler, the sound and rhythm are critical, as is the construction of images that move beyond the mere biographical. Darkness, frost, echoing footsteps recur. You can feel the chill:

wind came up the border
.   dogs were rising on
their delicate branching skeletons

whistled a bewitching witless
wanderlied. the snow came in
& tore the iron

curtain of their eyes, a
blunted gaze towards the hinterland
and made plain that we do.

(— from “in the east of the land”)

Seiler’s characteristic use of lower case letters and ampersands (especially striking in German where nouns are capitalized) adds to the mood and intensity of his poetry. One of the blurbs on the back of Pitch & Glint describes it as “a real-world Stalker with line breaks.” That captures the feel well.

The beauty of reading a number of works—nonfiction, fiction and poetry— that intersect like this is that each individual experience is heightened. Seiler’s poetry and fiction easily stand on their own, but the essays add an extra dimension. To be fair, one’s enjoyment of this collection may depend on whether one is a poet, or interested in poetry and the process of poetic inspiration/creation, or familiar with his other work. Nonetheless, his essays are thoughtful with a very strong personal flow and reflect the mind and experiences of a man for whom poetry is central to his very existence—in his memories, in his specific creative pursuits, and even in the everyday act of taking his daughter to dance lessons or son to football practice.

In Case of Loss and Pitch & Glint by Lutz Seiler are translated from the German by Martin Crucefix and Stefan Tobler respectively and published by And Other Stories. These Numbered Days by Peter Huchel is translated from the German by Martin Crucefix with and Introduction by Karen Leeder and published by Shearsman Books, and Blackbirds in September by Jürgen Becker is translated from the German by Okla Elliott and published by Black Lawrence Press.

Other titles mentioned and reviewed earlier on this site are Star 111 (And Other Stories/NYRB Imprints) and in field latin (Seagull Books), both by Lutz Seiler, translated from the German by Tess Lewis and Alexander Booth respectively.

If such a thing is possible: Star 111 by Lutz Seiler

Maybe at twenty-six he was already too old to seriously go about becoming a poet.

The fall of the German Democratic Republic was rapid and unexpected. As other communist regimes in Eastern Europe began to disintegrate, the East German government tried to maintain control, but in early November 1989 a mistaken announcement led to the sudden opening of border crossings through which hundreds of thousands of East German residents would soon pass. This is where Star 111 by German poet and writer Lutz Seiler begins.

Twenty-six year old Carl Bischoff has just been summoned from Leipzig to his home town Gera in the state of Thuringia. The telegram, dated November 10, reads “we need help please do come immediately,” but as he waits for the train, he has no inclination that all the childhood securities he once imagined were unassailable are about to be upended. His parents, Inge and Walter (Carl has long addressed them by their first names), waste no time announcing their intentions. They are going to take advantage of the crumbling state of the GDR and cross the border. Now. This is, they tell him, a dream they have long held and, should the precious opportunity be short lived, they plan to leave promptly. They will head for the refugee camp at Giessen, and then split up to better their chances of finding suitable lodgings and employment on the other side. Carl’s assignment is to stay behind and look after the apartment. He will be the rearguard. But left behind, Carl finds he is at a loss, confused by this sudden inversion of what he imagines the parent-child dynamic should be and worried about his middle-aged parents who by rights should be the ones at home worrying about him.

His age is critical. Carl will repeatedly question what it means to be in his mid-twenties as if there’s some kind of high-watermark that he’s worried he has already missed. He has completed military service, learned a trade, and spent a few years at college, but he is without direction. His dream is to become a poet. Yet, when he is called home, he is apparently recovering from a breakup and a breakdown—something he alludes to but does not discuss because there’s no time. His parents’ departure is so immediate and unnerving that it entirely usurps whatever crash course he might have been on. But, even if it leaves him temporarily unmoored in a world that is rapidly changing, it does offer him a chance to chart a new direction for himself. After a few weeks in Gera, trying to keep a low profile while working his way through the preserves in the cellar, Carl is beginning to bottom out. So he loads up his father’s beloved Zhiguli with tools, a sleeping bag, and some provisions, and heads to Berlin. He has no particular destination in mind. He is simply following a fantasy founded on little more than a few poems set in that mythical city, seeking, as he will later describe it, “the passage to a poetic existence.”

Arriving in East Berlin, Carl tries to get his bearings, picks up the odd unofficial taxi fare, and sleeps in his car. But, with winter settling in it’s a bleak—and cold—existence. Before long he falls ill. When, freezing and feverish, he happens to find his way through the rear door of a cinema, he suddenly steps into another world. So to speak. He finds himself in the company of an odd collection of individuals, led, it would appear, by a charismatic man they call the Shepherd—the owner or companion of a goat named Dodo—who nurse him through his illness and welcome him to their breakfast table, impressed in no small part by his car with its trunk full of tools. His tools?

“No, no Zhiguliman, you don’t have to explain anything here. More than a few people are on the move in this freshly liberated city. The whole world is being parcelled up anew these days—but if you’re looking for something permanent. . .”

Carl is not certain what he is looking for, or what something permanent might even mean. If stability cannot be assured in unstable times, he wants whatever it is the handful of men and women around him seem to have—community. And it seems to be on offer:

It was as if he were already part of a pack, as if he were of the same breed. Everything seemed already embedded according to a long-standing plan and leading toward the only logical conclusion. It was a strange feeling. It was the presentiment of a legend (if there is such a thing, thought Carl), on the point of taking him to its profound, all-embracing “once upon a time.”

It is, in fact, just the beginning. He settles into a spartan empty apartment and soon finds a place among a group of misfits, artists, and anarchists who are systematically occupying abandoned buildings, hoping to take advantage of the shifting political and social terrain to craft a kind of anti-capitalist utopia amid the ruins of a damaged urban landscape before others come to reclaim it. His bricklaying skills secure his place.

Over the months that follow, Carl will oversee renovations, begin to work in the Assel, the  café the Shepherd sets up, and embark on a romantic relationship with, much to his surprise and naïve delight, a woman from his hometown. Meanwhile, the progress of his parents is revealed regularly, but only insofar as his mother’s letters allow him to it piece together through what is shared, or more critically, what is left unsaid. For months after he had dropped them off at the border, there had been an unsettling silence. Then, once he has relocated to Berlin, the missives begin to arrive, secretly rerouted through the post office in Gera. For a long time Inge and Walter are apart (“separately after Giessen”, as planned), and the latter’s whereabouts are unknown. On her own, Inge proves to be remarkably self-sufficient, working and making social connections until Walter is finally found and the couple are reunited. From that point on, Carl’s father will rely on his computer programming skills to build toward the shared future they envision. Inge’s cryptic comments and idiosyncratic expressions imply that there is a greater game afoot, but Carl is being kept in the dark. But then, many months will pass before he finally confesses that he has abandoned his post as rearguard.

As Carl constructs a life for himself in Berlin, building relationships with others, testing his emotional boundaries, and tracing a regular path through the streets of his dilapidated neighbourhood, one central focus drives his days—the need to write, to dedicate at least some time to poetry. With a little promising feedback, he fantasizes about the day he will publish a book of his own poems. Yet, with all the uncertainty (and opportunity) that a rapidly evolving Germany promises, for Carl writing is a discipline that exists on its own ground away from it all. He is a purist, not a documentarian:

So-called reality and its abundance (“the most exciting times of our lives,” as everyone was claiming)—it would never have occurred to him to write about it, not even in a journal, never mind that he clearly wasn’t in any state to keep a proper journal (with regular entries). The main question was whether or not the next line would work. The next line and its sound preoccupied Carl, not the demise of the country outside his window. If the poem didn’t succeed, then life wouldn’t either.

It’s not an easy path to follow, but it’s one that sustains him when everything falls into place  and one that devastates him when life runs off the rail and words fail to come.

Decidedly autobiographical in nature, Star 111 is a tale of self-discovery, a portrait of a young man seeking to define his identity as an adult and as a poet against a backdrop of rapid change when, for a moment, all the old rules have been suspended before inevitably being rewritten and reshaped by capitalist interests. Seiler’s limited third person narrative with its frequent parenthetical refrains and clarifications, captures Carl’s insecurity and self-doubt as he navigates this strange terrain. It also facilitates the integration of a wide range of eccentric characters: members of the Shepherd’s “pack,” his neighbours, co-workers and customers at the Assel, his lover and her young son, and the many people he encounters vicariously through his mother’s regular updates. Essentially, then, this is a novel about family—natal, accidental, and imagined—and the forces that gather to form and inform one’s independent being. The “Star 111” of the title refers to the popular transistor radio that was the centrepiece of Carl’s family life when he was a child. The memories of it that haunt him reflect the strange longing that tends to set upon us when life conspires to force us to accept that not only are we truly grown up (whether or not we feel like it), but that our parents are independent adults too. As Carl spends a lot of time re-evaluating his relationship with Inge and Walter, he will wonder whether he ever really knew them at all. Or they him.

Lutz Seiler is, of course, like his protagonist, a poet first and foremost. This can be seen in the way his chapter titles are picked up in the text, often in the closing line, but more explicitly in his attention to the sounds and the rhythms of language. Translator Tess Lewis—who also translated his first novel Kruso which she describes as forming a sort of diptych with Star 111—writes in her Afterword of the challenge presented by his “ability to capture the minutiae and texture of a vanished world in rhythmic, lyrical prose.” She pays particular attention to the various registers in the original reflecting the different tenors of West and East German bureaucracy, varying speech patterns associated with social class, and the lines of poetry by a host of other poets that echo through Carl’s imagination. When words with multiple meanings afford the author an onomatopoeic flexibility that cannot be fully replicated, Lewis found she sometimes had to make alternate word choices, knowing the full affect could not always be maintained. This is not a loss noticed in the English reading though. The sense that this is a moment in time that will not last long and will never come again is captured so vividly through Carl’s adventures (and misadventures), not to mention those of his parents, that it feels, above all, like a privilege to be along for the ride.

Star 111 by Lutz Seiler is translated from the German by Tess Lewis and published by New York Review Books in North America and by And Other Stories in the UK.

you still don’t know / that you exist, & yet: in field latin by Lutz Seiler

i have said
something, sung without
my hands: i have

smoked up all the shadows.
lungward i took these shafts to where
the empty space begins the rustling
.       out along the paling
towards the railway cars—seventeen years

before the text.

(from “sentry duty”)

Poet and novelist Lutz Seiler was born in 1963, in Gera, in the state of Thuringia in the GDR and, like many writers from the former East Germany, the arts, as a career, were not on his radar when he was growing up. He was expected to acquire a solid, practical trade and complete his mandatory military service—that was the accepted foundation required to be a productive member of society. And so he did, training as a mason and a carpenter, but during his period of service he began to read poetry, kindling an interest in reading and writing that would ultimately shape his future. He went on to study literature and is now widely recognized for his poetry and prose. German nature poet Peter Huchel (1903–1981) was an early influence on his own writing and, fittingly, in time he would become the custodian of the Peter Huchel Museum in Wilhelmshorst, thus carrying his distinct variation on the same literary tradition into the twenty-first century.

Natural themes and a strong sense of place mark Seiler’s work. This can be seen clearly in his collection in field latin, Alexander Booth’s thoughtful translation of his 2010 publication, im felderlatein. Rooted in the bucolic landscapes of his home state which, prior to reunification, was situated in the southwest corner of the GDR, many of his poems elicit the shifting moods of the borderlands, adding a certain layer of ambiguity to his precise, attentive lyric poetry.

within the fields’ rippling script the glimmer
of a few bricks, some tufts of grass & the small
.       rests of bones: how

it all lies together in the end.
arise, ascent & so there was
a lot of signalling, radioing, failure
about my feet, step after step.

(from “what I possessed”)

The poems and sequences in this volume tend to draw inspiration from memories of childhood, family and the peculiarities of rural life. Seiler’s poetic form is spare, stripped down, details carefully selected and characteristically written with ampersands and without capitalization. This style is particularly affecting in German where nouns are typically capitalized, but in both languages the appearance on the page adds a hush to the sound and feel of his poems.

the shadows, aged early, but we
remember: homeward, lonely
simply walking
step by step recording
the silent outline. for

the shadows, at the beginning,
were the small, black units of pay
a currency for which
the creator interrupted his
.        work.

(from “the very first affection”)

Although Seiler’s poetic vision is clearly informed by his own unique political and literary inheritance—as much as any writer’s inevitably is—the deeply personal energy that animates his sparse, well-framed images invites recognition. It speaks to the universality of human experience. We are at once acutely aware of, and haunted by, the world around us. Every environment harbours its own ghosts. One of my favourite poems, “do you see the redbrick moon” evokes the image of an electrical lane. I once saw these parades of pylons marching across the landscape as an invasive species, but have learned to see them as a necessary presence, another creature that one might as well embrace as I do the line that runs between my apartment and the forest:

do you see the redbrick moon
above the eiffel towers? below that
the quacking, magnetic garbling & time
within the frogs’ legs humming?

this is the old high-voltage lane. it
holds the moistness to the poles, holds
the fog & supports it. soft
blue shadows envelop all, a spider

hands always its threads & floats
as if electrified. dreams unearthed.

Alexander Booth’s excellent translation allows Seiler’s poems room to breathe, preserving his unusual syntax and fine-boned imagery and emotion. As a result, in field latin offers a vital introduction for English language readers to the work of this important contemporary German poet.

in field latin by Lutz Seiler is translated by Alexander Booth and published by Seagull Books.