A pause, a rose, something on paper

A pause, a rose, something on paper. Lyn Hejinians “My Life”.
Forum für Übersetzungskritik mit Sonja vom Brocke und Norbert Lange

In a book I read the sentence, “the water is as blue as ink,” which made me regret that so few people use fountain pens. (39) It is impossible to return to the state of mind in which these sentences originated. (40) There was once a crooked man, who rode a crooked mile—thereafter he wrote in a crooked style characteristic of 19th-century prose, a prose of science with cumulative sentences. (48) He framed his sentences carefully. (56) To some extent, each sentence has to be the whole story. (93) In the sentence, “One turns onto 261 from 101 and follows it to the 5 point 73 mile marker, where a steep dirt road goes off to the right, up which one climbs for two miles, until one reaches a crest which is not the highest point on the ridge but from which there is for the first time a long view to both east and west, where one leaves the car and follows a path past two big oaks up a small hill for a quarter mile to the cabin,” I am the one. (114) I could feed those extra words into the sentence already there, rather than make a new one for them, make place in the given space, and that would be the same thing, making more sense. (126) In the sentence, “one climbs five worn wood stairs and turns left to the scarred open door, then crosses a hall and two feet of linoleum to the four foot formica counter with two sacks of groceries in seven steps,” I am the one. (132) To concentrate, as now, wanting to compress into a sentence whose words are a reflection of the sky in a blue lake in the Black Buttes that otherwise extensive or expansive stubbornness to which I have already referred, I hold my breath. (137) Night after night, in poetic society, line gathering and sentence harvesting. (144) A sentence is a metaphor since when. (150) They do not speak in sentences but in battlements, of pleasures and of necessities. (157) But that sentence isn’t exactly right—it’s not foreign policy but assumption to a jungle paradise. (159)

Sonja vom Brocke (*1980) schreibt Gedichte, Essays, Prosa und übersetzt Theorie und Dichtung; Studium der Philosophie, Anglistik und Germanistik in Köln, Hamburg und Paris; Dozentin am Institut für Sprachkunst (Wien); 2024 Weiskopf-Wedding-Preis der Berliner Akademie der Künste. Zuletzt erschien: „Blauer Ton. Gedichte“ (kook 2025).

Norbert Lange (*1978) ist Schriftsteller und Übersetzer, Librettist und Essayist; Gestaltung mehrerer Dossiers zum Übersetzen für die Literaturzeitschrift „Schreibheft“; Übersetzungen von Jerome Rothenberg, Charles Bernstein, George Oppen und John Ashbery; zuletzt: „Unter Orangen. Gedichte“ (wunderhorn 2021).