Daniela Danz and I have corresponded since 2015, when I first began translating her work. While our exchanges were initially practical or logistical in nature, we started engaging in conversations about social and poetic questions when I’d ask her in the course of translation about places, say, or regionalisms in her poems. When I first met her in 2017, on a visit to her home in Kranichfeld (a small town in the Weimarer Land District of Thüringia), Daniela and I also discussed some of her translations of my poems. In the past couple of years we’ve also met in Germany to speak more formally about poetry and translation: in 2022 at JUNIVERS, an annual meeting in Berlin for translators of German poetry sponsored by the German TOLEDO-Programm, and in May 2024 at the University of Bamberg at a two-day colloquium on Danz’s work to conclude her semester as the 2024 Bamberg professor of poetics. This is the first time we’ve had the opportunity to capture one of these poet-translator conversations for an English-speaking audience. The interview was conducted from May to July 2024 in German, over email; I then translated the conversation into English. While our exchange here focuses on the four poems from her 2009 Pontus published in translation in the Summer 2024 issue of The Georgia Review, Danz talks about ideas and themes that thread through her work as a whole.
Monika Cassel
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Monika Cassel (MC): Pontus was published in 2009, but the setting and subjects of the book are regions constantly in the news today. Can you say something about the original impetus behind writing a book about the relationship between Europe and the East by focusing especially on the Hellespont, especially for readers who might not otherwise be familiar with your work, and reflect a little on how you view the book now—are the perspectives the book maps still current today?
Daniela Danz (DD): My first book, Serimunt (2004), the book I wrote before Pontus, was concerned with the relationship between East and West Germany and the underlying ideas of West and East. As I was working on Serimunt, 9/11 and its aftermath exploded into the collective consciousness, and I understood that my questions about East and West were not just German questions but were in fact global questions. Or rather, the main question that I began to ask myself at that time is what Europe means to me and what it doesn’t mean to me. And so I began to travel Europe’s borders. To the west, the south, and the north those borders are very clearly defined by water. But where to the east and to the southeast can and do we locate Europe’s borders, where does Europe end? So I traveled to Ukraine, to Crimea, to visit a submarine harbor that was open to the public for the very first time, which had been constructed to defend the Soviet Union in a potential Third World War. And in Crimea I was amazed to find that my English skills didn’t really get me anywhere, because nobody wanted to respond to someone who was speaking English, while on the other hand my Russian skills from my German Democratic Republic school days got me pretty far. And then, in western Ukraine, the opposite was true. In “Album amicorum” in Pontus there’s that sentence, “danilo1 whom we pull up by the arms so he can swing up while russia hangs at his legs.” When you read this sentence today, it’s even more painful than it was when I wrote it—Crimea’s political and geographical position, which seemed to me then to be a crucial stress test, has now become an actual point of rupture. To map the boundaries of Europe in the book I also incorporated a chapter with poems on Israel and Palestine, and the West Bank in particular. And you know, Heiner Müller2 once said, in 1989, that Europe is deathly boring. He meant this as a critique of capitalism—as part of a larger systemic critique. At that time, at the end of the eighties, he thought everything would become homogeneous, because capitalism has a leveling effect. But Europe does in fact have borders, and in the current political context, when you attempt to define where and what Europe’s borders are, it almost feels wrong to repeat his words—because today the idea of Europe and the project of the European Union are also tied to the defense of democracy, which isn’t deathly boring at all: people are dying at and beyond Europe’s borders where democracy is threatened. Europe is now in a different place than it was in 2009 when Pontus was published, but the questions that wouldn’t let me go at the time still preoccupy me.
MC: Regarding those poems about Crimea and Ukraine in Pontus (and in your most recent book, Wilderness, as well):can you share something about your own family history in Ukraine?
DD: My grandmother was from Ukraine. She belonged to the German communities that the Habsburg monarchy invited to settle there toward the end of the eighteenth century,3 so I visited Ukraine often, mostly traveling by train: to Galicia, where you can still visit the graves of my family,4 then to Odessa, and to Crimea and Mariupol in the East. Western Ukraine always felt very different from eastern Ukraine and Crimea, which is why I wrote two separate sections in Pontus. The fictional character of Danilo always looks westward, while the Crimean poems are concerned with military dominance and the strategic importance of the peninsula.
MC: Let’s talk for a bit about form and process. You are, I think, equally at home with the maximalist/genre-bending aesthetic of prose poems as you are with brief, lyric forms. What draws you to write in one form or another? Do you find that certain themes or images demand a specific formal treatment, or do you discover the poem’s form in the course of writing multiple drafts, or multiple attempts to find the poem’s form?
DD: When I begin to write a poem, as soon as I have a fairly concrete idea of what kind of material the subject matter will coalesce around, I have a pretty clear sense of the shape of form the poem will require. But maybe I should explain material and subject matter further: I mean, every book I write has a foundational theme, a concept. That theme in turn offers up a range of subject matter. Then, in an individual poem, subject matter is concretized through specific material. So, for example, in Pontus I thought a lot about where Europe ends and what Europe looks like when viewed from those places. The fact that European wars are often fought in strategically important eastern border areas is one of the subjects that belong to my overall theme. And then I see an ant carrying a blade of grass that’s much too big for it and that becomes the materialization of the subject matter and of the foundational theme or question that I’m considering. And with that material—the ant—I know the poem has to be urgent and terse, and military commands have to melt seamlessly into the form and syntax of the poem, etc. Then another poem might be about a journey that has an epic quality, and that poem needs to flow smoothly and have longer lines. And at other times I know I have to invent a new form, because the form itself is what will help me to materialize that subject matter, and that ideally it will find its way through the form I create, the way a river gathers sediment as it flows. This question of form is in fact very important to me. Just as the question of perspective is crucial: who speaks in a poem, and for what reason? That’s also a matter that needs to be determined anew in every poem.
MC: Can you say a little more about perspective—how do you determine who speaks in a poem, and for what reason, or perhaps: how do you recognize when a poem has settled that question, attained a clarity of perspective? What does a poem do when it’s figured out its perspective and that a poem can’t do without that clarity?
DD: Every poem needs to establish its unique perspective for itself; every subject matter calls for a new perspective. If you aren’t successful in determining that novel perspective, then the subject matter will simply fail to come alive.
MC: The four poems published in this issue of The Georgia Review keep returning to the idea of borders—natural borders that are part of a landscape, or the often arbitrary but so determinative political borders, frequently created or maintained by violence or the threat of violence—which, of course, means that those borders will never be permanent. And some of the borders in these poems are the borders of a person/personhood, which are perhaps more porous than we might like to think (here I’m thinking specifically of “Devotional Image and Eating-Paper”). What do you see when you start looking more closely at borders?
DD: Well, it’s certainly no coincidence that I’m interested in borders: I was raised in the borderlands of the GDR, and beyond the forest there was always that place, as absolutely remote as antiquity, which I’d never be able to enter—or so I thought. A world which operated according to the same equations as mine, but with all of the signs reversed. And the knowledge of this nothing of course profoundly shaped the contours of my life. And this was of course true for so many others as well. East and West Germany, and all of the spheres of influence in the Cold War, defined themselves largely by principles of exclusion. Blind spots in the GDR came about chiefly when something was designated as belonging to the West; then it automatically was not seen as part of life in the GDR. It’s a little like what you see in fairy tales, where you rarely encounter ambivalent characters; the opposite of a quality is always embodied in a separate figure. So borders are continuous (and by nature unsuccessful) campaigns to fix or freeze something that can’t be set.
MC: These four poems also contain, or refer to, a wealth of direct quotations, narratives, or stories: Deukalion and Pyrrha, czarina and count, Wehrmachts-officer Damian, General Bosquet, Hölderlin, Philemon and Baucis, even the gesture to prayer in the title “Devotional Image and Eating-Paper.” Again and again we see the question of understanding and not-understanding as we encounter the voice of the poet/speaker who grapples with those stories and texts. So stories and texts are important here. Yet at the same time, the first three of these poems are rooted in encounters through travel. What do you think you encounter in travel that is different from what you encounter through these other sources?
DD: If you’re really traveling, there’s no way to stay out of things—but at the same time, it’s very rare to actually be able to fully enter somewhere. You’re in a liminal space of foreignness or strangeness (Fremdheit)—both with respect to yourself and what you take as a given, and with respect to what the environment around you takes as a given. Reading a book is also a journey of a sort, but a physical journey just has a different quality. You’re exposed, and I’m fundamentally interested in that state of exposure.
MC: You and I have certainly talked about this before, and you’ve written about this topic and given interviews on it in German, but since Americans in general might not know less about German literature and the poet Friedrich Hölderlin5 in particular, I’d like to ask: Hölderlin is one of your greatest poetic influences, certainly one of your earliest. Could you say a little bit about him, his work and what draws you to it, and how you engaged with his work in Pontus as a whole and in these four poems in particular? Where do you feel his influence?
DD: Reading Hölderlin is like moving through a landscape where the verses lie around like monoliths and then suddenly erupt out of nowhere. The syntax is wild, it pushes the limits of language to the point of complete rupture. This comes not only from Hölderlin’s reading of ancient Greek texts but arises also out of the difficulty in keeping thoughts coherent in light of the precarity of the personal and societal wilderness of the time around 1800. His poetry attempts to replicate the wildness that he experienced at the center of his own life—the threats he encountered not just through his psychological circumstances, but also in perilous moments on his walking tours.6 He does this through necessarily unpolished language, a language with a syntax and a juxtaposition of words that are totally unpredictable—this is what he calls “national” language, an idiosyncratic language that doesn’t arise out of some other prior time; it is the language of his own immediate and absolute present.
And this absolute will to be present and to be of the present without sounding modern, because he didn’t sound contemporary in any time period, least of all his own—that has always been very important to me. I think that the historicity of the present is something that needs to be brought into poetry with all the tools at our disposal, and that means not only in the content of a poem but also its form, and in how it assimilates other forms.
MC: Let’s talk about humor: I’ll just say that I love the humor and wit in your poems, in part because I often struggle in my own poetry to break out of a fairly serious default tone. Even when you’re writing about very serious subjects, you regularly include (often quite subtle!) humor or gestures to the absurd. In “Devotional Image and Eating-Paper” you do this in part also through sound—both meter and rhyme, because the German poem reads a little like a child’s song or a poem by Christian Morgenstern.7 (As a translator, I’ll say, it’s always extra-fun when I encounter another one of those poems!) At the same time, I find this poem to be incredibly moving, and it’s one of those poems that I can’t get out of my head. Can you say a little more about that poem, or about the role of humor in your poetry?
DD: This is what I love about having such a precise translator. I think the humor in my poems is pretty quiet, and I’m always fiendishly happy when I’ve hidden something like that in a poem, something that might get overlooked at first, given the generally serious tone of the work. But I really like to laugh, and I always love hidden humor in the work of other writers. The poem you’re referring to was one of those poems that just seemed to write itself. It’s like you knock over a jug of water and watch all of the little streams make their way through the dust, how they separate and come together again and finally form a river landscape. In this poem, the primary image is a dress. A dress is really only beautiful through its movement, and the most pure form of movement is dance, so the poem had to become a nimble-footed exercise in exchanging positions.
MC: When I visited you recently, shortly before the European Union elections, we talked as much (if not more!) about the political landscape in Europe, the U.S., and the world than we talked about poetry, and it seems that we kept returning to conversations about right-wing extremism and why right-wing rhetoric seems to be catching on with so many people. One of the reasons I love to read and translate your work is that, whether directly or more subtly, you return again and again to political and historical questions. But although we both gravitate toward politically informed poetry, there are endless debates about the place of poetry in political issues. “Why write a poem about this?” or “What’s the use of poetry in this situation?” are common questions in this debate. What do you discover through writing a politically informed poem—or what can a reader discover by reading it—that wouldn’t be accomplished by a novel or an essay?
DD: A poem can make something evident and memorable. A poem creeps into your heart and makes its home there. Then it’s there at the time when you need its words in order to grasp something that is simply unfathomable. From the country I was born in [the GDR], I know that there’s a politically explosive force to this phenomenon. People would secretly copy poems from forbidden books, or they’d memorize them, and then they would use them as mottos, as secret messages; the poems became containers in which people could carry their resistance. Poems are what is intangible, because you can never really explain what they do and how they work, but they are also what is tangible, because their concision allows you to memorize them and carry them with you, and because their brevity allows for collective recitation.
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1. Danilo: Ukrainian folk hero.
2. Heiner Müller (1929–1995): East German dramatist and theater director.
3. The Josephine Colonization.
4. After WWII, German populations were expelled from the region.
5. Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843): German poet and key figure in the German Romantic movement.
6. Hölderlin often walked up to 40 to 50 km a day. In 1801, he also walked much of the way from his home near Stuttgart to Bordeaux to take a position as private tutor; he returned on foot in 1802 exhibiting clear signs of the mental illness that kept him confined from 1806 to the end of his life.
7. Christian Morgenstern (1871–1910): German poet famous for his nonsense verse.
