Nora Gomringer

Nora Gomringer tr. Annie Rutherford

Bye

To flutter also means to sing for me, an all too silent creature with wings two and tight enthroated territory.

With radioiodine you can see me, ultrawave tones too make audible – large eyes for my non-existent song.

Like crotchets, quavers, minims, semi-breves on the staves from 1 to 5, hot, cold knots form themselves. Belcanto doesn’t want to shine.

I am the last luminous thing when your lights cool down entirely. I saw in Dresden’s Hygiene Museum and have believed it ever since:

I am the butterfly hurrying after your soul. You cannot capture, conceive, endure what doesn’t happen but for me.

Nora Gomringer is one of Germany’s best known and loved contemporary poets. In the early 2000s she was a prominent voice in Germany’s young slam scene, and her background in performance continues to inform her work. Her writing blurs the boundaries between performance and page poetry, as well as often intersecting with other art forms, from film to music and visual art. She’s won a number of awards for her writing, from the Jacob Grimm German Language Prize in 2011 to the prestigious Ingeborg Bachmann Award in 2015. Her most recent collection, Gottesanbieterin, appeared in 2020.

Annie Rutherford is programme co-ordinator for StAnza, as well as a writer and translator. She co-founded Goettingen’s Poetree festival and edited the literary magazine Far Off Places. Her collected translations of Nora Gomringer, Hydra’s Heads, appeared in August 2018, and she has a forthcoming pamphlet of translations by Volha Hapeyeva with Arc in 2021.

StAnza brings poetry to audiences and enables encounters with poetry through events and projects in Scotland and beyond, especially their annual spring festival in St Andrews. www.stanzapoetry.org Facebook: stanzapoetry Instagram: @stanzapoetry