Once upon a time many years ago I taught in Germany, not far from the Harz Mountains, haunt of the Brothers Grimm and Heinrich Heine. To my surprise my students in the Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik admired Charles Bukowski above all other American poets. He seemed to be the only English-language poet they enjoyed reading. Which, when I thought about his straightforward narratives, demotic language, and German heritage, made a lot of sense. He was the American Brecht, without the politics. They also liked Hemingway, ease of reading being an important qualifier for transnational popularity.
One feels a similar undertow in Whoever Drowned Here, Francesca Bell’s excellent translation of the German poet Max Sessner. In an interview with Sessner she says, “I found a great number of [contemporary German] poets writing in what seemed to me to be a very vague, abstract sort of style. It’s a style I am not very drawn to, frankly, and it is a style that I despaired of being able to translate well.” Finally, she chose Sessner, after resonating with his straightforward, colloquial style. But there were also similarities in their backgrounds: neither of them has formal literary training nor an academic affiliation. And indeed Bell’s translations are as straightforward, colloquial, and pungent as Sessner’s German.
At times these poems remind me of Charles Simic or Thomas Lux. But Sessner also demonstrates an imaginative freedom I associate with Wyslawa Szymborska. Evidence of a surrealistic bent abounds; the reader encounters dreams, fairy tales, and myth. As Sessner declares in the interview with Bell: “I always imagine that the objects that surround us daily lead a life of their own. Very philosophical, very tolerant. That they would like to understand us exactly as we would like to understand them.”