Yesterday I made a little translation of a poem for my friend Jesse, because they like lions and queer things. It’s from a book called mit Füssen mit Flügeln [with feet with wings] by the Swiss writer Verena Stefan, published 1980. Stefan is best known for her book Häutungen (translated in English as Shedding), which sold a few hundred thousand copies in the 1970s. It is one of many extraordinary texts of German language feminist literature in the 1970s – a literary movement that was the true heir to many of the debates on aesthetics and politics that raged in Germany throughout the 20th century, but today often forgotten behind the mass of contemporaneous American conceptualism – a movement less vital, political, and aesthetically interesting. So I was glad to come across another of Stefan’s books in a second hand shop this week. mit Füssen mit Flügeln takes as its topic various love relationships between women. Poems are interspersed with faint line drawings. Stefan begins her foreword, “Liebe zwischen Frauen heilt. Sie löst die Kraft des Erinnerns aus. Erinnern an die eigene Mutter, an ursprüngliche Zusammenhänge, die hinter den Zerstörungen in der Natur und der Geschichte der Frauen liegen.” [Love between women heals. It induces the power of memory. Memory of one’s own mother, of the original relationships, which lie behind the destructions in the nature and the history of women.] The book is as one would imagine cosmic, its weakness its Romanticism – certainly different from the sharp corners of Häutungen, with its reflection on the struggles and blockages of language for women’s political literature. But nonetheless it has a few nice things in it. So here is the little translation I made.
The Woman with the Lioness
My deepest dream, most full of yearning
to stride in step with the lioness
to put down feet and paws together
to let a hand hover imperiously
to let a hand fall softly
My deepest dream, most full of yearning
touching the pelt of the lioness
Die Frau mit der Löwin
Mein tiefster sehnsüchtiger Traum
im Gleichmass zu schreiten mit der Löwin
Gleichzeitig zu setzen Füsse und Tatzen
Gebietend eine Hand schweben zu lassen
Nachgiebig eine Hand sinken zu lassen
Mein tiefster sehnsüchtiger Traum
Das Fell der Löwin berühren
