From the Germanic Soup

The translation I am presenting here is particularly complex because the poem, by the former poet laureate of Friesland, Eeltsje Hettinga, is about the German-language poet Paul Celan, his life and work, his relationship with the Austrian poet Ingeborg Bachmann, and his death in Paris in 1970. All too often there is a tendency to see the literature of minor languages as interesting only inasmuch as it fills the gaps in the canon by concentrating on its own provincial, often rural, backward-looking reality, as if the interconnectedness of the twenty-first century doesn’t extend across the whole planet or as if languages that are being pushed back into the private, familial sphere can’t be used to reflect on the literary and political world that impinges on that sphere.