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Come, wilderness, break into our home

[Germany] Daniela Danz

Translated by Hu Wei

Break the window and come in

With your roots and insects,

Drowning our wishes,

Flooding garbage sorting systems, dentures

and unpaid bills,

Cover us with your rustling green leaves,

Cover us with your spores,

Go green: green and pious,

Green and specific, green and fungible.

Come, bad weather, with your storm,

Overturning bricks and tiles, coming with snow and hail,

Breaking up the co-sleeping we enjoyed in bed

And tired of explaining, come on,

Ice will turn clouds into glaciers,

Solidify our pursuit of flow.

Come, desert, with your dust,

Through the crack in the door,

Filling our desolation until it becomes stiff.

Come, past the rescue team,

The impulse of expansion seeps into the keyboard,

Missiles and missile defense systems,

The heart of think tanks and trolls,

Let the hedgehogs stay, their breath

Let's calm down.

Come, rising sea levels,

Flooding our shores: developed,

Undeveloped, home-like comfort,

Profitable plains,

Wash the jellyfish into our soup bowls,

Bringing snails of postman's horn shells into our hair,

As we swam towards each other,

Chasing in panic out of desire,

For there is little left, and all is gone,

Thoroughly softened, soaked with regret,

Accountability and tranquilizers.

Come, earthquake, destroy our apartment,

Building on what we have accumulated so far.

Come, earthquake, the end of buried shafts,

And the books that saved us,

Bury anger, goodwill and all gains,

Come, devour the memory,

Earthquake, come faster, make the rocks

Bury us, bury the water desert weather

Bury the wilderness that buries everything

Come Wilderness into Our Homes

Daniela Danz

break the windows come

with your roots and your worms

spread yourself over our wishes

our waste-sorting systems our protheses

and outstanding payments

cover us with your rustling greenery

and your spores cover us that we may

become green: green and reverent

green and manifestly green and replaceable

come weather with your storms

and sweep the slates off the roofs come

with snow and hail smash

through the collective sleep

we are all enjoying in our beds

our worn rationalizations come ice

and form glaciers over the shadow banks

and our drive for liquidity

come through the cracks under the doors

you desert with your sands fill

our desolation up until it forms into a solid mass

rise up over the search-and-rescue teams

and our growth compulsion trickle into

the control panels of the missiles

and the missile defense systems into

the think tanks and the hearts of internet trolls

just leave the hedgehogs with their

snuffling so that it may calm us

come rising sea levels

up over our shorelines both the developed

and the undeveloped the homey

lowland areas wash

jellyfish into our soup bowls

and ramshorn snails into our hair

as we swim in each other’s direction panicked

with our yearning for one another

because almost nothing is left because it’s all gone

and thoroughly soaked through with regrets

finger-pointing and tranquilizers

come earthquakes shatter the apartments

which we built on the foundations

of how we always did everything

come tremors fill the mine shafts

the end of work and

the literature of redemption bury anger

and affection and all manner of added values

swallow up the memories come tremors

hurry so that the bedrock covers us

so we are covered with water desert weather

and over everything that which covers all the wilderness

Translated from German by Monika Cassel

Cascade of Happiness

[Germany] Daniela Danz

Translated by Hu Wei

because

exist

today

Now

And the year condensed in it: all that has passed and will never come back

They shine brilliantly in us,

Like a carpet covering the edges of discontent, the urgent duties,

All the complaints about consumption, so much so that the ant soldiers from their

land

Rebellion

Escape to

us

Enter this light, in the huge wall stone, lock the wandering eyes

Meanwhile, a group of salamanders burst into green at midday.

To lure death, to tease death from the very roots

You can live with death, if you understand him and know what he loves most.

Dream:

This is clear

And certain

today,

And feed the devil hovering on the edge with the abundance of the present

With full branches of gratitude and sweetness picked by hand

Put their huge claws on the blackberry leaves and suck the flowing blood from the head

So that they can tolerate our bold talk

Nothing more

about

As far as the eye can see

The smell of flavor

The happiness that makes us sneeze and blink

Happiness leaps swiftly on hot stones

Because we are salamanders, the light makes us tremble

Once again we tremble, like a full pond rippling in the rain

Once again, the night cools the heat, before the blackberry leaves wither

die

Gently

Catch our ears

We nodded

Cascade of Joy

Daniela Danz

because

there is a

today and

a now

and the year gathered up within them: everything that was and never

more shall be washes brilliant over us and lays itself like a rug over the

tips of our disgruntlement our hurried duties all the misery of

consumption so that the army ants desert they leave

their

state

flee

to us

into this radiance in which enormous wall-stones arrest the

wandering eye while the green the salamanders blasted into the

noontime lures mortality and teases death bedded down there

under the root death whom you can live with if you just know him and his deepest

dream:

today

clear

and certain

and if you feed his demons resting on the sidelines with the glut of the present

with twigs laden with ripe gratitude hand-picked sweetness and then bed their

paws on blackberry leaves to draw the coursing blood from their heads so that

they are forebearing about our audacious conversations

about nothing

but what

can be seen

or smelled

what tickles us and makes us sneeze and blink with joy and scurry

across the hot stones because we are salamanders and the light

makes us shiver and shake ourselves again like brimming

ponds in the rain that ripple just one more time before night

stamps out the glow the blackberry leaves wilt

and death

takes us gently

by the ear

and we nod

Translated from German by Monika Cassel

About the translator: Hu Wei, scholar, translator, director of the German Department of the School of Foreign Languages ​​at Peking University, tenured associate professor, doctoral supervisor, and academic advisor to the Hong Kong Poetry Festival Foundation. He has written the German book "In Search of the Lost World: A Study of German Exile Autobiographies", and his representative translations include Heinz Schrafel's "A Brief History of German Literature", "100 Famous German Poems", and "On Brecht" (co-translation). He has won the German Bessel Research Award and the Feng Zhi German Literature Research Award.