Pitch & Glint

By Lutz Seiler and Stefan Tobler

On its original publication in 2000, Pitch & Glint was widely hailed as a landmark in German poetry. Rooted in Seiler's childhood home, a village brutally undermined by Soviet uranium extraction, these propulsive poems are highly personal, cadenced, cryptic and earthy, evoking European history with undeniable force.

• Language: English
• Publisher: And Other Stories
• Release date: Sep 6, 2023
• ISBN: 9781913505776

Lutz Seiler

(Gera, Turingia, 1963) se formó como tra­bajador de la construcción y ejerció de carpintero y albañil. En 1990 acabó sus estudios de lengua y litera­tura alemanas y en 1997 fue nombrado director del Museo Peter Huchel. Ha sido escritor residente en la Villa Aurora de Los Ángeles y obtuvo una beca para una estancia en la Academia Alemana de Roma. Es un prestigioso poeta, con seis libros publicados entre 2000 y 2010; ha recibido galardones como el Premio Ingeborg Bachmann, el Premio Bremen de Literatura y el Premio Fontane. Kruso, su primera novela, fue galardonada en 2014 con el Premio Uwe Johnson y el Deutscher Buchpreis (el más importante de Alema­nia, considerado el equivalente al Man Booker en In­glaterra o al Gouncourt en Francia), y ha sido traduci­da a veintidós idiomas.

Book preview

First published in English translation in 2023 by And Other Stories

Sheffield – London – New York

www.andotherstories.org

© Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am Main 2000

First published as pech & blende in 2000.

All rights reserved by and controlled through Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin.

Translation and afterword copyright © Stefan Tobler, 2023

All rights reserved. The rights of Lutz Seiler to be identified as the author of this work and of Stefan Tobler to be identified as the translator of this work have been asserted.

Print ISBN: 9781913505769

eBook ISBN: 9781913505776

Editor: Tara Tobler; Copy-editor: Robina Pelham Burn; Proofreader: Sarah Terry; Typesetting and eBook: Tetragon, London

; Series Cover Design: Elisa von Randow, Alles Blau Studio, Brazil, after a concept by And Other Stories; Author Photo: Renate von Mangoldt.

Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following, in which some of these translations first appeared: Modern Poetry in Translation, New Statesman, PN Review, PROTOTYPE, Shearsman, Sheffield Telegraph, the TLS and Wet Grain.

And Other Stories gratefully acknowledges that its work is supported using public funding by Arts Council England and the translation of this book was supported by a grant from the Goethe-Institut.

Contents

I

mechanics of the pictorial world

latrine

there was a kinship between our houses

fin de siècle

Greater Berlin, one

spoilheap glow

scissors knives and matches

Felizetti’s garden

summing up

II

in the East, Lisa Rothe

what remains remains

on the sheep track

the sixth blue black August

but it was good

Berlin room

in the east of the land

pitch & glint

where were you, Gagarin

III

my class, born in sixty-three, that

Potemkin’s village

bugs

brain dead Sunday

over mountains, over steppe, ventured

we always said hello we answered

grassland

my gems, my boat, my canvas gym bag

IV

in field Latin

Gera

moss fire

Sundays I thought of God

Bols ballerina

born ’fourteen / name / sex

one o’clock on the towers

stick boy

poetry is my gun dog

I’m tired

V

travel in the nineteen hundreds

at night, among the noises

Black Africa, the knee, the

hers, for her man

citizen of the world

almost frosty still, yet

Castlegregory / Co. Kerry

just the way things are

good evening Cape

gravity

VI

sixty-nine, old century

Translator’s Notes

Memory Salt: A Translator's Afterword

Everyone has only one song.

Paul Bowles

‌I

‌mechanics of the pictorial world

taking down the swing

in autumn & putting it up

in April. day after day

the suburb commutes under

the trees and hour after hour

from the sky above courtyards

pulverised swallows fall & neatly

stuffed ones come up: the

gravity in their eyes hangs

raw as an egg

over the globe over

the man at the next table

(in sleep he leans his face

against the lamp) and over

the slender animals here

that each evening

creep down the avenue

& murmur

ev’nin into the dark as

if tucking the greeting away

in