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The Baslat Womb by Tadeus Pfeifer
Translated by Pamela Hardyment and Vishnu Khare.
Jay Landesman (Ltd) Publishers, 8 Duncan Terrace, London, N1 8BZ (available from Pamela Hardyment, 10 Heathfield South, Twickenham, TW2 7SS. [email protected]) ISBN 0905150 42 2    A5 pbck 100pp £8.95

Another English and German bi-lingual volume, this time a selected poems of German born Swiss native Tadeus Pfeifer. The poems are culled from his five volumes of poetry issued between 1982 and 2000. Being free of the sort of restrictions faced by the Saxony poets Pfeifer's work, at first glance, seems more open and with fewer layers of meaning. However this is not strictly the case for Pfeifer both delights in language and has moments of angst about language or the way it can be used to interpret personal experience.
Creative self-doubt is also hinted at as in 'Bois-Rateau' -

     The sun weighs on my verse
     a gust of wind tugs at the paper
     on which I wrote and carries it off.
     I jump after it. Did I really catch it?

There are areas where multiple meanings can be implied, and sufficient ambiguity and intrigue to encourage several readings of the book. Reader participation is necessary as you actually have to think about these poems. For instance the short poem 'Untitled' has just these two lines -

     I see circles in the water and know
     nobody threw a stone in.

Particularly enjoyable are 'The Dead Poem' and 'Collector of Dead Poems'. Whereas most English poems about poems merely seem to be poets trying to show how clever they think they are, these two poems have an almost brutal honesty about poetry. In 'Collector of Dead Poems' we are told -

     Dead poems, you find them everywhere
     Run over, tortured, strangled
     Some killed themselves.

These bi-lingual volumes bring into focus the problems of translating poetry from one language to another. the end result has to be good poetry in the second language. Happily this has been achieved in both cases. A few compromises have had to be made, for example one of Pfeifer's poems is reduced from nine lines to seven, and in the first book the structure of one of Wulf Kirsten's poems is corrupted slightly by having the repeated opening phrase of its four stanzas moved to the end of the opening line in the first three stanzas of the English version. These problems are caused more by the syntactic requirements of the English language than by any inadequacy in the skill of the translators.