The 'Post-Monolingual' Poetry of Uljana Wolf

German studies scholar Heidi Hart writes about Uljana Wolf for Music & Literature, noting Wolf's nod to Rosmarie Waldrop's essay collection, Gap Gardening: "Here in the younger poet Uljana Wolf’s stretching lace, in her expanding string of familial islands, in the tongue’s guerilla garden, poetry points out the places where monolingual identification breaks down." More from "Gaps and Tatters: The Poetry of Uljana Wolf":

The title of Wolf’s collection meine schönste lengevitch refers to a another take on mono-multilingual culture, but one meant to ridicule: Kurt M. Stein’s 1925 book poking fun at German-American code-switching and mispronunciation. “Lengevitch” is a transliteration of a fictional German immigrant’s effort to say “language” in English. Wolf takes this problematic text as a starting point, also drawing on Gertrude Stein’s wordplay and Nelly Sachs’ pained investigations of the German idea of “Heimat” or “homeland.” Though she does not intentionally engage Heidegger’s obsession with etymology as a reflection of nationalist “rootedness,” Wolf chooses some of his preferred German words (such as “bauen,” “to build,” which he relates to Old High German “buan,” or “to live”) to play with and against, far more aware than the Nazi philosopher was that etymology is, as she puts it, “a form of fiction.” Wolf reads and writes more in dialogue with Friedrich Schleiermacher, whose nineteenth-century theory of translation holds that the language of the translator should be “bent towards an alien likeness” and with such foreignness enrich the receiving language.” As committed as she is to contesting borders and teasing apart the idea of “roots” in her own work, Wolf is well aware she has her own, in German, and that if anything she is “post-monolingual.” Working with images of whiteness and veiledness, she makes sly reference to “mr. veilmaker” (Schleiermacher) in the poem “Doppelgeherede” (“Double-going speech,” if attempted as literal translation, or what Sophie Seita calls “Double Drivel Speech”), which also refers to “mrs. stein” and her buttons, in its playful narrative of language-twins and their shadows, Doppelgänger-words springing onto white space without apparent roots.

Translating Wolf requires dual sensitivity to German and to the English slippages that bring her texts to multilingual life. Sophie Seita’s 2015 translation of Wolf’s “Anna O.” series takes on its own title from within the text: “i mean i dislike that fate that i was made to where,” these broken lines running from the back of the chapbook-style cover to the front. Syntactically, “to where” could mean direction or action, a “wh”-word turned verb. In English as inflected with German as Wolf’s source text is in the reverse, Seita’s language-license turns each “annalogue” into an equally slippery mindscape. Each translation mirrors Wolf’s text visually, with a prose poem on the left page and largely white-space, floating text on the right. Since Wolf’s language already incorporates English, Seita keeps those lines while approximating the German language-play with earthy Anglo-Saxon syllables: “oh such recognizing work,” Wolf’s prose poem “annalog von den blumen” begins, “sie sagen überschuss, ich sage bluterguss, blütenstuss. sie fluffen kissen auf, ich hisse: what can all that green stuff be?” Here is Seita’s version, which keeps Wolf’s de-hierarchized letters: “oh such recognizing work. they say surplus, i say bloody overplus, blossom guff, they ruffle and puff up pillows, i hiss: what can all this green stuff be?” The result is that the music of both languages sound more similar than might be expected; it is not so hard to imagine Anna O. sliding with frightening ease between them. A word like “guff” (which means trivial talk) is used so rarely, it might be made up. Although this prose-poetic fantasia is narrated by an Austrian psychoanalytic patient who forgot her native language for a time, that language was German. When she riffs on oranges and flowers and the world’s end in English, with some German slipping through the lace-gaps of her mind, the reader’s experience may actually come closer to the “real” Annalog voice than in Wolf’s lengevitch edition. Readers of Seita’s translation can look forward to a larger selection, Subsisters: Selected Poems, forthcoming later in 2017 from Belladonna Press.

The gaps and thresholds of young children’s speech have also found their way into Wolf’s work, partly the result of listening to her own daughter and partly through her experience teaching writing to children . . .

Read the full piece at Music & Literature.