L: Francesca Bell, cr. Gina Risso; R: Max Sessner, cr. Bert Strebe
Poet Sarah Wolfson talks with NER 44.1 translator Francesca Bell about German grammar, developing a translator’s code of ethics, and the light reality of Max Sessner’s poetry.
Sarah Wolfson: What first appealed to you about Max Sessner’s poetry and how did you approach him about translating his work?
Francesca Bell: What appealed to me first about Max’s poetry was the combination of melancholy and humor. I am completely defenseless before light-hearted heavy-heartedness. I’m a very literal-minded poet, so it surprised me, but I also fell in love with Max’s use of surrealism, with the way objects we assume are inanimate animate people’s lives in his work, for example, and the way ghosts go on living among us. I’d searched for a contemporary German poet to concentrate on for a couple of years, and when I first read eleven of Max’s poems in an Austrian journal in December of 2018, I instantly knew he was the one. I had to write to the editor of the journal to find him. They passed my message on to him, and then I was able to ask if I could translate his work. I feel lucky to be the first person to translate his work into English.
SW: As you say, these poems operate in a sphere of gentle surrealism. They remind me a little of James Tate’s work, but they bend more toward tenderness. Are there any features of the German language that you think suit it to surrealism?
FB: Honestly, not really. The German language is a very literal, cautious, explicit language, a language that, by design, leaves nothing up to chance. It is a language so replete with grammatical signposts that one always knows exactly who is doing what to whom and in which tense. I wouldn’t say that it is inherently well-suited to surrealism.
SW: Tell me about your relationship to German. How and when did you learn it?
FB: I was an exchange student in Germany for six months when I was fourteen. My high school had a truly incredible exchange program run by a German woman named Annelies Clauson who had married an American soldier after WWII. Every year for about thirty years, without any financial compensation, she managed a program that brought twenty-five German students to America for half a year and sent twenty-five American students to Germany for half a year. Because there were no fees associated with the program, even kids of modest means, like I was, could participate by hosting a German student and coming up with just a plane ticket and spending money. I knew very little German when I arrived and spent the first few days sobbing in my room, but then, with the help of my German exchange mother, a former teacher, I began to catch on and fell in love with the language.
SW: How much do you collaborate with Sessner during the translation process?
FB: I’m very grateful to be able to ask Max questions whenever I get stuck, and sometimes, there will be a phrase that really cannot be translated, and I can send him a few different possible phrases to choose from. He can tell me which phrase comes closest to what he was after in the original poem. It’s wonderful to work with him. I’ve heard translators joke that they prefer to translate the dead because then their interpretations can’t be contradicted, but I much prefer to have the luxury of checking my work.
SW: Restlessness, shelter, and the afterlife recur throughout these poems. Are these themes typical of Sessner’s larger body of work? When do you feel you have read enough of an author’s work to capture the broader themes and vision?
FB: Yes, those themes are common in Max’s work—as well as death, loneliness, the alienation of modern life, aging, the strange ways humans relate to objects, sorrow, ghosts. Max is the first poet I’ve translated in whose work I’ve really immersed myself, and I didn’t know it then, but the first eleven poems of his that I found in the Austrian journal manuskripte already represented his broader themes and visions.
SW: What was the most challenging thing you encountered when translating Sessner’s work?
FB: The biggest challenge for me when I translate a poem of Max’s is his habit of doing away with punctuation and nearly all capitalization. I must pay very close attention to grammatical clues to orient myself, and this isn’t always easy for a non-native reader of German. In addition to this, he very cleverly manages line breaks to tease as many meanings as possible from each potential phrase. This can make it tricky when translating Max’s poems and when reading them aloud. Sometimes, it can be difficult to know which words belong together and which merely happen to be in proximity to each other. I have learned to use a pencil to divide up the phrases with small slashes, especially when I’m going to read the poems aloud.
SW: These poems feel effortless and at home in English. How much do you care about communicating a specifically German sound or ethos within a translation?
FB: Max and I have both been pleased that his poems weather the journey across the English border so well. He has wondered if perhaps he’s been influenced by reading American poets over the years. I don’t think at all about communicating a German sound or ethos when I’m translating. I think only of communicating the tone and intended meaning of the individual writer. I want people to read these translated poems and feel that they have heard Max Sessner’s voice, even though the poems are now speaking to them in English.
SW: You’ve said elsewhere that you’ve translated almost fifty of Sessner’s poems. Maybe that number is even higher now. What’s it like to spend so much time inside one author’s work? How does it affect your own work? Like most translators of poetry, you are a poet in your own right.
FB: I’ve translated at least three times that by now! It is a kind of magic to spend this much time inside an author’s work. It’s a form of intimacy to move inside someone else’s language, to examine the decisions they made as they worked. It feels more like being truly inside another person’s mind than anything I’ve ever experienced. My job is to deeply examine what exactly the poet was trying to say, what they really meant, and in doing this, it feels like I am allowed to feel at least some of what they felt as they worked. I had hoped that my own work would be more influenced by my long engagement with Max’s poems. I admire the magical realism he brings so effortlessly to the page, how lightly he holds the “reality” we all cling to, how easily he engages the mystery of time. Alas, I only see his fingerprints on one of my poems, “The Window Before Which We Last Kissed Is on the Market,” a poem in which I try to engage the way we seem to live in the past and the present at once. Perhaps his influence will show itself more often in my future writing.
SW: What advice do you have for budding literary translators, especially those who work with poetry?
FB: My advice for budding literary translators is to begin by developing what I call a translator’s code of ethics. When I was first beginning to translate, I poked around online to explore people’s opinions about translation. Some translators feel more comfortable taking liberties as they work than others. Some are more literal in their interpretations. Some translators are comfortable translating from a language they don’t know, and some are not. Some believe that what is most important is to end up with a piece that feels like it was first written in English no matter how much you might have to alter things as you go. Each translator will have different ideas about what is most important to focus on and to honor. Translating, like writing, consists of a series of decisions. I advise giving some thought, before you begin, to what your values and ethics are so that you can lean on them when you begin to grapple with the hard choices you’ll have to make. I advise reading your work aloud, over and over, to hear if your translation sounds natural, and I strongly advise finding a native speaker of the language you’re working from who can proof your work for errors.
SW: Which other contemporary poets writing in German do you wish English language readers had more access to?
FB: Andreas Altmann, Sabine Göttel, Simone Scharbert, and Bert Strebe are all poets I’d like English readers to have more access to.
SW: Can we expect to see a book of Sessner’s work in English any time soon?
FB: Yes! There’s a collection of new and selected poems I translated, Whoever Drowned Here, coming out in August from Red Hen Press.
SW: Thanks so much. It’s a delight to have access to these poems and this voice.
Sarah Wolfson, a former staff reader for NER, is the author of A Common Name for Everything, which won the A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry from the Quebec Writers’ Federation. Her poems have appeared in Canadian and American journals including The Walrus, TriQuarterly, The Fiddlehead, AGNI, and Michigan Quarterly Review. Originally from Vermont, she now lives in Montreal, where she teaches writing at McGill University.
Francesca Bell is a poet and translator. Her debut collection, Bright Stain (Red Hen Press, 2019), was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award and the Julie Suk Award. She translated a selection of Max Sessner’s poems, Whoever Drowned Here (Red Hen Press, 2023), from its original German. Her poems and translations appear in New Ohio Review, North American Review, Mid-American Review, Prairie Schooner, and Rattle. She lives with her family in Novato, California.