Nicolas Born (1937-1979)
I began to translate Nicolas Born in 1968, when someone brought a few of his poems into the translation workshop at Iowa along with unidiomatic English translations by one of Born’s German friends. I liked the poems and started working on my own translations immediately. Word got back to Born, then relatively unknown, and he sent his first book, Marktlage (State of the Market), and copies of poems from his forthcoming second, Wo Mir der Kopf Steht (Where My Head Is). Then Born came to the international workshop at Iowa between October 1969 and May 1970. We met and became friends; he collaborated on my early translations, and we corresponded after he went back. I published translations of early work in Modern Poetry in Translation, Iowa Review and some smaller journals.
Anselm Hollo and Ted Berrigan were teaching at Iowa then; he met Ginsberg, Creeley, Anne Waldman and others. Though a very different person, far more engaged socially, Born found something he could use in O’Hara (particularly) and other New York School poets: the names of friends, the apparently trivial details of daily life, the emotional immediacy and the deflation of the consciously literary. These things went into his third, breakthrough book, Das Auge des Entdeckers (The Discoverer's Eye), a huge hit, in Germany, for poetry. (Later Born published a book of German translations of Kenneth Koch.) Born went on to stake out a contrarian position on the subject of poetry and politics: he rejected (at the time of Vietnam) directly political poetry in favor of what he called utopian writing: writing that preserved our most immediate feelings, which by definition meant horror at the realities of Germany and the world in his day, and insisted on imagining other possibilities altogether. It was, in its way, a more radical position than the dominant (Marxist) assumptions of the day in Germany. It cost him a lot of friends.
What made these poems new and popular also made them, for me at the time, very difficult to translate. I had an undergraduate degree in German literature from Cornell, but I’d never been to Germany, and my German was strictly literary. Also, being young and dumb, I disapproved of his new influences. After a couple of years we lost touch, though I always thought I would contact him again. Much later I learned, by reading a review of Günter Grass’s Headbirths, which has scenes at his deathbed, that he’d died rather horribly of lung cancer metastasized to the brain. In response I wrote this poem:
THE HORSES
—on learning, late, of the death of Nicolas Born
The horses, Nicolas. Once we all drove
out through corn to ride the rented horses.
You had it first, the horse whose legs
years had locked in a stolid walk;
you kicked and pulled. You made good jokes.
We circled you on our spry horses, laughing.
No rider, afraid of a gallop, I gave up
my good horse then and you rode her back
to the barn in style. Long past that circle
of laughing friends I ride the slow horse home.
In 2005 I got an email from Born’s daughter Katharina, who had edited a large collected poems volume that had won Germany’s premier prize for poetry, the Peter Huchel Prize, in 2004. She was now assembling a volume of Born’s letters and wondered if I had any. I did, and in the correspondence that followed we agreed that I’d undertake to translate a book of Born’s poems to be published here. I’ve since visited Katharina and Born’s widow Irmgard in Germany and Paris, and they’ve helped a lot with these translations.
The volume of letters, like the collected poems, was widely and well reviewed, and sold well, in Germany; Born’s reputation has been greatly revived, and more republications are planned.
E.T.
For sample poems of Nicolas Born, translated by Eric Torgersen, click here.
Born in Wikipedia
Born website (in German)
ET's recent Born translations also appear in Field, Fall 2008; in Exquisite Corpse and the Exquisite Corpse Annual, 2009, and (along with two by Mark Terrill) in Atlanta Review, Spring/Summer, 2009. "A Few Notes from the Elbholz," a major poem and Born's last, appears in Field, Fall 2010; "For Pasolini" appears in the online journal Slope, #47. Four poems will appear in the forthcoming Zoland Poetry, and two in Michigan Quarterly Review.