The Art of Topiary: Poems

by Jan Wagner, David Keplinger (Translator)

Overview

A dual-language collection of vivid, tightly knit poems from one of the most important contemporary poets writing in German.

The Art of Topiary is the gorgeous product of a long collaboration between Jan Wagner and American poet David Keplinger. With the care of master gardeners tending their plants, Wagner and Keplinger have shaped Wagner’s originals—acclaimed internationally, now in English for the first time—into precise, delightful, and highly modern translations.

Along the way, the collection unfolds dialogues between discipline and freedom, sound and sense, faithfulness and improvisation. In these poems, formal structures are a corset loosened by each line of verse, a garden always pleasurably at risk of being overrun. Yet for all Wagner’s wit and sharp poetic detail, The Art of Topiary is written with an intimate earnest: a swarm of gnats take on an urgent mystery as they hum in code around the speaker’s ears, a bird atop a rhino’s leathery back becomes a fragile porcelain cup, and the antlers of an elk reach for the air like a champion for a trophy.

Compact, lightfooted, and curious, The Art of Topiary is the exciting American debut of a stunning and joyful voice in global literature.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781571314963
Publisher:	Milkweed Editions
Publication date:	10/17/2017
Edition description:	Bilingual
Pages:	144
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.60(d)
Language:	Multiple Languages

About the Author

Jan Wagner is the recipient of the 2017 Georg Büchner Prize, one of Germany's most prestigious honors in literature. He has published six collections of poems since 2001, as well as two collections of essays, several edited volumes, and a number of translations. For his poetry, which has been translated into more than thirty languages, Wagner has received fellowships from the German Academy, the Villa Massimo in Rome, the Villa Aurora, and elsewhere. His literary awards include the Anna Seghers Award, the Ernst Meister Award for Poetry, and the Friedrich Hölderlin Award. A member of the German Academy of Language and Literature, Wagner lives in Berlin.

David Keplinger is the author of four volumes of poetry, most recently Another City. He has won the T. S. Eliot Prize, the C. P. Cavafy Poetry Prize, the Erskine J. Poetry Prize, and the Colorado Book Award, as well as two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and grants from the DC, Danish, and Pennsylvania Councils on the Arts. He directs the MFA program in creative writing at American Universityin Washington, DC.

Read an Excerpt

essay on gnats

as if every character had fled all at once from the newspaper and hovered as a swarm in the air,

they hover as a swarm in the air,
transmitting from the awful news nothing. prudent muses, emaciated

pegasusses humming nothing but themselves into the ear; borne of the last band of smoke when the candle is snuffed,

and so weightless it’s hardly possible to say:
they are. appearing more as shadow from an alternate world

now cast into ours, they dance,
limbs now so thin as if drawn with a pencil; tiny sphinxes are their bodies;

rosetta stone, without the stone.

* * *

augustín lópez: the art of topiary
From the series: “three possible books”

he set out every dawn to do his work while everyone was sleeping. in sun and rain the man was there, to make the wild box jump through rings, cutting it along the gates into globes, into pyramids, column gardens,
just so: so we heard him keeping time

with scissors, saw how, sacrificing time for anything else, he willed with wirework the natural world into new forms: gardens of labyrinths, minotaurs and the golden rain of danae; with portcullis gates,
then towers, walls, so that, as if by bricks,

the landscape of a fabulous city, boxed by walls, emerged. it was met at that time by a topiary sea, upon which crossed frigates of tree-envoys. the days he did his work,
even sunday, he went as one who reigns an ever-reaching empire, postured in his garden

as its king until just silence was its guardian.
only a light wind twitched the wild box,
trimmed at its leaves. why should we rant about this? don’t all artists at some time or other dissolve into their work?
we stood for a while in front of the gates,

then two boys dared to climb over. agape they found surrounded by gardens a gentleman’s image as his last great work,
and within it as the heart, hidden in the box,
a bird’s nest left from wintertime.
the eggs the color of marble, rain-

flecked, hard—and nothing seemed to rouse when one listened to them. we gathered fallen pieces for the tree at christmastime.
but from the master gardener and his garden,
no more words. soon we saw that on the box young shoots were growing, the work

of nourishing rain. so the garden’s details faded and in time we would forget his work.
behind the gates burst flowers from the box.

* * *

the merman
for Robin Robertson

before husum, with the first catch they pulled me on board, the obulos of a shell in my hand, cold as halibut,
the herring and their silver applause

surrounding me on deck. their hot grog burnt me down to the fish ribs,
but i got used to other things: to the clock and its bells. to snow. to featherbeds.

they found the yokel, the jealous one,
drowned in a puddle. a seed arose. one morning when the cod lay rotting at my door, i took that as a sign.

i left behind the angst of the sleeping,
who fear water in their dreams, my prints licked away by the sun, and i left the gaping neighbors, the mothers and their prams,

their sons with fish lips and webs.
unhurried i sank back down to the palace,
its walls of flounder eyes, where my wife grinds salt for the sea. i became my own myth.

* * *

quince paté
From the series: “Eighteen Pies”

when october hung them in the branches,
bulging lanterns, it was time: quinces,
we plucked quinces, heaving in our baskets yellows to the kitchen

and into water. pear and apple ripened toward their names, to a simple sweetness—
different from the quinces on their branches hanging in far corners

of my alphabet, in the garden’s latin,
hard and foreign in aroma: we sliced,
quartered, cored the flesh (four huge hands, two smaller ones)

shadowed in the juicer steam, added sugar, heat, effort toward something so raw it resisted the mouth. who could or would want to understand quinces,

jellies set in bulbous jars for the darkest days, lined up on our shelves in a basement of such days, where they shone, are still shining.

Table of Contents

Contents

Translating [with] Jan Wagner

Part One

rhino gecko quince paté
essay on gnats elderflower december 1914
the west wejherowo teabag augustin lopez: the art of topiary chameleon pinochle nicosia corn

Part Two

mushrooms histories: onesilos moor-oxen see-saw störtebeker clover bedsheets in the well self-portrait with a swarm of bees lazarus amish elegy for knievel oysters solitaire the man from the sea doberman the merman steinway sloes centaurs’ blues essay on soap

Part Three

owl from the globe factory koalas krynica morska essay on napkins nail rain barrel variations essay on fences elk ficus watkinsiana dachshund rübezahl field poppy pieter codde: portrait of a man with watch koi

Notes
Acknowledgments

Editorial Reviews

"The Art of Topiary is a poetry collection of indescribable wonder. . . . The contrast between the openness of Wagner's words and the tight adherence to form only makes each more beautiful. David Keplinger's care in translating these from the original German never demands to be felt, and yet is inescapable. The Art of Topiary will stick with you long after its poems have been thoroughly devoured."—The Atlantic

International Praise for Jan Wagner

“The longer Jan Wagner writes, the more choreographed the scenes seem to be, the restraint, the historical, the remote material are more present and less sought. The effect is impressive: Jan Wagner is close to a Master of Delight.”—Süddeutsche Zeitung

“In his poetry he is a wise observer with a cheerful curiosity. Watching him work is enjoyable, as he describes pure enjoyment. . . . Jan Wagner transforms life into a new life. . . . In its best moments, his poetry transcends the metaphor of its appetizing and ingenious pastry-art.”—Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

“Charming, interesting and surprising in the choice of topics . . . Through a choice of extremely specific details Jan Wagner manages to create a sense of a common experience and wonder at being alive.”—Oxford Brookes Poetry Center

From the Publisher