Late autumn leaves rhyme with stripes of rustdripping down all the round industrial concrete things.Mountains of old tires, garbage heaps, scrap metal, substations, waste,truth is the name we give to the choices to which we cling.But ah, it is exciting pulling in to New York! Near-anagram cafe Onioma; in the rain, an unusually gentle equestrianstatue, of a translator with sword: Franz Sigel;good weather for a memorial.John was sad, looked distant, sighed “Sometimes Iwish the Raggle-Taggle gypsies would come take me away.”I knew the deceased not well but since the beginning, tolda little story, not as meaningful as the others’, people liked it though.Like the pharaohs, we must have the most beautiful wordsready in our mouths so that they can accompany uson our journey to the world of darkness.When we go back out into the rain those are what we’ve heard. Image Information:Regentag, 1931, 150Watercolor on primed gauze on cardboard, 20.5 x 38.5 cmPrivate collectionImage credit: Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, Archive
Rainy Day
A Translation for Edie Grossman
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Copyright © 2024 by Damion Searls.
Published in Asymptote, “From The Complete Paintings and Drawings of Paul Klee, Translated into Verse” in January 2025.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Damion Searls has translated books by Nobel Prize winners Thomas Mann, Elfriede Jelinek, Hermann Hesse, Gide, Modiano, and Jon Fosse, as well as many other classic modern writers: Proust, Rilke, Nietzsche, Bachmann, Döblin, Robert Walser, Christa Wolf, Victoria Kielland, and Nescio. He has edited a one-volume abridgment of Henry David Thoreau’s Journal and produced a lost work of Hermann Melville’s; published criticism (Harper’s, Bookforum, New Republic), essays (Time, n+1, The Atlantic, The Believer), and poetry (Paris Review, New York Review of Books); and taught at universities (Princeton, Harvard, Wesleyan, Iowa Writers Program) and other venues (NYC Center for Fiction, 92nd St. Y, Naropa).
His own books include What We Were Doing and Where We Were Going (stories), The Inkblots (a history of the Rorschach Test and biography of its creator, Hermann Rorschach, which has been translated into ten languages), and The Philosophy of Translation.
Feature: The Complete Paintings and Drawings of Paul Klee, Translated into Verse
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Winner of the 2015 London Book Fair’s International Literary Translation Initiative Award, Asymptote is the premier site for world literature in translation. We take our name from the dotted line on a graph that a mathematical function may tend toward, but never reach. Similarly, a translated text may never fully replicate the effect of the original; it is its own creative act.
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