Seeing Vienna: Poems Inspired by Christine de Grancy’s Photographs

Tess Lewis presents her translations of Maja Haderlap’s poetic cycle “Seeing Vienna,” inspired by the photographs of Christine de Grancy.

By Maja Haderlap, Tess LewisDecember 8, 2021

The poems in Maja Haderlap’s “Seeing Vienna” cycle were inspired by the black-and-white photographs of Vienna taken by the noted photographer Christine de Grancy, whose pictures recall Yvon’s Paris. Born in Czechoslovakia in 1942, de Grancy discovered photography in 1965. Starting in 1975, she regularly clambered over the roofs of Vienna for a bird’s-eye-view of the city. Her work has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art in Vienna, the Photography Biennale Torino in Italy, the Museum of Modern Art in Passau, the WestLicht/Leica Gallery in Vienna and many other galleries. In honor of de Grancy’s 80th birthday, photographs from her four-decade long portrait of Vienna were collected into the volume Über die Welt und den Zeiten (On the World and Times) along with responses in verse and prose by fourteen renowned Mitteleuropean authors. My translation of a selection of Haderlap’s poems, distant transit, will be out with Archipelago next February.

— Tess Lewis

¤

I

My thoughts, laden with light

and forgetting, do they push forward in time

or just backward to the outer edge of the picture?

Do they bore more deeply in the silt

to that submerged place, dive down into

the constellations of the deep where a reflection swims,

a veduta drifts? Seen from this angle, the city thinks

and imagines itself. Under the open sky,

beneath bursting clouds, it swells. The eye

of the diver who raised it has been wept dry. Vienna.

Nonsensical Vienna! Titans tap on your roofs in the dark.

II

All those gods who watch over you are blind.

They believed you immortal, lashed by

rainstorms, inundated by the Danube’s floods.

They loved your illusion, as did all who came

and stayed and left. Countless bell towers

rang their hours of reckoning. The expiration date

of each eternity had run out before it began.

From the ground I gather up the splinters

of my attempts at love. Congealed sparks of light,

great promises, airy fluff. Fortuna’s shadow

falls across my face, at random, a punch line.

III

Riders galloping out of earlier ages.

Above glistening squares heroes and warriors,

enthroned, alternate with nymphs and korai.

White horses dance ballet, a Slovenian lout

swindles salt from the emperor’s pocket.

A bee colony flees under the empress’ skirts.

Just bees, Slovenians, who swarm and surge.

A visionary invents the Living Wheel in outer space.

His observatory glows. A censor chastens

and forges the neighbors’ languages,

a poet flees from the seamstress who feeds him,

a prisoner recapitulates his novel in his cell.

The empress’s rustling skirts over the gravel.

The nautilus lies in the watery depths. Its chambers are empty.

Its chambers are black. The empress lifts off into space.

IV

The city divided into internal and external, into visible

and invisible, on their boundaries I lived. Neither

at home nor abroad, neither arrived

nor departed. Each withered cactus in a

neglected display case, each dusty window

in the side streets where I lived was as familiar

as the name of a body part and just as strange.

Beautiful residence! Lavish, in any case, with the embellishment

of its history, the old palaces fossilized

into casings once the mollusks had moved out.

Their former subjects now populate them

as guests. They stroll along the Ring, as if awakening,

lethargically, in the eiderdown of their losses. What elsewhere

would be a catastrophe and spark protests

is peacefully tolerated here, Milena writes.

She knows that Vienna is on the last legs of its glory.

It will reinvent itself one day when only

the name, Milena, will survive it. Everything will be

freshly priced, offered and contrived as myth.

V

Idols with resonant names and a blood-soaked

history attached spent their temporary exile

on roofs and facades.

Sentenced to silence, they paused

in summoning the oceans. In the battle

against the eternal enemy, their lethal

victory signs froze. The fanfares from above — who

followed their call? Even the goddess Fama could no longer

understand the chatter that hummed

on all sides. Full of melancholy, the thinkers lay

their weighty heads under the pigeons’

feet. The globe no longer rolled,

it stayed in place. In the timberwork

of a city that engulfed it.

VI

I recently dreamt of city built

upon sleeping sand. When I awoke

it strewed sand, fine-grained, in my eyes.

It trickled into me or did I sink into it

in the estuary of those student days

that flowed into the past never to return?

The report of moments arrayed in pictures

that tell a fleeting story yet conceal

everything that actually happened.

The spines of books on shelves, the chink of light,

rich with dust, in the reading room of a library,

the chair legs scraping against the parquet.

The screeching and pounding of the tramcar

in the curve at the outlet of an alley,

the streaks of water on a coffee tray,

the barely visible, barely audible flotsam of those days.

Ever since the gleaming city at the foot of the Nußberg

disappeared in my lens and sank within me,

I have been searching for it, holding its

reflection, myself, as I saw it then.

¤

Maja Haderlap was born into the Slovenian-speaking minority of Carinthia, Austria. She writes in German, and was awarded the Ingeborg-Bachmann-Preis and the Rauriser Literaturpreis for her novel Engel des Vergessens, which was published in Tess Lewis’s English translation as Angel of Oblivion in 2016. In 2018, Haderlap was awarded the Max Frisch Prize of the City of Zurich. The jury wrote that her “poetry and prose combine poetic brilliance with explosive political power.” In 2021, she was awarded the Christine Lavant Prize.

Tess Lewis is a writer and translator from French and German. Her translations include works by Walter Benjamin, H. M. Enzensberger, Christine Angot, and Philippe Jaccottet. She was awarded the 2017 PEN Translation Prize for Maja Haderlap’s Angel of Oblivion and her translation of Lukas Bärfuss’s One Hundred Days was shortlisted for the Oxford/Weidenfeld Translation Prize. She is an advisory editor for TheHudson Review.

All photographs © Christine de Grancy.