November 30, 2022

Max Sessner

ONE DAY

Everything comes back to haunt us
one day the boy you beat
up a long time ago
stands before you in the street car
he is like you now around
 
sixty his hair thin like
yours generally he looks 
like you moves like 
you as he approaches you
walks past gets off
 
at the next stop
that was it you turn
after him and note 
the stop and tomorrow
you will forget it
 
 
Translated from the German by Francesca Bell
 

from Rattle #77, Fall 2022
Tribute to Translation

__________

Max Sessner was born in 1959 in Fürth, Germany. He has long lived with his wife in Augsburg and has held a wide variety of jobs, working as a bookseller for the Augsburg public library, and currently for the department of public health. Sessner is the author of eight books of poetry including, most recently, Das Wasser von Gestern (The Water of Yesterday). | Francesca Bell: “I first came upon the poems of Max Sessner in the pages of the Austrian literary journal manuskripte. I was reading German-language journals with an eye toward finding a poet in whose work I could immerse myself, and those first eleven Sessner poems caught my attention and held it fast. I wrote immediately to ask permission to translate them. In Max Sessner’s work, I found a poetry that is simultaneously melancholy and funny, deeply tender and yet eviscerating. His voice is entirely, profoundly his own, and his poems, deceptively accessible, contain complex, often uncanny, ideas and sentiments. I remain fascinated and humbled by how deftly he uses surrealism, not to obscure reality, but to illuminate it.” (web)

Rattle Logo

January 21, 2019

Max Sessner

IT IS

Sunday and the bells
tolling to services one last
look in the mirror and
the pastor climbs into the pulpit
I want a new car
Father in heaven but something always
goes amiss and so we find
instead in the evening an
injured blackbird in the garden you make
your dress bloody as you
carry it gently into the house it doesn’t
bother you maybe you say
we’ll remember this day years from now
or we’ll dream of it
my dear your hair by the way
is going gray bit by bit and the bird will
likely not survive the night

 

—translated from the German by Francesca Bell

from Rattle #61, Fall 2018

__________

Max Sessner: “Why do I love poems? Every morning, I rode the bus from the village into the city to school. At one station, the old poet boarded. He was fat and looked friendly, a little like Pablo Neruda. He seated himself with the women who were also riding into the city. Unexpectedly, he began to recite his poems. The women laughed. I was impressed. They maybe weren’t especially good poems, but what does that mean? For a moment, the bus was a driving poem, and I sat inside it.” (web)

Francesca Bell: “I discovered Max Sessner’s poems in an Austrian journal called Manuskripte five months ago. Since then, I have translated 39 of them. His poems have a delicious combination of deep melancholy and dark humor, a mixture I am unable to resist, one I return to again and again. I’m proud and grateful to be the first person to translate his beautiful work into English.” (web)

Rattle Logo

January 18, 2019

Max Sessner

AUGUST EVENING

and chlorine scent on my shirt from
the swimming pool the aunts
are there smiling slipping me
small change and what do you
want to be someday they
ask the spirit I say of the
boy who drowned last
year while swimming
his bicycle still stood in winter
in front of the pool oh they sigh
and one scuttles to the bathroom
no one budges until
finally there’s a flush

 

—translated from the German by Francesca Bell

from Rattle #61, Fall 2018

__________

Max Sessner: “Why do I love poems? Every morning, I rode the bus from the village into the city to school. At one station, the old poet boarded. He was fat and looked friendly, a little like Pablo Neruda. He seated himself with the women who were also riding into the city. Unexpectedly, he began to recite his poems. The women laughed. I was impressed. They maybe weren’t especially good poems, but what does that mean? For a moment, the bus was a driving poem, and I sat inside it.” (web)

Francesca Bell: “I discovered Max Sessner’s poems in an Austrian journal called Manuskripte five months ago. Since then, I have translated 39 of them. His poems have a delicious combination of deep melancholy and dark humor, a mixture I am unable to resist, one I return to again and again. I’m proud and grateful to be the first person to translate his beautiful work into English.” (web)

Rattle Logo