Ingeborg Bachmann - Tumblr Posts

My Bird

by Ingeborg Bachmann

Whatever comes to pass: the devastated world

sinks back into twilight,

the forest offers it a sleeping potion,

and from the tower the watchman’s forsaken,

peaceful and constant the eyes of the owl stare down.

Whatever comes to pass: you know your time,

my bird, you put on your veil

and fly through the mist to me.

We peer into the haze where the rabble houses.

Yon follow my nod and storm out

in a whirl of feathers and fur—

My ice-gray shoulder companion, my weapon,

adorned with that feather, my only weapon!

My only finery: your veil and your feather.

And even when my skin burns

in the needle dance beneath the tree,

and the hip-high shrubs

tempt me with their spicy leaves,

when my curls dart like snake tongues,

sway and long for moisture,

the dust of distant stars still falls

right on my hair.

When I, in a helmet of smoke,

come back to my senses.

my bird, my nighttime ally,

when I’m ablaze in the night

the dark grove crackles

and I hammer the sparks from my limbs.

And when I stay ablaze as I am,

loved by the flame

until the resin streams out of the trunks,

drips over the wounds and

spins the earth warm into thread

(and though you rob my heart at night,

my bird of belief, my bird of faith!)

the watchtower moves into brightness

where you, tranquil now,

alight in magnificent peace—

whatever comes to pass.

—translated from the German by Mark Anderson

Random Collection of Essays, Poems, and Books

Clarice Lispector “Love”                              “One Day Less” Alejandra Pizarnik Excerpt from Diana’s Tree Angela Carter The Bloody Chamber Helene Cixous “Coming to Writing”                          Stigmata  Alice Notley “Iphigenia”  Julia Kristeva “On the Melancholic Imaginary”                        Excerpt from Black Sun                        The Kristeva Reader Franz Kafka Letters to Milena 

Ingeborg Bachmann Collected Poems Simone Weil The First and Last Notebooks                       “The Iliad, of the Poem of Force” Velimir Khlebnikov Collected Works Vol I                                Vol II                                 Vol III

Maggie Nelson The Argonauts                            Bluets

Susan Sontag Illness as Metaphor                        “Against Interpretation” 

Roland Barthes The Pleasure of Text Marcel Proust In Search of Lost Time Vol 1 

Random Collection of Essays, Poems, and Books

Clarice Lispector “Love”                              “One Day Less” Alejandra Pizarnik Excerpt from Diana’s Tree Angela Carter The Bloody Chamber Helene Cixous “Coming to Writing”                          Stigmata  Alice Notley “Iphigenia”  Julia Kristeva “On the Melancholic Imaginary”                        Excerpt from Black Sun                        The Kristeva Reader Franz Kafka Letters to Milena 

Ingeborg Bachmann Collected Poems Simone Weil The First and Last Notebooks                       “The Iliad, of the Poem of Force” Velimir Khlebnikov Collected Works Vol I                                Vol II                                 Vol III

Maggie Nelson The Argonauts                            Bluets

Susan Sontag Illness as Metaphor                        “Against Interpretation” 

Roland Barthes The Pleasure of Text Marcel Proust In Search of Lost Time Vol 1 

“And everything stayed unsaid.”

— Ingeborg Bachmann, tr. by Eavan Boland, from “Departure from England,”