A body, a notion: translating Karla Reimert's 'Picnic with black bees'

Picnic With Black Bees is my translation of Karla Reimert’s 2014 book of poems, Picknick mit Schwarzen Bienen. It is a speckled text. It is a picnic with Paul Celan, Sigmund Freud, with the Danish Isefjord, a spinning tornado cake. It is a book wholly preoccupied by the ways in which language impinges upon perceived existence (and the other way around).

The book contains a remarkable aesthetic disparity between its four chapters, a voice that shifts at rapid-fire pace (often between poems, stanzas, and even lines). But Picnic with Black Bees throbs consistently in its embodiment: it is a wholeness that testifies, albeit erratically, to the astonishing ways with which language both forms and un-forms sensation, perception, and identity. My task, then, was to render a English-language poetic space that might accomplish a similar unsettlement for the English-language reader, all the while maintaining an awareness of the fact that the reader is, indeed, reading a text translated from the German.

In my introduction, I address how I intimately aligned myself with what is a very personal poetic endeavor. I will address how contextual cues and changes often accomplished the necessary task of elaborating on certain individual “untranslatable” words, as well as Picnic’s dogged insistence upon historical and canonical insertion and subversion. Ultimately, I speak to the ways in which Reimert’s directed wordplay (and my translation thereof) establishes a vernacular all its own, in a translation that both disquiets and delights.