David Keplinger

My association with Jan Wagner began in 2009 as a series of emails. I had set out, with an Austrian friend, to translate four or five of Wagner’s recent poems. As the conversations deepened I began to plot in my mind’s eye the topography of this voice, using forms as my map to chart the way. The formal conventions of the sonnet, sestina, haiku, and even blues were my first guide to bringing these works into English. But at the same time the poet’s imagination outsized the legends and pushed against the boundaries, trudged outward into wilderness, forged uncharted roads. The struggle to translate Wagner became for me the very reason why I wanted to read him; and to read him made me want to study ever closer his technique and genius, to walk at snail’s pace through those unmarked terrains. Soon, Wagner and I were working on the poems ourselves, stopping and starting and gathering poems in clusters. After eight years we completed The Art of Topiary using nothing other than email, the same mode in which we’d begun. We had not met. We never spoke over the phone. It was an old-fashioned correspondence.  I have included his well-known poem “Giersch,” a word which translates, more literally, into “bishop’s weed.” More important than the literal reference is the way the sound of “giersch” becomes like the plant itself, overtaking the poem, swallowing the poem up. Our translation settled on “clover,” certainly a different type of plant, but most faithful to the effect and intention of the original.  To seek that effect, as translator, is to render to the Caesar of literalness no more than it requires. Beyond this, in Wagner’s case especially, the mood music, the conventions of form, the conversations the words are having, and even the way the words are trying to break from formal restrictions—these are as much a part of the collage of meaning as any other aspect of the work.