Back to Issue Fifty-Eight

REVERBERATION

by SIMONE LAPPERT, TRANS. BY FABIENNE RINK

soundlessness combs the eardrum out,

enshevels the clamor of the years, makes you all ear

and aware. the silence, a phonograph needle, moves along memories,

replays once more what was. no getting up now,

just blinking and breathing and staying quiet,

waiting for the hidden track of this discomfort.

 

 

OVERCOMING

by SIMONE LAPPERT, TRANS. BY FABIENNE RINK

you push the crisis

in zigzags across the lawn,

and leave the flowers standing.

 

 

MELTING

by SIMONE LAPPERT, TRANS. BY FABIENNE RINK

it bestirs itself now, what ducked under the ice,

for worse or borrowed betterness:

fossils, long overdue shifting-maneuvers.

under parquets, forest floors, highways,

under sandbanks, marble, power plants, seas,

the debt notes shimmer through,

unthinkabilities deposit,

the continents move towards each other.

 

Swiss author Simone Lappert has published two novels and one poetry collection, längst fällige verwilderung (long overdue feralization, Diogenes 2022). She has received multiple awards and stipends, is the president of the international lyric festival in Basel and part of other committees and collectives. She was also Writer in Residence at the German House at New York University, and lives and works as a writer in Zurich.

Fabienne Rink is a literary translator and journalist from Germany. She holds an MFA in Literary Translation from the University of Iowa and is also pursuing an MA in Literary & Cultural Studies from TU Dortmund University. In 2025, Fabienne won World Literature Today’s Student Translation Prize in poetry.

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