Here are three poems from Daniela Danz’s 2020 collection Wilderness (Wildniß), which explores “wildness” and nature in the Anthropocene, traversing post-industrial, personal, and linguistic landscapes: the Azovstal plant by Mariupol, most recently known as the site of a siege in the early stages of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine; Nachterstedt, site of a deadly landslide;  and an unsettling dreamlike landscape on a train at night.

            The two “Cascade” poems are in a form Danz invented to imitate the movement of water as it rushes down a series of inclines and then slows to pool in level places. But language, Danz discovered in the process of composing her Cascades, works in the opposite way: a reader tends to slow down or even pause at individual words in the short tumbling and steplike “waterfall” lines, which are lineated so that each word (or short phrase) receives its own line; the longer pooling lines, on the other hand, encourage acceleration. The differences between German and English syntactical structures pose a particular translation challenge here: in the original, many of the “waterfall” sections end with dynamic verbs, and English syntax needs tweaking to land on words or phrases that merit the weight of longer attention.

            “Cascade of Work I” is the first of two poems in Wilderness written in the voice of workers at Mariupol’s Azovstal steelworks, a massive Soviet-built plant notorious for the environmental havoc it wreaked. The poems came out of Danz’s 2018 visit to the plant during a German-Ukrainian literary exchange after Russia’s initial invasion of Ukraine in 2014. This 2018 trip is documented in the 30-minute film Nachtzug nach Mariupol (Night Train to Mariupol); see https://paperbridge.de/ueber-das-projekt. In this first poem, workers illustrate the gulf between those inside the plant and outside it, a gulf as great and as incongruous as the tropical scenes in Cold War-era murals decorating the steelworks. The poem’s context has shifted, tragically, in recent years; where it once revealed traces of Soviet-era notions of industrial progress that continued in independent Ukraine, the setting now inevitably calls to mind the brutal siege of Mariupol in 2022, the destruction of the plant, and the ongoing Russian occupation of the city.

            “Nachterstedt Cascade” is set in a coal-mining region in Sachsen-Anhalt. The poem refers to a catastrophic landslide in 2009 at the edge of a former coal mine pit turned artificial lake; the bodies of the three victims were never recovered, and residents were never even allowed back into their homes to collect their belongings. Danz, who grew up in a potash mining region, frequently returns to the costs and consequences of mines and mining in her work—see for example “Jackdaw You Tuck Your Head in Your Plumage” from her 2014 V.

            In contrast to the two “Cascade” poems, Danz does not identify a specific landscape for “The Clothes Hanger and the Ineffable”; the poem lives in the restlessness and disorientation of transit. As the speaker traverses a border, she enters an imaginary scene where she is suddenly fixed in place: there’s a kind of domesticity here, but it’s marked by deprivation, isolation, poverty, outside of the modern vision capitalist Europe attempts to offer. Composed in one long sentence punctuated only by dashes and colons, this poem offers a typical (and pleasurable!) challenge when translating Danz: to construct phrases that balance sense, momentum, and music in lines that, like Danz’s, frequently break against syntax and, often, in places that a poetry workshop might flag as “awkward” but which give her work a characteristic energy.

            All three poems come out of and contribute to the landscape of Danz’s Wilderness, one which we feel and know intimately, even if the exact locations are foreign to us. The (post-) industrial world we contend with now came out of a belief that industry could master wilderness and nature; this illusion falls like scales from our eyes with every passing year, with each industrial, natural, and political disaster. Still, we travel and squat and cry into our pots, humming our dissonances as we seek—when we are not bent on destroying one another—to feed each other.