Wickerwork is the first translation of the German poet and priest Christian Lehnert into English. The bilingual edition includes selections from three of his most recent collections: Opus 8, Im Flechtwerk (Opus 8, Wickerwork, 2022), Cherubinischer Staub (Cherub Dust, 2018), and Windzüge (Windstrokes, 2015). Lehnert was born in 1969 in Dresden, in the former East Germany. Only after the fall of the Berlin Wall was he able to study and travel before returning to become a Lutheran minister in a small rural community in Saxony and taking up university posts in Wittenberg and Leipzig.
Lehnert’s material is nature: trees and birds, but also a more unconventional repertoire of lichen, stone, insects, jellyfish, amoebae and microbes. He revels in naming and taxonomy: his “theophanic environmentalism”, as his translator, Richard Sieburth, terms it in his introduction, is imbued with philosophy, insights from the Zohar, a central document on Jewish mysticism, and quotations from the liturgy. Formally, Lehnert invokes the baroque period, his intricate sequences suggesting cantatas in their mathematically inflected forms and precise rhythms. Elsewhere, traces of the baroque writers Jakob Böhme and Angelus Silesius come to the fore, condensed into Lehnert’s signature twelve-footed rhymed distichs.
His voice is entirely unique in German, and Sieburth makes a case for his importance in English too. But in comparing him to two other Saxon poets of the same generation, Durs Grünbein and Lutz Seiler, he is surely wrong. Unlike theirs, Lehnert’s is a solitary encounter with the non-human, lacking any trace of dissidence, critique of environmental degradation or doubt. “There the growth of things is never in doubt. // The linden / the lung-tree / is breathing out.” His imagination is precise, patient, yearning. It goes in search of everyday epiphanies in minute natural “happenings”: seeds splitting open, hoarfrost transmuting a twig to a feather. But it also documents the vast interconnectedness of being on earth in the mundane hydraulics of existence – sap, slime, metabolic exchange – and enacts it in a dense weave of sound.
Lehnert’s economy and intricate formal games are a challenge to any translator. There is much to admire here in the overall effect, but the bilingual format is also exposing. Choosing to prioritize the rhymes and formal features (especially in the couplets, where there is so little room for manoeuvre) inevitably sometimes comes at the cost of fluid rhythm, appropriate register and, occasionally, sense. Nevertheless, Wickerwork gives a sense of this singular German voice.
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