Esther DischereitSometimes a Single Leaf by Iain Galbraith

Abstract

appalling injustice occurs when, during the movement of sending “urban youth” to the countryside, a villager attempted to rape a young woman from the city and was sentenced to death immediately, whereas when an urban youth raped a village girl, he could escape without any punishment, except for some “monetary compensation.” Besides, the memoir is also a literary testament to the greatness of humanity. “Goodness was the foundation and the basis of our humanity,” as Yan declares. It depicts the sense of duty of three brothers, who shoulder their responsibilities from the moment they become “fathers.” It displays the sense of dignity, which is “the spirit of life”—Yan was once beaten severely by his father for stealing and telling lies. It describes the bond and warmth of the family: Yan’s elder sister sacrificed her own opportunity so that Yan could enroll in high school. In this sense, the book is a celebration of the power of one family to hold together in spite of harsh circumstances. Even though all three brothers are illiterate , they have deep insight toward life and death, like philosophers. According to Yan, “Human life is that finite distance between you and death, and if you progress at a certain pace, it will take you a considerably longer period of time to reach death,” which is the essence of traditional Chinese wisdom. Perhaps this is the reason why “I had to return again to that land . . . since regardless of where you go, and regardless of how far you travel, your home and your land will always be under your feet,” as Yan declared in his prefatory essay, “The Home from Which I Walked Away.” In times of darkness , Yan can always find the gleaming light of humanity by returning to his roots. Yang Jing Nanjing Normal University Esther Dischereit Sometimes a Single Leaf Trans. Iain Galbraith. Todmorden, United Kingdom. Arc. 2020. 133 pages. BORN IN GERMANY in 1952 to a Jewish mother who had survived the Holocaust in hiding, Esther Dischereit grew up in a haunted society, where the crimes of the recent past were effectively suppressed despite their omnipresent traces. These poems, drawn from published collections spanning the years 1996 to 2007 as well as from more recent work, give voice to disorientation and pain, as well as endurance and resolve, in the unwelcome work of calling history to account, of witnessing to the ghostly “once-weres,” invisible to her contemporaries . A fine preface by the translator Iain Galbraith provides biographical context and introduces rich avenues of interpretation . Galbraith’s translations render very compellingly the sparse lines and subtle rhythms of Dischereit’s free-verse poems. “Time has no meaning / it has material ,” Dischereit writes. Indeed, her poems give the collisions of past and present a striking, material quality, often figured as vestiges and residues, whether splinters (a term Galbraith discusses in his preface), shards, streaks, or dust. Many of her poems distill German Romantic nationalism into a single word or image—the moon, flowers , a lone tree, Beethoven, Snow White, a beer—and place them in fraught narrative sequences or effaced landscapes of horror such as Dachau, Plötzensee, or the Putlitz Bridge. Of particular power are her poems that stage complex human interactions. Sometimes vicious, sometimes loving, these encounters are often conveyed in an imagery of entanglement, where arms and legs are violently encircled and restrained; or the hands and hair—of mother and daughter ?—are braided together. An excursion with a friend or a lover provides the occasion for a mutual weaving together—“I am weaving you in / and he wove me in”—and seems to stand as a rare moment of grace and an integrative ideal within this corpus. The titular poem, “Sometimes a single leaf,” pays tribute to the fleeting, irreproducible flight of a leaf buffeted by the wind, which the poet tries and fails to pursue in a kind of dance. The poem thus lays bare the fragility, ephemerality, and irreplaceability of singular existence. But if reanimation or even reenactment are impossible, the final line, “As I recently told you,” allows for repetition in the telling. That seems the faithful task which Dischereit sets for herself as a...