Anja Utler’s poetry is rooted in the body. Her poems’ tendrils climb up the throat to the tongue, their rhizomes creep under the skin. They trace the origins of vocal expression to a point prior to language, where breath’s vibrations first give rise to sound.

In engulf – enkindle, Utler’s second volume of poetry and the first to be translated from German into English, the emergence of sound from the body is tightly interwoven with imagery of landscapes scarred by human intervention. Slagheaps, clearcuts, and river dams find their parallels in prelingual scraping and choking in the throat as speech seeks to issue forth.

The book’s second half, from which these selections are taken, consists of Utler’s reworkings of mythological motifs. Along with a cycle that considers the conflation of Kronos, the Titan, with Chronos, the god of time, Utler devotes cycles to three of Apollo’s victims: Marsyas, Daphne, and the Cumaean Sibyl. Included here are the Sibyl and Marsyas cycles.

The Sibyl, an oracle of Apollo, persuades the god to grant her one year of life for every grain of sand she is able to hold in her hand, and in return offers him her virginity. When she subsequently refuses the god, he punishes her by prolonging only her life, and not her youth. Thus the Sibyl shrivels away until only her voice is left. The sibilance in this cycle is an echo of the Sibyl’s name; it lingers even after the prophetess’s body has wasted away.

The satyr Marsyas, too, suffers on Apollo’s account. After discovering the aulos, a reed pipe, he loses a contest of musical skill to Apollo. The god wins by treachery, proposing that the two contestants play their instruments upside-down, a feat possible with the lyre but, alas for Marsyas, not with the aulos. This victory gives the god the right to do anything he wishes to Marsyas, and so he flays the satyr and stretches his skin on a tree.

In the paired stanzas of this cycle, the flaying occupies the top of each page, while a reed grows and is honed into a pipe in the bottom quatrains. Ingressive sounds (indicated in brackets) punctuate these stanzas. These sounds could perhaps be read as a pipe player’s gasps for breath between notes, but they are also Marsyas’s gasps of pain as the god carves his flesh. (The consonants are drawn from the surrounding words, so the English and the German do not always coincide.) The trembling air of the reed pipe gives way to Marsyas’s own cries, until finally his blood and tears flow forth in a river.

Each cycle uncovers a phonic remainder in language, a layer of sound that precedes or exceeds meaning. In my translation, I have sought to preserve these sounds, both the Sibyl’s hisses and Marsyas’s gasps. When the English translations are read alongside Utler’s masterly recordings of the German texts, these sounds resonate between the languages.

—Kurt Beals

Click on the red text to read the full English translation and hear the original German.