kochanie, today i bought bread. Uljana Wolf. Trans. by Greg Nissan. World Poetry Books, 2023. 128 pages.

Uljana Wolf’s collection kochanie, today i bought bread, translated by Greg Nissan, depicts language as always arising on a borderland. The book consists of four sections—“displacement of the mouth,” “subplots,” “kochanie, today i bought bread,” and “krzyżowa, companions,” each containing some short cycles and individual poems. A poet born in East Berlin and a translator from English and Polish, Wolf is a pivotal figure for the contemporary trend of translingual writing. She incorporates multiple languages into a single work and breaks down her primary German into its essential components to be rearranged into rich neologisms. Nissan’s translation precisely captures these innovations: “fuckrich,” “tongue-arch,” and “purgatorrents.” But these phonetic and morphological experiments do not occur in a vacuum, outside of historical context: Wolf is very conscious of the multiple coexisting histories around the territory of former East Germany, especially given her Polish-German Silesian heritage. The title of the collection begins with a Polish term of endearment “kochanie,” meaning “honey” and “darling” a seemingly innocuous testament to the geopolitical turbulence that allows for such hybridity. Most explicitly, this history is reflected in the nightmarish cycle “the ovens slept” with its historical and geographic snapshots of Berlin, Glauchau, Malczyce/Maltsch, and Legnica/Liegnitz as sites of war, destruction, and shifting political identity.

The collection’s opening poem “displacement of the mouth” introduces the depersonalization of the spoken word in the context of geopolitical borderlands as the book’s central concern:

around four in the morning
i watch the mouth’s dis
placement

with the last
yawning gust
the house shuts
its lips thin as lids

in contrast the sky cracks
back its jaw : lightblue
close to uvula
over the dark taut
tongue-arch of the forest

from a misted mouth
a rain a long held
breath unravels: as if
speaking through
the sleeper’s lashes

This overture initiates the analogy between embodied language and geography. Words are materialized through breath that becomes a gust of wind against a shuttered house. The firmament, earth and sky, are contained within the mouth; the uvula connects to the “tongue-arch of the forest.” The displacement of language is also a “placement,” signaled graphically by the intra-word enjambment at the end of the first stanza. In the linguistic limit where Wolf’s speech is mouthed, language is drawn from “fairy tales, bureaucratic lingo, socialist songs and newspapers, the language of trains and travel,” as Nissan notes in his translator’s afterword. These words, always situated in the body, even “cough[ing] in the mailbox” as in “post,” are broken down into essential components to be recombined and reconstituted.

Wolf’s poetics often boils language down its essential components—phonemes and morphemes—and rearranges them to produce new combinations. The generative potential of repetition and sameness has been a staple of theoretical thought since the heyday of postmodernism. From Gilles Deleuze’s valorization of repetition in itself to Judith Butler’s use of performativity theory to describe the creation of gender through repeated acts, thinkers and artists have seemingly long moved on from the modernist faith in absolute newness, questioning whether that newness is still possible. Indeed, Jacob Edmund’s Make It the Same (2022), playing off Ezra Pound’s famous injunction, sketches a global trend of self-conscious copying as a device in poetic cultures in the latter half of the twentieth century, surveying texts ranging from the performances of Moscow Conceptualist poet Dmitry Prigov to Christian Bök’s crystalline structures. In kochanie, today i bought bread, Wolf’s poetics of false starts, murmurs, and repetitions participates in this larger international aesthetic while being profoundly situated in the experience of the body and the fraught geography of East Germany. As shown in “displacement of the mouth,” language for Wolf is embodied in its oral form and contains the entire heavens and earth, the world constituted by recombinations of breath and sound.

Most emblematic of the generative power of permutation and recombination of elements comes in the subsection “subplots.” While the original German “flurstücke” refers specifically to plots of land, the translation of the title and its punning association gestures to the text’s narratological experimentation. The pun also subtly reinforces one of the collection’s underlying trio of metaphors: literary production (fairytale “subplots”) is political geography (“plots of land”). The poetic sequence “my cadastre (i-viii)” is structured as a theme and variations on a single fairy tale-esque motif. Most famously, the Soviet folklore scholar Vladimir Propp analyzed folktales as being composed of basic plot units that continually reappear. Thus, Wolf takes advantage of this genre’s shared and limited vocabulary of elements to trace the various subplots lying latent beneath the overarching master narrative:

my fathers
are simple men

they have daughters
just as i am

we dare to question
we wear our father’s

embroidered word
into the darkest woods

The father-daughter relationship is represented as one of patriarchal domination. Though the
speaker (de-individualized through a group “we”) wears the father’s embroidered word, there is
already a glimmer of the resistance to emerge at the end of the cycle. In this tightly wound form,
Greg Nissan’s deftness as a translator is on full display, reproducing the fairytale-like structure of
the original through slant rhymes. Though the enjambment and stanza break “we wear our
father’s/embroidered word” is syntactically a departure from the original (“wir tragen
gestickt”/unseres vaters wort, literally “we wear embroidered/our father’s word”), the choice
preserves the phonetic flow of the line as well as its visual symmetry on the page. In the third
entry in this cycle, the origin of speech is displaced, revealed to be outside the speaker’s control:

my mouths
are no simple fathers

the first one speaks
i’ve measured

the second keeps quiet
i wasn’t remembered

the rest always quarrel
the rest get their way

Swapping out “fathers” for “mouths” may at first appear like a cut-up substitution of the two
that produces a nightmarish image. In his review of the collection, Mark Tardi notes the
subsequent variants on this “combinatorial and recursive structure, recalling the tintinnabuli
accretion via minute variations,” comparing Wolf’s method to that of minimalist composer Arvo
Pärt or the language poet Michael Palmer. The comparison is apt, capturing the shift in emphasis
from individual words to their syntactic and real-world relationships. However, this methodology
does not suggest that the individual words themselves are meaningless. Indeed, this third variant
adds depth to the patriarchal world depicted in the first: language itself (the speaker’s mouths)
emerges in Lacanian fashion from the law of the father, problematizing the poet’s agency over
her speech.

The further variations on the opening line “my fathers / are simple men” found in this cycle
similarly appear based on simple substitutions executed with mathematical precision—“my
fathers / are simple surveyors” and “my fathers / are no simple surveyors”; “my mouths / are
simple daughters” and “my daughters / are no simple mouths”; “my fathers / are no simple
rhymes” and “my daughters / are no foolish mouths.” Nevertheless, the daughters shift from
being “simple” to gaining agency, rejecting the moniker of “foolish mouths” given to them by
patriarchy. Through this series of seemingly meaning-blind substitutions and rearrangements,
consciousness and self-consciousness emerge: the cycle concludes with a parenthetical but
nonetheless powerful call to action “(but it was time).” Despite this algorithmic execution, these
lines chart out the cycle as concerned with language as the site of domination.

Wolf’s collection poignantly illustrates the generative and political potential found in
recombining semantically dead material such as fairytales and commonplace words. Held in
hypostatic tension throughout this collection are the network of relationships between the units
of meaning and sound and the words themselves as meaningful units. The words can both be
disassembled into individual units and exist in their original contexts, shimmering between these
two positions. Voice emerges on contested territory, verbal agency always appearing as a struggle
against inherited language, against the “hierarchical snarl” of the social word.