Kerstin Hensel

BAHNHOF VERSTEHEN

Language: german

Translations: english (DESOLATION STATION)

BAHNHOF VERSTEHEN

Wir werden zurückbleiben wenn schwer
Beladen die Tender
Mit dem Schüttgut der Kriege
Rangieren, zurückbleiben wenn
Erz für die Väter, Koks für die Söhne, die Asche der Enkel
Wagen um Wagen besetzen. Eingleisig
Fährt mit verspiegelten Scheiben der Glücksexpreß
Aus der Welt. Auf verbogenen Zehen
Gehen uns die Tauben an
Um ein Fressen. Mäuse im Schienenbett
Tragen die Meldungen weiter wohin
Soll die Reise gehn Russland
Schafft Durchzug und Polen steht offen, nur wir
Bleiben zurück weil wir nicht wissen Wohin ja wohin Im Fundbüro
Wohnen wir zwischen vergessnen Signalen und hören
Wer sich davonmacht wenn´s pfeift.

Kerstin Hensel

photo © gezett.de

* 29.05.1961, Karl-Marx-Stadt (Chemnitz), Germany
lives in: , Germany

Kerstin Hensel was born in 1961 in Karl-Marx-Stadt (now called Chemnitz again). There, she studied at the Medical School and worked for three years as a nurse in the surgery, before she took up studies in literature at the renowned Johannes R. Becher Institute in Leipzig as well as two years of apprenticeship at the Leipziger Theater. Kerstin Hensel gave a number of lectures at the “Ernst Busch”-Highschool for Actors in Berlin, at the Highschool for Films in Potsdam and at the German Institute for Literature in Leipzig, but in addition to that, she works as a writer since 1987. She lives in Berlin.

photo © gezett.de

Kerstin Hensel has published three novels: Tanz am Kanal (1994), Gipshut (1999) and Im Spinnhaus (2003), several volumes of collected stories, including Im Schlauch (1993) and Neunerlei (1997), numerous volumes of poetry, the most recent of which is Bahnhof verstehen (2003), moreover, she wrote dramatic plays, movie scripts, libretti and radio plays.

For her poetry, Kerstin Hensel was awarded the Anna-Seghers-Prize of the Berlin Academy of Arts (1987), the Leonce-und-Lena-Prize (1991), and the Gerrit-Engelke-Prize (1999).

Kerstin Hensel stands out in her generation of poets, because of her supreme awareness of formal aspects. Her poetry belongs to a tradition that seeks the political inside the poetical, and that dissects the presence in the individual. She stands in one line with Bertolt Brecht, with writers like Karl Mickel or Volker Braun, who share a wide formal knowledge and practice their craft with great nimbleness.

Hensel’s poetry covers the range between tradition and everyday-life, and it surmounts this dichotomy to come to terms with a reality loaded with discursiveness but unwilling to lose itself in a bantering anything goes. It is the multifarious simplicity of her images, a counterweight to her rich allusions, her jocular mastery of language, that makes her poems delusive plays never to be completely translated.

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