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Gig Ryan

Electra to Clytemnestra

  • 1 Still Life | Translations: de
  • 2 Achilleus to Odysseus | Translations: de
  • 3 He extrapolates | Translations: dezh
  • 4 Heroic money | Translations: de
  • 5 Profile | Translations: de
  • 6 Mary Wollstonecraft
  • 7 Actaeon
  • 8 Thelma’s Hamlet
  • 9 Fallen Athlete
  • 10 Electra to Clytemnestra | Translations: de
Language: english
Translations: german (Elektra zu Klytämnestra)
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Electra to Clytemnestra

Your jewels and cut and my chopped dress
and awkward husband
in the lounge where he slinks
in a puff of
Hansel and Gretel jump from the idling ute
Sliced moon, you frolic
and robes sass my dirt floor
while I tear my hair, my brother’s footprints chip
and old flowers drop as you crony
through pamphlets of behaviour
for your blow-in – old admirer in his hushed shirt
proffering a bar stool while my herd goats bleat

Aztec’d life of laurels and libations
who died in the cause
I texta out stains and mistakes on my clothes
and pan the earth for ribboned hope
apart, a clue, his grassy voice cracked like an axe
or false memory that shoos you to a bride
A king at work a cairn at home
when night clumps like a jigsaw
You choose the finish and intent in your spiralled city’s
claimed suburb where I’m hostage to your incursions
your whim to broach my brother’s track
his beauty has left me that used to crinkle air. I tramp through ash
to look for the most wished for

© G.R.
From: Heroic Money
Rose Bay, N.S.W.: Brandl & Schlesinger Poetry, 2001
Audio production: M.Mechner, literaturWERKstatt berlin, 2003

Translations:

Language: german

Elektra zu Klytämnestra

Deine Juwelen dein Schnitt und mein gestückeltes Kleid
mein hölzerner Ehemann
in der guten Stube, in der er schleicht
in einem Paff
Hänsel und Gretel springen vom angeworfenen Pickup
Zerschnittener Mond. Du  hüpfst herum
und deine Gewänder pfeffern auf meinen dreckigen Fußboden
während ich mir die Haare ausreiße, bröckeln die Fußspuren meines Bruders
und alte Blüten fallen wenn du gut Freund wirst
den Verhaltensvorschriften
für deinen hereingewehten alten Bewunderer in seinem schweigenden Hemd
der einen Barhocker offeriert während meine Herdenziegen meckern

Aztekisiertes Leben von Lorbeeren und Ausgießungen
die für die Sache starben
Ich  lösche Flecken und Fehler aus meinen Kleidern
und wasche die Erde nach Hoffnungsschleifen aus
und dann, ein Hinweis, seine grasige Stimme krachte wie eine Axt
oder falsche Erinnerung, die dich zu einer Braut scheucht
Ein König bei der Arbeit, ein Hügelgrab zu Hause
wenn die Nacht sich zusammenstoppelt wie ein Puzzle
Du wählst das Ende und das Ziel im abgesteckten Vorort
deiner hoch aufragenden Stadt wo ich Geisel Deiner Raubzüge bin
und der Laune die Bahn meines Bruders zu blockieren
seine Schönheit hat mich verlassen die die Luft zum Kräuseln brachte. Ich stampfe durch Asche
um nach dem Meistgewünschten zu suchen

aus dem australischen Englisch von Kathrin Schmidt

auch in: Hochzeit der Elemente. Zeitgenössische australische Dichtung.
Hg. von Ivor Indyk
Köln: Du Mont 2004
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Gig Ryan

photo © gezett.de
* 05.11.1956, Melbourne, Australia
lives in: , Australia

Gig Ryan was born in Melbourne in 1956. She has published six collections of poetry:

The Division of Anger (1981); Manners of an Astronaut (1984); The Last Interior (1986); Excavation (1990); Pure and Applied (1998), which won the Victorian Premier’s Award for Poetry; and Heroic Money (2001). The poems selected here are from her two most recent collections. Ryan is also a song-writer, freelance reviewer, and since 1998, poetry editor of the Melbourne Age.

 photo © gezett.de
Ryan’s poetry has a terse, clipped quality, which springs from her concentrated use of irony. Irony is one of the strongest features in Australian writing, and has its roots in historical circumstance. It also works largely through tone and understatement, the unsaid, the implied, the attitude or gesture determining what is meant as much as what is actually said. In Ryan’s portraits and monologues, this traditional ironic stance is intensified through a deliberate awkwardness in the language, and a breaking of its syntactical forms, in order to heighten its gestural and emotional qualities, its tones of menace or disappointment, resentment or vulnerability, self-deception or illusion.

There is a determined resistence in Ryan’s poetry to fluency and ease, as if they papered over the jagged edge of experience, or diluted the power of expression. Her imagery , too, has an intensified, clipped, expressionist quality. Many of the poems in this selection have classical antecedents, and the ghostly ideals of classical form and grace provide an active counterpoint to the rapid, abrupt, compounded or abbreviated presentation characteristic of Ryan’s contemporary landscapes. The use of historical figures also heightens the gestural and tonal intensities of her poems. These intensities also lurk in the vernacular, and like other poets in this group, Ryan mixes colloquial, commercial and poetic forms of language to great effect.

Publications
  • The division of anger

    poems

    Glebe, N.S.W. : Transit Poetry in association with Allbooks Distribution, 1980

  • Manners of an astronaut

    Sydney, NSW: Hale & Iremonger, 1984

  • The last interior

    Melbourne: Scripsi, 1986

  • Excavation

    arguments and monologues

    Sydney, N.S.W.: Pan Books, 1990

  • Pure and applied

    Brooklyn, N.S.W.: Paper Bark Press Craftsman house, 1998

  • Heroic Money

    Rose Bay, N.S.W.: Brandl & Schlesinger Poetry, 2001

Prizes
  • 1982 Anne Elder Award

  • 1999 Victorian Premier’s Award for Poetry

Links
  • Gig Ryan @ Poetry International Web

    More poems of Gig Ryan in original and further information about the poet.

    Website (en)

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