The Loveliest Vowel Empties
The Loveliest Vowel Empties is a collection of 49 poems by the visionary Berlin-born Swiss artist Meret Oppenheim (1913-1985). Associated with the Surrealists and best known for her fur-lined teacup and saucer that premiered at MoMA in 1936, Oppenheim created an oeuvre spanning sculptures, assemblages, collages, drawings—and poems. Though she died in 1985, she only received her first major US retrospective in 1996. Oppenheim’s poems were chiefly written in the 1930s and 40s and are collected here in English for the first time.
Like her artworks, her poems startle and delight: “I gut my mushrooms / I am the first guest come through / And let fall the walls.” Each brief piece is full of surreal élan: “A rainbow encamps on the streets, / Undermined only by the distant buzz of giant bees.”
The Loveliest Vowel Empties conjures the briefest fables in an enchanted atmosphere. Oppenheim chiefly wrote in German, but composed seven of the poems included here in French and later translated them into German. This edition includes the French and German texts, allowing the reader to compare Oppenheim’s versions with Kathleen Heil’s English translations:
Elle reparaît dans les nuages
Mangeant du massepain.Sieht man sie wieder in den Wolken
Marzipan essend.She reappears in the clouds
Munching on marzipan.
Heil has deftly captured the nimble verve of Oppenheim’s originals, and she reflects on her decisions in an engaging foreword: “true respect in translation […] calls for seizing freedom from the language one is working with, whose syntax, punctuation, and prosody are systems independent of—even if ancillary to—the language one is translating into.”
Oppenheim once observed that “[i]f you speak a new language of your own […] you may have to wait a very long time for a positive echo.”
Whoever’s quick with the lure
Will always be cleaved by the light
But can never be caught,
Found dead or alive.
Almost 40 years after her death, Oppenheim’s playful poems may now delight English-speaking readers.
