Berlin Collective introduces multilingual poetry to späti

In fact, all this usually works in this repressive hot Sunday evening in the wedding kiosk “Spätis Backshop – from morning to späti”: people of Bezali in small groups between freezers, take cold limousines and waved each other air. Poetic volumes that cover themselves between chewing elastic bands and chocolate bars are less common.

What should poetry look for in späti? Obviously, a lot today – at least if you turn a convex refrigerator into the back of Berlin Sleepatis. Here are benches, which are covered with personal carpets, boxes for drinks, turned into a chair and a small table in the living room, around which three young women are sitting. All of them experiment with the language, write poems – in English, Russian, Tatar, German and Portuguese. Sometimes in several languages ​​at the same time.

This is the second of the four readings that the Open Späti team organizes this year. Three curators deliberately chose mini -markets open around the clock, a prototype for Berlin: a place of everyday life, where it is never too late – for tobacco, water ice, beer and an informal society. Here people from a variety of life realities are naturally found. In poetry, curators feel similar freedom – the one that needs to be studied in different languages.

Dinara Rasuleva is the first to get up. She speaks quickly, repeats individual words with an accent and moves her hard look alternately between a smartphone and an audience. The poem that it represents is mainly written in the Tatar – for many, the room is still an unknown language. This speaks mainly in Tatarstan, an autonomous republic in Russia. The poet and musician grew up here.

Lose your native language and find it again

At that time, many parts of their everyday life took place in Russian – whether it was school lessons or conversations with friends. Rasuleva really recognized the slow loss of her native language only when she moved to Berlin in 2015. Attempts to translate their poems to the Tatars at that time failed. Instead of learning the language again, she began to remember writing. She used the words that spontaneously invaded it or opened in the process of writing. Sometimes friends -Tartars invested her with love when she built a word with a complete conviction that was not.

Rasuleva now uses four languages ​​in its everyday life: Russian, Tatars, English and German. Everyone easily falls into each other in their verses. The sound of words is crucial. She collects words that resemble Russian or Tatars, and composes poems that sound like a melody. And in order to understand them, you do not need to be able to do the Tatars.

Inna Krasnoper also works with sound and rhythm. Does she use Russian, English or German words – this is a musical solution. She often analyzes the words into her syllables and unites what sounds like. During the performance, the poet, who is also a dancer, passes through the room and emphasizes his poems with the outline of the movements of the hands: “The background / rear scene / rear stagnation / hide in the rack / passing yourself in the rack / stack on / AC

Those who experiment should let go. Yessica Klein reads in English. The language, which she basically acquired on the Internet and describes it as “Earth without a man”: the space of poetry, which has not yet been fully developed, on which she can and can leave what she wants. Break the rules of grammar and still keep all together. Her native language – the Brazilian Portuguese – flows indirectly, about meanings, sound or rhythm into its English texts.

“We must learn to listen to other languages, discover ourselves for their beauty,” says co-founder Katarina Gothic Damiani, who is the poet herself and from Bosnia. In the countries of the former Yugoslavia, the idea of ​​linguistic purity was used to distinguish people. A series of reading wants the opposite: shows that the language is not separated, but is connected. And that it’s not too late to listen to her.