“The Silent One” / “Der Schweigsame”
Collaborators’ Q&A: Artist Janice Redman: When I read the poem, I really resonated with it, the feelings of failing being part of the process, of making and creating… struggling along in my studio, my mind telling me that I don’t know what I am doing but still having to trust the process of making just by showing up over and over again. Translator Caroline Wilcox Reul: I hadn’t envisioned how one would write silence but thought Janice captured it perfectly—the way the text was burned through, or perhaps the ink had dissolved itself and the paper that held it.
Artist Janice Redman is a sculptor who lives on Cape Cod. Her work is in the permanent collections of the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum and the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum. Translator Caroline Wilcox Reul has a MA in computational linguistics and German language and literature from the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich.