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Sabine Schiffner was born in Bremen, Germany in 1965. He studied theatre film and tv-sciences, German literature and language and psychology at the University of Cologne. After finishing her studies, she worked as assistant of the director and later as director at the cologne official theatre.
She lives in Cologne as teacher of art and philosophy. Her first collection of poems was published in 1989 and first novel in 1994. She has published several books with poems and prose since the year of 1991. She also works as a literary translator (from Spanish, English and French) and has translated several books of Georgian poetry (Nika Jorjaneli, Rati Amaglobeli, Zurab Rtveliashvili) in cooperation with native speaker translators. Her poems are translated in several languages, including English, French, Catalan, Spanish, Polish, Czech and Georgian. For her literary work she won a lot of important German literary prices (Ehrengabe der Deutschen Schillerge- sellschaft) and scholarships (Villa Aurora Foundation/L.A., Schloss Wiepersdorf/Berlin...)
ORANGE MARMALADE
and all the cigarettes that we smoked to the bitter filter the golden butter that we stole from the supermarket and spread uncooled on
fine white bread the artist we loved
who came with champagne and great words the cream tart we decorated with hazelnuts
and marzipan and gleefully devoured
the cigarettes made our legs like lead
when we woke up in the morning and counted the fag-ends that lay in the ashtrays and grabbed the burnt-out
butts from the night before and then drank
black teabag tea with milk and sugar and
ate flat bread that costs next to nothing with
butter and orange marmalade and we gazed out of the window onto cologne sometimes still tipsy
and often hungry such was our fun-filled student life we laughed a lot and went out into the streets with lungs full of smoke our bellies full of the flat bread with butter and orange marmalade
Translated from German by Paul Archer