De Duitse schrijfster Antje Rávic Strubel werd geboren op 12 april 1974 in Potsdam. Zie ook mijn blog van 12 april 2007 en ook mijn blog van 12 april 2008 en ook mijn blog van 12 april 2009 en ook mijn blog van 12 april 2010.

Uit: Colder Layers of Air (Vertaald door Zaia Alexander)

„About light they knew everything.

They knew it in every shade. They had seen how it made the sky appear brittle and torn, or waxed blue-black. They knew how the light looked under foaming clouds; how it fell diagonally over the Fjell; how it struck the rocks over the forest and the thick underbrush. They knew how fleeting, how illusive it was. If the lake had just shone turquoise to the bottom, the next moment it lay leaden and sealed like asphalt. They had seen how the light made the pines and blackberry bushes appear matt in the rain; they had seen how the roads looked at four in the morning, devastated by falling rocks, and at noon on neatly mown Swedish front lawns. They knew it in the shimmering yellow from the heat, in the greenish glow of the evening; they could say how it looked above the roof of the tool-shed on overcast days.

They knew how faces change when glaring light falls upon them. Every morning, when they left their tents and went to the wash area, they had to cross the grassy field that had been cleared from the forest. There the faces became stable. They changed from milky-gray, the color of night, into a harsh, polished tan. They knew it. They saw it every morning.

And later, when only a few clouds were left in the sky, this tan had a certain sharpness, as faces only here have, on this peninsula. It was brutal how the sun shone.

Nobody spoke about the light.

There were other things to discuss. They had to take care of the tent walls that had torn in the storm and were lying on the field like shed skins in need of mending. They had to replenish the supplies and food that came every Saturday from Berlin; they telephoned often. They reordered potatoes and coffee, charcoal and sausages and rice, and they never forgot fruit, because fruit was particularly expensive this summer in Sweden. They sent the newly arrived youth groups to the lakes, first to the small Stora Le and then to the wind-whipped Foxen; they gave the crew photocopies of outdoor cookbooks so they knew how many cans of chili to empty into the pans at night. In the kitchen tents, they packed weekly supplies in waterproofed plastic barrels.“

Antje Rávic Strubel (Potsdam,  12 april 1974)

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