In his recent book Himmelsstriche, or ‘Sky Lines’, Bernhard Malkmus records his explorations of the landscape and history of Northumberland. It is an enthralling and beautiful book that encourages us to pay more attention to the world around us. But it is not romantic escapism. Malkmus shows us how seemingly timeless landscapes have been changed by political decisions and financial incentives and he brings urgently to our attention the accelerating effects of climate change on the seabirds that inspired his walks. He has not waited for readers to find his book but instead, with translator, Marielle Sutherland, and musician, George Herbert, has taken it in performance to audiences.
Sarah Escritt interviewed the three of them about their upcoming performance, the process of creating it, including the translation process, and the hope that nature can offer.
Bernhard and Marielle will be presenting Himmelsstriche at a Wonder of Birds day at the Bodleian Library in Oxford at 2.15pm on 18 October 2026: https://visit.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/event/2026/oct/wonder-of-birds-day
NBG: Bernhard, your book teeters on the edge of a despair that is negated by the obvious joy that has gone into its creation. You have now taken the book a step further by presenting it in performance. Have audience members extended the work through their own imaginative responses?
Bernhard Malkmus (BM): I wouldn’t say that there is despair in the book, it is rather a work of mourning about the ecological, social, and psychological impact of our cultures’ dissociation from nature. Mourning is a form of working-through, an act of resilience; in that sense it is the opposite of despair, rather a work of hope. That hope rests both on sharing a sense of being alive that is inherent in nature observation – and, as you say, on its literary rendition.
And yes, indeed, audiences have taken this into their own stride through their imaginative responses. We have had many responses centring around the experience of resonance with nature through language, the value of a foreign-language perspective on what is home, reconnecting with lost landscapes, encouraging political action.
NBG: Starting with the multifaceted title Himmelsstriche, your writing commands attention. I wondered whether formative time outside Germany, as a child in Portugal (as you mention in the book) and as an academic in the UK, has shaped your relationship with the German language?
BM: That is something I am only beginning to understand – and I am slow when it comes to things like that. I do think it is fair to say that my expat situation has shaped that relationship in two main ways: It has heightened my sensibility for the specific potential of the German language, especially its syntactic precision and suppleness in rendering memory; and it has turned the German language into a portable non-territorial Heimat for me.
NBG: At the core of this book are the months that your diary entries span. But the scope is widened through quotations from across the centuries and illustrations that pause the linearity of text. In performance further layers are added through the music played and sung by George and Marielle’s particular interpretation of your text in her English translation. Do their responses and interpretations offer perspectives that you had not anticipated?
BM: Yes, absolutely. They have taken the texture of Himmelsstriche and woven beautiful unexpected threads into it.
For Marielle, who is from the North East but has lived elsewhere all her adult life, it was a way of relating to her home again – through a foreign language and through a new perspective that pays close attention to natural phenomena. The power and elegance of her English prose has a lot, I think, to do with her biographical journey through that text, and that is incredibly moving for me – and speaks directly to our audiences.
George did precisely not what most musicians would have done, i.e., create a soundtrack to the text. The beauty of the way in which he regards music as part of the overall texture has to do with his avian musicianship. He listens to and makes music with the birds and other creatures in Himmelsstriche in a way that I would not have thought possible.
NBG: You have translated from English into German many of the quotations that appear in the book. Is there any similarity between this process of translation and that of finding words to bring the world to the page or ways to bring the page to the stage?
BM: On some level there isn’t – insofar as I believe that Nature Writing implies an experience of the non-linguistic and always also engages in translating the non-linguistic, as part of a wider cohabitation with non-human creatures who elude us. On another level, however, I do think that they are comparable. H.D. Thoreau used the beautiful phrase ‘neighbouring’ for the act of translating the expressions of the natural world into human language; by that he means that we always fail to do so – what we can achieve, though, are moments of living-together, of neighbouring. I believe that is also the case between two languages.
Languages preserve diversity of perspectives and historical depth of experience, thus countering the dangers of cultural monotony. In a paradoxical way, his comment could be read as an invitation to learn foreign languages.
Bernhard Malkmus
NBG: Walking past former lead mines east of Newcastle you met a fellow walker who had lived and worked in divided Berlin and spoke excellent German. He felt that increasing uniformity across cultures diminished the interest in learning German. Can you counter that?
BM: The loss of diversity and its replacement by a facile ‘culture of choice’ that avoids the friction of productive cultural encounters is a reality – modern Europe is shaped by that and present-day populism is one of its most terrifying spectres. What our companion on the moors above Rookhope Valley was talking about, however, was cultural rather than linguistic homogeneity. I think our only response to that tendency can be linguistic diversity. Languages preserve diversity of perspectives and historical depth of experience, thus countering the dangers of cultural monotony. In a paradoxical way, his comment could be read as an invitation to learn foreign languages.
NBG: You include a quotation from Gerald Manley Hopkins’ poem about poplars felled at Binsey near Oxford. Might you be inspired to write about the birds of Port Meadow, Otmoor or Wytham Woods or is the sound of traffic a poor substitute for the sound of the sea? Is there a particular quality about the North East that inspires you?
BM: I visit Port Meadow frequently, especially during the bird migration seasons, and I greet every poplar there and around Binsey every time I go. Hopkins understood the spiritual dimension of our relationships within nature like no one else in his days. Yes, I have written about the places you mention, about wildlife, landscape, and conservation. I am particularly interested in birdsong as a form of place-making rather than purely competitive and territorial. Sometimes it felt to me that the way people in the North East speak about their region is also a form of place-making, of homing, much more so than in Oxford, which in many ways has become a museum, even for the students who live there. And yes, there is no substitute for the presence of the Sea, the terrifying cradle of our terrestrial lives.
NBG: Marielle, How were the extracts selected that to date have been translated and performed? Can you envisage weaving different extracts into a new performance that would bring out other aspects of the book?
Marielle Sutherland (MS): We tried to take extracts that show the narrative arc of the book: the annual migration of the Arctic tern, as well as a descent into the hell of avian flu and the environmental ravages of the Anthropocene. This also makes for a dramatic and elegiac performance, finishing on a crescendo of beauty and hope. I think another aspect that would be captivating in performance would be the descriptions of the calls and gestures that make up bird communication. These could even be accompanied by movement and sound on stage.
NBG: Has the exercise of bringing a text to an audience through performance brought you new perspectives on translation and how German-language books might be communicated to English-language readers?
MS: Performing this text, verbalising it, has also helped to remind me that what I want to achieve with the translation is, where possible, the resonance of the spoken word and song in the written form, because I like to remind the reader that this is part-memoir from lived, embodied experience. This is not necessarily an emphasis in the original, but in translation, the author’s voice is coming through my own, and I make certain decisions. I want to get across that this is an individual roaming both mentally and physically through a landscape. The text is as much about human and animal bodies occupying and interacting with land, sea and sky as it is about cultural and political history and environmental enquiry – it is by no means a disembodied meditation. Another aspect to this is that I come from the North East myself – albeit Teesside rather than Northumberland – so when I speak the text, I suppose I do body forth something of the acoustic landscape and local voices at the centre of Bernhard’s book, which includes much mention and description of individuals he met during his time there, and conversations with fellow walkers, conservationists and members of the community.
The writing is in lyrical conversation with poets and composers, and sometimes itself borders on the hymnic, so there is a sense of looking up to the sky in song, singing of, to, and with the birds. It is our own form of bird-song, in which music and voice become about survival. So, in performance, this text becomes much more about bodies, voices and instruments in immediate and sensuous interaction in time and space. In fact, we have added in a small choir, bringing individual bodies and voices literally into harmony, surrounding the audience with a dawn chorus. What started out as a single narrator in the written form becomes a self-proliferating, pluralistic piece of many interlocutors, like bird-song itself. In addition, the German and English readings are their own kind of call-and-response, offering themselves for complement and comparison. And even if an audience member cannot understand one of the languages, they get to hear that foreign tongue, that voice calling from far away, asking for relation, perhaps even migration.
So, I suppose this particular text has undergone translation between languages but also into spoken-word performance, and I’m sure that orality will feed back into the written form as we iterate further through the process of translation. This is certainly a new perspective on translation for me, but it also made me think about how performance can serve translation in general. Hearing the two languages read side-by-side by different people in different voices reminds the listener that this is more than one text with more than one author and many recipients who receive it differently. And there is also the immediacy and spontaneity of people’s responses to the performance—we have had translation suggestions from the audience in questions and conversations afterwards, so it’s an excellent way to pick people’s brains.
The writing is in lyrical conversation with poets and composers, and sometimes itself borders on the hymnic, so there is a sense of looking up to the sky in song, singing of, to, and with the birds.
Marielle Sutherland
NBG: Why do you feel that it is important nonetheless that this book should be translated in full? Is there something particular about the reading experience?
MS: I think the diary form is what comes across more in the written than the performative version. The narration is, at the same time, both episodic and part of a larger momentum, and I think the book does ask us to take this multiperspectival view of our own, limited actions and individualities in relation to our environment. The diary entries also take us on a linear journey, tracking the narrator through the landscape, close to the ground, and in human time. We feel this movement, experience and thinking unfolding and iterating slowly and very much at eye-level. The book asks for, and teaches, this attentiveness. We do not consume it at pace; we can put it down, let it breathe, think and feel and come back to it. Reading in this way runs counter to the extractivist approach we have taken to our environment.
NBG: Bernhard is encouraging us to notice things to which our habits of categorisation blind us. Could we regard translation as a form of re-categorisation?
MS: If I could take this metaphor of blindness a bit further, there is actually a visual spectrum at the centre of Bernhard’s book: Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours. In 1774 Abraham Gottlob Werner, a German geologist, developed a nomenclature to describe the visual characteristics of minerals. This was translated into English by Thomas Weaver in 1805, and then again by the Scottish flower painter Patrick Syme in 1814. Syme added to Werner’s mineral referents with colours from the animal and vegetable kingdom, extending the system by another 31 shades and even including colour swatches. So, this colour spectrum underwent much translation back and forth, both linguistically and visually, reading the geological through the floral, drawing out hues and nuances, complicating our relationship to names, concepts and descriptions, helping us to see nature in more detail, and differently. I think translations always bring other shades and interpretations: re-categorising, recasting and iterating through language is how the human mind and body remain alive, expressive and relational.
I see in Bernhard’s work an opportunity to reach different kinds of readers, and I think I am recasting it, in translation, not only for the English-language reader but also for readers both with and without an intellectual background. I would like this book to belong to the people and places that inspired it, and as I translate, I often have my own family and home-town in mind: even though the book comes in some ways from the outside, can it bring poetry, reflection and connection that speaks to the full range of local lives and experiences? Bernhard’s work is both a cerebral and a terrestrial, sensuous experience, and where I see opportunities to do so, I loosen the academic register. This is also a consideration for the title (as yet undecided!): some of our attempts have sounded a bit too much like an academic treatise, e.g. ‘Flight Lines: Of Avian and Human Homing Instincts’.
NBG: Bernhard, you give the names of the birds in both English and German and, in the index, in Latin too. Why is this? Do the names not translate across exactly?
BM: Yes, they belong to different registers. The binomial Latin nomenclature was codified throughout the 18th century. It forms an international taxonomy that allows us to understand the place of individual species in the web of life. That taxonomy has been much refined since with the help of evolutionary biology and genetics. German words for plants, fungi, and animals often have a long history and are deeply rooted in vernacular variants of specific landscapes and habitats. The great banded grayling, for example, is a purely descriptive English term for a butterfly species of the Nymphalidae family. In the binomial nomenclature it is called Brintesia circe — composed of the components ‘from Brindisi’, implying a Southerly species, and a rather random reference to Greek mythology that was common for the taxonomic description of Nymphalidae species. In German, the species is called Weißer Waldportier, i.e. woodland porter or guardian, referring to the behaviour of the butterfly: it lives on the border of woodland and meadowland, and upon approach by humans, it flies around and ‘guards’ the entries into the woods. In certain parts of Southern Germany, it is also called Schattenkönigin, i.e., the Queen of Shadows, an evocative term referring to the same behaviour and the black and white patterns of its wings. In English, Germanic and other vernacular terms have often been replaced by the less sensory and resonant Latinate terms, for example ‘fritillary’ for snake’s head, chess flower, frog cup — or the butterfly species marked by similar chess-board patterns.
NBG: George, Bernhard refers in his book to works by Messiaen and Schwitters but you have ignored these references and made your own musical choices. What informed these choices?
George Herbert (GH): These choices were almost entirely purely instinctual. I read each passage of text and then noted the first few words that came into my mind in response (for example ‘awakening’ or ‘arrival’ or ‘cloudy’). I then came back to these words a few days later and listed the piece of music which came to mind instinctively when I saw them. With two exceptions (the two song selections), we stuck with these original instinctive choices. My aim was to create sound-worlds which resonated with the poetry of the text, and works with directly relevant titles often didn’t occupy quite the right sound-world for Bernhard’s words. The important exception to that is Vogel als Prophet, from Robert Schumann’s Waldszenen, whose curious, winding protagonist emerges naturally and quietly from the pages of Himmelsstriche.
NBG: Bernhard regrets the impossibility of describing birdsong but nevertheless comes up with some wonderful evocations. I particularly like the cumulative effect of ‘Klangregen’, ‘Klangfarben’ and ‘Klangwelle’. But he says that it was the absence of birdsong caused by bird flu that spurred him to write, so it is really interesting that, through the culmination of this performance in silence, you use music to draw attention to silence and absence. For those who will pick up the book without the music to guide them, what would you say?
GH: I would encourage readers to take time to listen to the world around them whilst reading – to hear what natural and man-made sounds fill the ears.
NBG: Bernhard wonders why we do not give children field guides to nature at school. From what you were taught at school, which subject would you drop, and with what would replace it?
GH: I would drop academic music and replace it with environmental humanities!
MS: I wouldn’t drop anything, but I would definitely introduce regular first-aid training. I think we should all have the routine knowledge and basic training to respond to a physical emergency, and we should keep refreshing this.
BM: Yes, I have always advocated strongly for first aid as a perpetual feature of education, and was part of the first aid group in high school!
NBG: George and Marielle, is there one thing in particular that you could pick out as having been brought to your attention thanks to your engagement with Bernhard’s text?
MS: I learned so much more about the knowledgeable, patient, passionate work of the RSPB and other conservationists. Bernhard describes not only the meticulous monitoring, managing and gentle interventions that take place but also the self-effacing people behind them. In this sense, he brings what, for me, were background characters and labour to the fore.
GH: I hadn’t realised quite how globally significant the north-east coast is for migratory birds, nor did I know how much natural beauty was to be find in the coastline near Newcastle. Thanks to Himmelsstriche, Northumberland now holds a special place in my heart.
Bernhard and Marielle will be presenting Himmelsstriche at a Wonder of Birds day at the Bodleian Library in Oxford at 2.15pm on 18 October 2026: https://visit.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/event/2026/oct/wonder-of-birds-day
Photo by Saul Brotheridge on Unsplash
