Twentieth Century German Poets, Intro

[This is the Introduction and Table of Contents to Sense of a Century, my translations of five generations of twentieth-century German poets which I have been posting here since February. Over 370 poems by 105 poets, 29 of them women (I have here left out one early poet Christian Morgenstern for typographical reasons). The Introduction provides some general thoughts on the project and an overview of all the poets and poems published in the Table of Contents.

Quantitatively, the third generation born 1920-40, the first Cold War generation and many of them with strong memories of the Second World War, seems to stand out in this selection. My personal favourites, for what they’re worth: Rilke, Trakl, Stramm, Arp and Lichtenstein in generation one, Brecht, Lavant, Bobrowski in generation two, Celan, Jandl, Enzensberger, Kirsch, Kunert, Haufs and Born in generation three, Brinkmann, Wondratscheck, Treichel and Gruenbein in generation four. Poets I would keep an eye out for within the current fifth generation, who still grew up in the late twentieth century, might be Sielaff, Poschmann, Wagner, Fiebig, Scheuerrmann. Bookending images are Nazi Party Day Nuremberg 1935, bringing down of the Berlin Wall 1989.]

Peter Lach-Newinsky

Sense of a Century. Five Generations of Twentieth-Century German Poets

Introduction

However rootedly national in detail it may be, poetry is less and less the prisoner of its own language. Perhaps it is only now being heard for what, among other things, it is – a universal language of understanding, coherent behind the many languages in which we can all hope to meet.

– Ted Hughes 1967 (cited in: Daniel Weissbort , ‘The unsung heroes of poetry’, The Guardian, 23/11/2002)

This anthology aims to showcase 106 twentieth-century German poets, 29 of them women, in 372 poems for the twenty-first century Anglophone reader. Although generational divisions are largely arbitrary, certain common experiences linked to age and zeitgeist have suggested a fluid clustering into five generations of poets. Of these, some will be well known and appreciated in non-German cultures (e.g. Rilke, Trakl, Celan, Brecht, Bachman, Enzensberger), while most will probably be very little known outside the German-speaking world.

These five generations span – to use historian Eric Hobsbawm’s plausible periodization ‒ the very end of the ‘long nineteenth’ (1789-1914), the ‘short twentieth century’ (1914-1991) and the present beginning of the twenty-first century. The first half of the twentieth century was to a large extent defined by social catastrophes, wars and ideological extremes, most of them linked to Germany and the policies of its ruling classes: the First World War, the Hitler regime, the Second World War, the Holocaust, the division of Germany. Unlike in most Anglophone, but as in much Eastern European poetry, such a traumatic history has of course left its strong imprint, in content, tone and form, on almost all German poetry, even, surreptitiously, on the purely ‘lyrical’ ones.

The selection is of course a personal one and aims neither to adequately represent nor weight all poets of this period. Nor does it attempt to set up some sort of canon of the supposed best. Some usually anthologised poets (George, Lehmann) are missing. Some poets are represented by quite a number of poems, others only by one or two. These are simply poems I have enjoyed, poems that have displayed that certain indefinable poetic experience or lyrical ‘x factor’ – Les Murray has spoken of ‘wholespeak’ ‒ and which seem to me to be, however debatably, of a certain more than ephemeral value. The emphasis has thus been openly hedonistic: on selecting for reading enjoyment.

Of course, the other level of enjoyment might then lie in more general intellectual comparisons and musings. How do Hofmannsthal or Rilke compare with their contemporaries like Eliot or Yeats? Is there any English equivalent to the radical expressionism of Stramm, Trakl, Heym, Stadler, van Hoddis and Lichtenstein, to the Dadaism and surrealism of Ball, Arp or Schwitters (and if not, why not)? Is Brecht in the same league as Auden or MacNiece, or better? Is there anything like Celan in English? Are Lavant, Borchers or Bachmann in any way comparable to Plath, Levertov or Judith Wright? Despite their approximate contemporaneity and certain broad similarities, Hughes, Heaney, Muldoon, Murray seem to some extent exist in quite different worlds to those of Enzensberger, Bobrowski and Kunert who, in turn, share certain similarities and influences with the American Black Mountain, Beat or New York schools. Is there a greater similarity between the German and Anglophone poets of the ‘generation 0f 68’ perhaps (between Haufs, Born, Brinkmann, Wondratscheck, Theobaldy, or Krechel and, say, Tranter, Adamson or Dransfield in Australia)? And what of the contemporary young poets of both language spheres – do they share any commonalities beyond the obvious ones of expanded information technology and a globalised, postmodern zeitgeist?

There is also another motivation behind the compilation of this anthology. Significant poetry has been international in context and knowledge at least since early modernism with movements such as Symbolism, Futurism, Expressionism, Imagism, Dadaism, Surrealism all reaching out and cross-fertilizing across nations and continents, even though much British and Australian poetry may have long been more insulated from these once avant-garde European movements.

As we ineluctably and thankfully move, or are dragged, towards consciously being One World in the twenty-first century, an exclusively national and parochial poetry is becoming ever more of an anachronism. Like contemporary genes, the contemporary poem now arises within a context both local/national and international, a mind ecology both rooted in a national tradition/ language and cosmopolitan or globalised.

Translation, with all its inherent difficulties and limitations, has thus necessarily become a central part of this large and ongoing shift in cultural evolution. This anthology is also motivated by the truism, as much metaphysical as political, that the more we know of and learn to appreciate each other’s cultures, and particularly poetries, the wider, deeper and more rewarding this cultural mutation between and within ourselves and the firmer the subjective conditions for (multi-)national cohesion and world peace.

Let me conclude with some brief remarks on the translations.

I have mostly tried to keep the original punctuation, upper and lower case line beginnings, enjambments and line breaks, syntactic inversions, sentence lengths and order of dependent clauses as much as possible. The lesser love of English for the long sentence and hierarchy of dependent clauses has thus on occasion been severely tested. A tendency, for modern English ears, to sometimes over-use the conjunction und (‘and’) in the original German has met with some judicious pruning unless where absolutely central to the tone and cadence of the poem (e.g. Hofmannthal’s ‘Ballad of External Life’) .

Where at all possible, English words have also been chosen that share similar semantic word fields with their German equivalents. (A simple example: the verb ‘kreisen’ in a line by Rilke ‘could be translated by ‘rotate’, ‘revolve’, ‘spin around’, ‘gyrate’ or ‘circle’; the latter word has been preferred here because both words contain their implied nouns ‘Kreis’ and ‘circle’ and this also seems to fit best into the semantic field of resonances created by the poem as a whole). While register has been imitated as much as possible, no attempt has been made to find equivalent rhymes or rhythms. The exceptions to this are Christian Morgenstern’s ‘The Funnels’, Gottfried Benn’s ‘Traveling’, Christine Lavant’s ‘It smells of snow, the sun apple hangs’ and Helmut Heissenbüttel’s ‘Miracle’. Ernst Jandl’s concrete poem ‘Names’ and the quasi-bilingual ‘calypso’ have not been translated; they are presented in their original forms.

In general, a constant struggle has been waged to steer between the perennial horns of the poetry translator’s dilemma: the Scylla of prosaic, plodding literalism or ‘transliteration’ and the Charybdis of the rather too-free ‘imitation’ or improvisation (German: Nachdichtung) with little connection to – or, it could sometimes be argued, respect for – the original. However, where semantic accuracy and poetic freedom have been in strong conflict, the former has, in general, been favoured, at least where compatible with the need to produce something that still bears some resemblance to poetry. Moreover, no attempt has been made to somehow ‘iron out’ what, to me at least and even after many readings, seemed to be obscurities (e.g. in more ‘hermetic’ poets like Rilke or Celan or in some younger contemporary poets). In most cases these apparent, perhaps initial, obscurities seem indeed to be essential to the success of the poem. To attempt to iron them out would be like trying to apply a steam iron to a string of balloons.

Table of Contents

I Born 1870-1895: The End of the ‘Long Nineteenth Century’

[Symbolism/Impressionism 1890-1910
Expressionism 1910-25
Dadaism 1916-19]

(In the following lists, dates after poets’ names denote the year of birth.)

Christian Morgenstern (1871): The Great Lalula; The Funnels; Three Hares
Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874): Ballad of External Life; From: Tercets on Transience; Some of course…
August Stramm (1874): Evening Walk; Patrol; Melancholy
Rainer Maria Rilke (1875): Untitled (from: The Book of Hours); Autumn Day; Early Spring; The Washing of the Corpse; The Panther; The Flamingos; Gravity; ‘Oh woe, my mother is tearing me down’; From: The First Duino Elegy; From: The Fourth Duino Elegy; From: The Eighth Duino Elegy; From: Sonnets to Orpheus
Else Lasker-Schüler (1876): Sascha; My Mother; World’s End; My Blue Piano
Ernst Stadler (1883): Early Spring; Journey over the Cologne Rhine Bridge at Night
Alfred Wolfenstein (1883): City People
Jakob van Hoddis (1884): World’s End
Gottfried Benn (1886): Beautiful Youth; Little Aster; Man and Woman Walking through Cancer Barracks; Song; Travelling; Through the alder wood it came sauntering
Hugo Ball (1886): The Sun; Intermezzo
Georg Heym (1887): Robespierre; The Madmen; War; Midwinter
Georg Trakl (1887) De Profundis; On the Moor; The Peasants; The Autumn of the Lonely One; Autumn Soul; Suburb in a Föhn Wind; Decline; To One Who Died Young; Sleep; Whispered into the Afternoon; In the East; Grodek; from: Revelation and Decline
Hans Arp (1887): Kaspar is dead; My Own Face; Second Hand; ‘With his steam engine he goads…’; My Happy Feet; Ripe to Alight; We Petitioners However
Kurt Schwitters (1887): To Anna Flower; Greygreen Greed
Oskar Kanehl (1888): Autumn Morning
Alfred Lichtenstein (1889): The Twilight; Sunday Afternoon; Into the Evening; Fog; Quiet; Landscape; The Excursion; The Battle near Saarburg
Ivan Goll (1891): Café; The Salt Sea; Morgue; Job
Nelly Sachs (1891): Butterfly
Gertrud Kolmar (1894): The Angel in the Woods; Transformations

[19 poets, 79 poems]

II Born 1895-1920: The Age of Catastrophe

[Neo-Functionalism 1920s
Third Reich Hiatus
Post-war Zeitlyrik 1945-48]

Bertolt Brecht (1898): The First Psalm; Great Thanksgiving Chorale; Of Poor Old B.B.; Of the Drowned Girl; I have never loved you so much; Buying Oranges; Discovery on a Young Woman; But in the Cold Night; Remembering Marie A.; The Lovers; The Ship; Ballad of the Adventurers; Exclusively Because of the Growing Disorder; Bad Time for Poetry; Questions of a Reading Worker; ‘the uppers/consider talk of eating low…’; To the Descendants
Erich Kästner (1899): Reasonable Romance
Rose Ausländer (1901): Amazed; The Strangers
Marie Luise Kaschnitz (1901): Interview; Hiroshima
Peter Huchel (1903): An Autumn Night; Early Morning
Günter Eich (1907): End of a Summer; The Beginning of Cooler Days; Brook in December; Latrine
Hilde Domin (1909): Autumn Crocus; Choice; Withdrawal
Irmgard Keun (1910): Dusk in Scheveningen
Hans Egon Holthusen (1913): Variations on Time and Death IV; Variations on Time and Death VII
Rudolf Hartung (1914): How long far
Christine Lavant (1915): ‘It smells of snow, the sun apple hangs…’; ‘When the moon fowl flies over the roofs…’; ‘Broken on the wheel of your sun…’; ‘O spindle in the moon, take your time…’
Karl Krolow (1915): Sleep; Still Today; Love Poem; Moon Trace
Johannes Bobrowski (1917): Grieving for Jahnn; Way Home; The Women of the Nehrung Fishers; Midnight Village; Pike Time; Blood Rain; Language; Return
Rainer Brambach (1917): No One Will Come; In that Time
[14 poets, 53 poems]

III Born 1920-1940: The First Cold War Generation

[‘Catch-up Modernism’ 1950s
Political poetry 1960s]

Wolfdietrich Schnurre (1920): Prayer
Paul Celan (1920): Death Fugue; ‘Aspen tree, your foliage looks whitely into the dark’; Of the Blue; I am Alone; Speak You Too; Tenebrae; An Eye, Open; ‘ There was earth in them, and…’; Psalm; Threadsuns…; ‘In the snake carriage, past…’; ‘Corroded away by…’; ‘Go blind already today…’; ‘How you die yourself out in me…’; ‘I can still see you: an echo…’; ‘Illegibility of this…’; ‘I hear the axe has blossomed…’; ‘A leaf, treeless…’; ‘End of mud flat, then…’; ‘I fool about with my night…’
Erich Fried (1921): On Re-Reading a Poem by Paul Celan; Homecoming; Longing for Home; Reasons; Immortalization; The Execution
Helmut Heissenbüttel (1921): Combination XI; Miracle
H.C. Artmann (1921): my heart; ‘like the juice of a very sweet fruit…’; landscape 8
Ilse Aichinger (1921): Part of the Question
Walter Höllerer (1922): He lay particularly relaxed by the side; Oh see the red poppy, and take fright
Friederike Mayröcker (1924): Children’s Summer
Ernst Jandl (1925): Library; In the Deli; from the 30s; Fallaonemandown; calypso; grade; Two Kinds of Hand Signals; by night; Names; awholewashbasin
Hans Rudolf Hilty (1925): Variations on Anna Pavlova’s Self-Chosen Grave Inscription
Heinz Piontek (1925): Clouds
Ingeborg Bachmann (1926): Every Day; The Time of Debt Delayed; Early Noon; Fog Land; Bohemia Lies by the Sea
Elisabeth Borchers (1926): Always something else; The Blue Fish; Someone is silent
Dagmar Nick (1926): No-Man’s-Land
Albert Arnold Scholl (1926): Something is in the Air; Poetry
Günter Grass (1927): The Advantages of Wind Fowl; The Sea Battle; Prophets’ Diet
Hans-Magnus Enzensberger (1929): For the Sixth Form Reader; to all telephone subscribers; Middle Class Blues; On the Difficulties of Re-Education; Song About Those It’s All About and Who Already Know Everything; More Reasons Why Poets Lie; The Thirty Three Year Old; Short History of the Bourgeoisie; To Eternal Peace; Privileged Factual Findings; Address Unknown – Return to Sender; The Visit; from: The Story of Clouds; War Declaration; Utopia
Günter Kunert (1929): Rain; My Thoughts; Poem; Last Walk Through the Garden; Something or other; Program; Stillness II; Last Garden Poem; Society; The Poems; Before the Flood
Peter Rühmkorf (1929): Ship Ahoy
Horst Bienek (1930): Learn from the Wombats
Carl Guesmer (1930): Requiem
Jürgen Becker (1932): Return after longer period; White Collar Worker, Afternoon
Sarah Kirsch (1935): Ravens; Breath Pause; In the Country; Sweetly summer reaches through the window; In Summer; End of the Year; Earthsmoke; Evening; Snow; Motionless; Trees
Christoph Meckel (1935): Styx; Other Earth; Words of Jonas; Inspection; Decree
Rolf Haufs (1935): A Moment in June; In a Dream; Still Yet Again; Waking; River; Just a Moment; Blue Fool; What is happiness exactly anyway
Wolf Biermann (1936): Small Town Sunday; And When We Arrived at the Shore; Of Me and my Chubby Girl among the Spruce
Nicolas Born (1937): We don’t know who you are and who you’re working for; Fifteenth Row; The Wedding Couple; Nature Poem; Horror, Tuesday; In the Athens-Patras Train; Disposed
Volker Braun (1939): Property
Rainer Malkowski (1939): Men on Stilts

[29 poets, 129 poems]

IV Born 1940-1965: The First Post-War Generation

[New Subjectivity 1970s
Post-Modernism 1 1980s/90s]

Rolf Dieter Brinkmann (1940): Concrete; Ever more words; Snow; Writing Poems; Sleep; Simple Ideas About My Death; Rounded Image; Writing, Seen Realistically; Image; Is That All?; Chiquita Banana High; Artificial Light; Orange Juice Machine; After Shakespeare; Oh, peaceful noonday
Peter Handke (1942): Alias; The Text of rhythm-and-blues
Karin Kiwus (1942): Alienating Work
Wolf Wondratscheck (1943): In the Cars; Men and Women; How I grew up; Empty Beer Garden; Deutschland Anthem; I’m too old to be a boxing pro; Last Stop
Roman Ritter (1943): To embrace a stranger in the post office
Michael Krüger (1943): On Hope; Train Journey; In an Aeroplane, still over Europe
Jürgen Theobaldy (1944): Cream Cheesecake; Mirror; Light
Jörg Fauser (1944): Poem for the Rain
Thomas Brasch (1945): ‘Do you know where you were born…’
Ursula Krechel (1947): Hymn on the Women of the Middle Class; Now it’s no longer; Outside
Hans-Ulrich Treichel (1952): Progress in Chaos Research; Running on the Outer Ring; Chin up; Let’s get out of here; Modern Times
Lutz Rathenow (1952): December 89
Sabine Techel (1953): It’s announcing itself; Lullaby; felix coniunctio
Thomas Kling (1957): Amaryllis Belladonna L.; biopsy
Kathrin Schmidt (1958): border view, as if practising
Barbara Köhler (1959): World View with Conquerors; Rondeau Allemagne; Refraction; Furniture
Durs Grünbein (1962): [untitled]; No. 8; Almost a Song; For an Okapi in the Munich Zoo; Complaint of a Legionary, from Germanicus’ Campaign to the Elbe; Comma and Colon; Folds and Traps
Ulrike Draesner (1962): winter night
Raoul Schrott (1964): Physical Optics I; Corollaries VI
[19 poets, 63 poems]

V Born 1965-1982: The Second Post-War Generation

[‘Post-Modernism 2’
Reunified Germany
Internet Generation/Beyond the Isms]

Sybil Volks (1965): ‘august moon…’
Marcel Beyer (1965): Canola
Volker Sielaff (1966): Flies; Fetish; Ice Nights
Helwig Brunner (1967): ‘Sleep in a bed of fire, leave…’
Tanja Dückers (1968): A Street
Martina Hügli (1969): ‘under the body stone…’
Marion Poschmann (1969): Institution of Grace; Landscape with Proof of God’s Existence; Homesickness, Tourist We Too; Substation East
Monika Rinck (1969): on the first day of the year
Hendrik Rost (1969): Imago; Aftermarch
Alexander Nitzberg (1969): Claire de Lune
Matthias Göritz (1969): Hallered’s House
Christian Lehnert (1969): [untitled]; object h
Sabine Scho (1970): Funeral Rites
Jan Wagner (1971): hamburg-berlin; haute coiffure; autumn villanelle; december 1914; a japanese stove in the north
Nico Bleutge (1972): three sketches; not colour; afternoon, changing perspective
Ron Winkler (1973): for the first dog in space
Gerald Fiebig (1973): strategy; sunday; beijing night piece
Silke Scheuermann (1973): Requiem for a just conquered planet with intensive radiation; For the Once Most Common Bird in the World; The Day the Gulls Sang in Duet; Prism
Adrian Kasnitz (1974): ‘this tuesday…’
Daniela Seel (1974): ‘fallen from a sleep…’; ‘the shining of the last things happened…’
Marcel Diel (1975): ebernhahn I: location/definition; people can do that; into the cafes lost through heat
Björn Kuhligk (1975): What you need
Renatus Deckert (1977): Odysseus; By the water
Steffen Popp (1978): Elegy for K.
Nora Bossung (1982): Hard Shoulder; Steam
[25 poets, 48 poems]

[Total: 106 poets, 29 of them women, 372 poems]