The work of 20 contemporary German poets is presented in the original and translated into English in this 173-page collection, which offers a welcome insight into the preoccupations and obsessions of poets whose names will be new to most Irish readers.
In his introduction, Anton G Leitner does, after all, mention The War. “The verdict of the impossibility of “writing a poem after Auschwitz” still hovers over the poets of today, “ he writes. “Those who tried anyway had to first engage in a historical and political house-cleaning before they could again deal with metre and metaphor. However at the post-war reconstruction stage the need for metaphorical expressions apparently became so strong that German-language poets wished to excel above all in making their lyrical works as hermetic as possible.”
Born in 1946, Ulla Hahn clearly began to work later than the poets who wrote at the end of the Second World War. Yet her poem, After So Many Years, while clearly looking back, does not mention Auschwitz or any such death camp. In there are 'the railway carriage' and 'the fire burning', but she deftly skirts direct reference in her 14-line poem.
Shoes lying in a pile/It’s the end-of-summer sale
Hair being cut/ A new hairstyle
Hahn’s much more moving and disturbing poem, I Am the Woman, does not deal with history at all, but plots economically the lot of what used to be called the Other Woman, or even just the woman who is being mistreated by someone whom she does not deserve.
I am the woman/ You could invite again/If someone else cancelled
I am the woman/You wouldn’t invite/ to a wedding
The Austrian Peter Turrini (born 1949) comes from an Italian family of furniture makers and he is winner of the Gerhard Hauptmann prize. His short poem, Atop the Highest Peak of the Words is enigmatic yet magisterial, sublime in its sense of resignation about the way life, in the end, does not deliver on what we think we want. There are clearly blunter ways of putting it, but Turrini does it with elegance and grace. Here is the poem in full.
Atop the highest peak of the words
I will erect a gallows.
The following will dangle from it:
All the whispered.
All the desired.
All the promised.
All the imaginable and imaginative.
Well drawn up.
This is clearly poetry of the highest order, it breaks through the bridgehead of language with wisdom and restraint.
Uwe Kolbe was born in 1957 in East Berlin, and he is clearly a poet of great feeling. In 1980, after his first collection was published, Kolbe was banned from `publishing anything’ in East Germany and was duly placed under surveillance.
Kolbe’s poem, Nowhere to Go is charged with pathos, depicting the awkwardness of young lovers without a place to go to for their tryst but suggesting much more. Given the author’s predicament viz a viz his native East German state, a picture of constricted public lives - the lives of others - can somehow be delineated.
They probably have fathers, mothers;
They have forgotten. So young
And already with such a heavy burden,
It’s hard to turn within the circle.
Ludwig Fels (born 1946, winner of Hans Fallada Prize and the Wolfgang Köppen Prize) seems to be taking a pop at poetic torpor, or complacency, in his short poem, German Poems, where
The sheet of paper is fully covered/with the nothingness of the today. There’s always a deficit of/ blood in the veins; it’s ever/so cold.
Anatoly Kudryavitsky and Yulia Kudryavitskya have done an impeccable job in rendering into English what must be some difficult construction work in some of the vital poems collected in this welcome new anthology. www.dedaluspress.com
Paddy Kehoe
