CPR - The Germans are Coming: Michael Hofmann's New Anthology by Andrew Goodspeed

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Useful poetry anthologies have one of two virtues: either they gather an informative selection of the canon they represent or, by their eccentricity, they illustrate amendable elisions in the canon from which they deviate. Michael Hofmann’s collection Twentieth-Century German Poetry: An Anthology is firmly in the first category. Although it includes some verse that is little known to most Anglophones, the book is essentially a gathering of the most accomplished modern poetry in the German language. It is not devoted exclusively to German writers, although they predominate over the Swiss, Austrians, and others who chose to write their poems in German.

One might reasonably expect that twentieth-century poetry in German, particularly that poetry by Germans themselves, would bog down artlessly in war, death, guilt, blame, and retribution. Germany did not have an easy century. Two hideous wars, the enormity of National Socialism, the crematoria and national division are all ineluctable themes here. This book does not avoid these horrors. Some of the poets represented in this collection gave those subjects their most accomplished and painful expression. Paul Celan’s famous Todesfugue remains scorching and inevitable, and its anguished incantation “der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland” seems one of the few unanswerable assertions in modern poetry. Another poet—the wonderfully inventive Ernst Jandl—offers a poem that, in only two words, creates an unforgettable impression. If one happens to know the meaning of the word “krieg” (“war”), and knows that the fifth month of the year is, in German, “Mai,” the whole is clear, simple, and strangely beautiful:

1944 1945

krieg krieg

krieg mai

krieg

Where else has the single word “May” conveyed so much?

Yet what is most impressive and startling about this collection is the strength and artistry of German-language poetry outside of the expected political realms. Here readers will find odd, appealing exercises, such as Pastior’s “dominotaurus,” a poem which will likely remind English-speakers more of Finnegans Wake than anything else. Love poems without cynicism here appear beside humorous verses, creating an unexpected and curiously positive sensation when juxtaposed brusquely with more somber poems about history and crime. But despite the serious poets grappling with the troubles of their times (Grass and Enzensberger offer notably strong postwar poems), history doesn’t win. Something different, less offensive—humanity?—prevails. There are poems here so light and dexterous that they seem almost divorced from the convulsed century and battered societies from which they emerged. Take, for example, this pleasing jeu d’esprit from Paul Klee, “Wasser,” and as translated by Harriet Watts:

Wasser, Water,

darauf Wellen, topped by waves,

darauf ein Boot, topped by a boat

darauf ein Weib, topped by a woman,

darauf ein Mann. topped by a man.

Klee’s twelve words not only convey an entire image completely, but also modify the image substantively with every line. It is wonderful, light, visual poetry: a real discovery. (Yes, it is that Paul Klee; one also finds here gathered a wonderful Mayakovskian verse from the great George Grosz.)

This anthology faces certain inevitable problems directly. Rainer Maria Rilke has here a representative selection, but it is not nearly enough: how could it be? With Rilke, as with Bertolt Brecht, one faces the anthological problem posed by T.S. Eliot for modern American poetry, or W.B. Yeats for Irish—to represent the accomplishment and the influence would wholly unbalance the collection, and would likely be impossible given the applicable copyright laws. One might yearn for larger contributions from certain distinguished poets (Else Lasker-Schuler deserves a bit more than her sampling), yet the whole is a balanced, thoughtful, and informative selection of worthwhile poetry.

The question of translation is important in a work of this sort, as most of the potential readership will not be fluent readers of German. One should immediately applaud the fact that this is a facing-page edition (English translations recto, German originals verso). Far too often modern publishers offer poetry in target-language translation only, making no attempt to print the originals. For those readers who know German, or who have enough German that the English translations provide a superstructure of comprehension by which to approach the originals, bilingual editions such as this are irreplaceable. Farrar, Straus and Giroux are to be commended for spending the extra money to allow Anglophone readers to read directly, or through the help of translation, the poets as they chose to express themselves. As to the translation itself, it is, in a word, poetic. One does not here note with despair that all the translations rhyme in English: the translators have attempted to reproduce the German originals with fidelity and precision, but have not striven to make self-consciously English poetry out of non-English source material. The result is that the poems remain persuasive as verse, and are commendable examples of that infernal task, the translation of poetry. The translators themselves are a large and distinguished body, with many of the translations coming from the editor Hofmann himself.

If one wanted an absolutely representative collection of German-language poetry of the twentieth century, one would have to include much that does not appear in this volume. The editor of such a book would, of dismal necessity, include the doggerel of Weimar musical theater (of which Brecht and Simone Weil were such an exciting extension), the obsequious and nauseous Nazi sloganeering and song-making (as, for example, the repugnant “Horst-Wessel-Lied”), the weird and feeble East German hymns to a Communist tomorrow, or the endearingly strange lyrics of West German rock music. Yet we should note the general artlessness of all these potential inclusions. These omissions may diminish the truly representative character of the collection, but they are works that are more valuable to the sociologist than to the admirer of poetry.

Hoffmann has assembled an informative, useful, and pleasing collection of the most artistically accomplished twentieth-century poetry in German. Collections of this sort are easy to disparage: one may dislike the poets represented, or wish that others appeared, or contest the choices a translator has made. Yet this volume deserves praise. It has two distinct, but interrelated, accomplishments: it provides a strong introduction to readers with little knowledge of the subject, whilst also helpfully compiling, in one volume, many of the poems informed readers will wish to have on their shelves.