Language of Darkness

Modern German Poetry, 1910-1960. Edited by Michael Hamburger and Christopher Middleton. (MacGibbon and Kee, 30s.)

LUROPEAN unity—economic, political, cultural— [nay be widely desired, and an urgent, impera- tive necessity in our age. Yet it would be foolish io overlook the terrifying barriers to communi- cmion between the nations of Europe which llirce centuries of secularism, nationalism and parochial education have piled up. This is not merely a matter of defective knowledge of the other nations' languages. It goes much deeper: diverging habits of thought have created such widely differing climates of feeling, such differ- ing values, given so widely differing associations to basic concepts like freedom, justice or beauty that even a thorough knowledge of the other's language may be a hindrance rather than a help to understanding.

Nowhere is this state of affairs clearer than in the field of poetry: not only is little known in this country of the individual merit of even the most important German poets, the very con- cept of what poetry is for and what is poetic is totally different: much of contemporary English poetry would appear intolerably wordy, euphuistic and cerebral to a German, most of contemporary German poetry must strike. the English reader as self-pitying, naive and senti- mental. Add this divergence to the difficulty created by the spirit of the languages themselves, and you will have a measure of the difficulty confronting the compilers of an anthology like the present one.

And yet, in spite of it all, this is an immensely impressive book : the work of some sixty poets, With the original text facing the translation, has here been assembled • with immense knowledge and understanding—and Many of the translations (which are mainly the work of the editors) really do give an adequate idea of the effect of the originals. The title of the anthology, however, is something of a misnomer: we are riot given a conspectus Of all German poetry in the half- century between 1910 and 1960. As the editors themselves point out in the introduction, the accent is on Expressionism: this leaves out two or the greatest of modern German poets, Stefan George and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, a host

()I lesser figures, and !pads to a highly untypical selection from Rilke. As long as the reader remains aware of this lack of comprehensive- ness, however, no harm is done.

For now, when German Expressionist painting is at last coming into its own, the great poets of German Expressionism should not remain unknown any longer. Here we are presented with the best selection of Trakl available in English. Georg Trakl, a Salzburg pharmacist, %yho died in 1914 because the suffering he wit- nessed in the army in the opening weeks of the war literally broke his heart, is the purest of

the Early Expressionists and—although his ceuvre is small in volume—perhaps the greatest. The

slow melancholy cadence of his line has here been beautifully captured in English, as in this passage from 'Decline,' translated by Michael Hamburger : Always the town's white walls resound. Under arches of thorns,

0.my brother, blind minute hands,

We climb towards midnight.

Georg Heym, drowned in a skating accident in 1912, at the age of twenty-five, was a prophet of an age he did not live to see. Christopher Middleton's translation of the famous 'Umbra VitEc' brilliantly renders the fervour and flavour of his verse:

The people on the streets draw up and stare While overhead huge portents cross the sky; Round fanglike towers threatening comets flare, Death-bearing, fiery-snouted where they fly. On every roof astrologers abound, Enormous tubes thrust heavenward; there are Magicians springing up from underground, Aslant in darktess, conjuring to a star.

Through night great hordes of suicides are hurled, Men seeking on their way the selves they've lost; Crook-backed they haunt all corners of the world, And with their arms for brooms they sweep the

dust. . .

Excellent also is the selection of Brecht's poetry in this volume:. it includes the magnifi- cent, posthumously published 'Four Psalms,' strange prose-poems using a long Biblical line to express highly un-Biblical sentiments:

I. In July you fish my voice from die pond. There is cognac in my hands. My hand is flesh.

2. The pond water tans my skin, I am as hard as a hazel switch, I would be good in bed, \ ladies.

3. In the red sun on the stones I love the guitars: they are cow's guts, the banjo sings like a beast, it eats little songs. . . • (The Third Psalm, translated by Chr. Middleton.)

Brecht stands half-way between the older generation and the poets of the post-Hitler age. There is a gap between them: the cultural collapse in Hitler's day was almost complete But the younger generation is recapturing the links with what is one of the greatest traditions in European poetry. Among the younger poets represented in this volume, the influences of Hoelderlin and Brecht seem to predominate: Ingeborg Bachmann, Hans Magnus Enzens- berger, Erich Fried, Paul Celan, Hans Werner Cohn, Christoph Meckel impress their itrong individuality on the reader—and are well served by the translators.

Anthologies are often bought as an act of sympathetic magic: having them on the shelf absolves one from feeling ignorant of a period, an area of literature; after all having purchased Modern German Poetry, neatly packaged, one can feel that one possesses it. It would be a pity if such a fate overtook this volume, It re- quires a great deal of effort to penetrate into the brooding, melancholy and guilt-ridden world of these poets. But it is an effort that should

prove amply worth while. MARTIN ESSLIN