Twentieth-Century German Poetry An Anthology [Paperback]

This groundbreaking anthology will serve as the standard for years to come. Editor Michael Hofmann has assembled brilliant translations of the major German poets, from Rilke and Brecht to Durs Grunbein and Jan Wagner, in an approachable, readable, and endlessly interesting collection. Here we find poetry as a living counter-force to socio-political reality; poetry of dissent and fear and protest; poetry of private griefs and musics. From the subtlety and elegance of Brecht, to the extraordinary jargon-glooms of Gottfried Benn, to the oblique and straightforward responses to the country's villainous history, to the bitter, cleansed, and haunted poetry of the postwar years, the anthology ends with a reunified country looking at itself and its neighbors in new ways. This is an essential and timely collection of verse from a tumultuous, violent, tragic, and hopeful century, written in the language of those who were at the heart of the matter.

Christian Morgenstern (18711914)
Night Song of the Fish

Introduction

Else Lasker-Schuler (18691945)
George Grosz
George Grosz

Rainer Maria Rilke (18751926)
Herbsttag
Autumn Day

Spanische Tanzerin
The Spanish Dancer

Blaue Hortensie
Blue Hydrangea

Vor dem Sommerregen
Before Summer Rain

Orpheus. Eurydike. Hermes
Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes

Der Konig von Munster
The King of Munster

Ausgesetzt auf den Bergen des Herzens
Exposed on the cliffs of the heart

Die neunte Elegie
The Ninth Elegy

Sonette an Orpheus II, 4
The Unicorn

Paul Klee (18791940)
Wasser
Water

Ernst Stadler (18831914)
Fahrt uber die Kolner Rheinbrucke bei Bacht
On Crossing the Rhine Bridge at Cologne by Night

Gottfried Benn (18861956)
ausMorgue I, II
fromMorgue I, II

lÓ)