This poem (Världens tystnad före Bach) appeared in Swedish in Lars Gustafsson’s poetry collection of the same title in 1982, at the mid-point of the poet’s literary career to date. Over the past 50 years, Gustafsson has experimented with many… Read More ›
Rainer Maria Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus (Die Sonnette an Orpheus) comprises 55 sonnets in two series. The first series (Erster Teil) contains 26 poems; the second (Zweiter Teil), 29. Poet and translator Willis Barnstone provides a breezy but comprehensive 97-page… Read More ›
This poem forms the central piece of George’s last volume, Das neue Reich (The Kingdom Come, 1928), and combines the poet’s central themes: autobiographical recollection, a fierce critique of modern society, the invocation of poetic ancestors and heroes, allusions to… Read More ›
Published in her volume My Miracles, Leise Sagen (“Say It Softly—”) embodies Lasker-Schüler’s greatest expressionist achievements. She combines extraordinary, unconventional imagery with simplicity of form to render love as both spirited frisson and melancholic surrender. The title, along with its… Read More ›
A Romance to Night (Romanze zur Nacht) is a perfect example of Trakl’s preoccupation with the horrors of modernity in rural settings and its effects on the individual’s physical and unconscious existence. It showcases Trakl’s most characteristic poetic technique of… Read More ›
In her study Keepers of the Motherland: German Texts by Jewish Women Writers, Dagmar C. G. Lorenz comments that Nelly Sachs wrote In den Wohnungen des Todes (In the Dwellings of Death), the collection of which O the Chimneys is… Read More ›
This poem, Nur eine Rose als Stütze, appeared in 1959 in a revised version as the title poem of Hilde Domin’s first collection. The poem consists of four stanzas of five lines each. The first two stanzas speak of the… Read More ›
This poem from his best-known collection, written shortly before his death in 1975, depicts “a / freshly washed pair of / black tights” hanging on a wire “between two / bare trees.” The poem exemplifies many of Rolf Dieter Brinkmann’s… Read More ›
The long poem marsyas, umkreist (marsyas, encircled) from Anja Utler’s volume münden—entzüngeln (merging—untonguing, 2004) evokes and reinvents a mythological protagonist’s execution by gradual skinning. According to classical Greek mythology, the satyr and flute player Marsyas challenges the god Apollo to… Read More ›
During an unpublished conversation in Cologne, Germany, in 2003, two years before his premature death, Thomas Kling, who had visited New York City briefly a decade before and who planned to visit the United States for a series of poetry… Read More ›
Many readers have called Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet life-altering, and many writers of all ages have felt as moved as the original recipient must have been by reading these letters. The 10 letters have been called… Read More ›
Leda And when the god possessed the swan, from need, and found it beautiful, that terrified him. Wholly shocked, he disappeared inside it, but his trickery drove him toward his deed before he could explore what that life must have… Read More ›
Yvan Goll’s Jean Sans Terre is a collection of five books of interrelated poems written over eight years (from 1936 to 1944). Goll maps the anguish of dispossession, the suffering and distress of the alienated human individual suffering the worst… Read More ›
Published in his first collection Morgue and Other Poems, “Happy Youth” (“Schöne Jugend,” also translated as “Beautiful Youth”) lyrically captures the world of disease and death that the young doctor Benn confronted daily while treating the poor and suffering in… Read More ›
Bertolt Brecht wrote a number of poems and songs that lamented the disastrous state of Nazi Germany. Germany, dating from 1933, is the most famous. Hitler’s Nazis began their totalitarian control of Germany during February 1933. Like many other communists,… Read More ›
One week before its first publication in Germany’s leading weekly newspaper, Die Zeit, in November 1962, Johannes Bobrowski recited Erfahrung at a literary meeting of the legendary Gruppe 47, an informal alliance of German postwar authors that included the novelists… Read More ›
Many readers consider Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies (Duineser Elegien), which Rilke completed in 1922, not only his most accomplished poetry, but also, plausibly, the most perfect lyrical sequence of the 20th century. So well crafted are the 10 poems… Read More ›
The Buckow Elegies are 22 poems that Bertolt Brecht wrote during the summer of 1953, when he was staying at a country house that he had bought early the previous year. The poems were published gradually over the next two… Read More ›
Archaic Torso of Apollo We cannot know his legendary head with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso is still suffused with brilliance from inside, like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low, gleams in all… Read More ›
The German-Swiss writer Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) started the novel Siddhartha at the end of 1919, when his psychoanalytical novel Demian, (1919) was published, but after a few chapters he suspended his work on the novel for more than 20 months,… Read More ›
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