Friedrich Dürrenmatt - Kafka’s greatest heir: searing, tragicomic explorations of the ironies of justice and the corruptibility of institutions

Friedrich Dürrenmatt, The Possible is Monstrous: Selected Poems, Trans. by Daniele Pantano, Dzanc Books, 2010.

"Much the way Dürrenmatt himself reclaims in verse the psyche of the Minotaur from the ancient labyrinth, so Daniele Pantano brings down from the Alps and the secret land of bank vaults the poetry of Switzerland’s most important writer of the twentieth century. The fidelity of these translations not only owes itself to Pantano being one of Dürrenmatt’s countrymen. He is a poet as well, one with a real ear and eye for Dürrenmatt’s sardonic imagination that is peculiarly Swiss and pan-European at the same time." - James Reidel

"What was the Swiss writer Friedrich Dürrenmatt, author of The Visit and one of the greatest and most inscrutable dramatists of the 20th Century, really thinking – about life, love, drama and politics? Here, in The Possible Is Monstrous, a tremendously revealing and stimulating German-English dual language volume of his selected poetry, is a perfect place to find out. For in his poetry Dürrenmatt reveals sides of himself not readily discernible in his plays. In addition to providing English-speaking readers with new access to Dürrenmatt and his work, The Possible Is Monstrous will be of great interest to scholars of the dramatist.
Daniele Pantano's translations of Dürrenmatt's poems into English are themselves a significant achievement in poetic translation. His translations of Dürrenmatt's poems are a model of the elusive and delicate balance between accuracy and readability that makes The Possible Is Monstrous so satisfying." - Dr. Victor Peppard

"This collection is long overdue. Long acknowledged as a master playwright and novelist, Dürrenmatt is at last presented as one of the great poets of the last century. Daniele Pantano's excellent translation captures all the wit of a writer frustrated by the times he lived in - balancing at once the personal and the political to produce work that is genuinely vivid and exciting." - Rob Shearman
Friedrich Durrenmatt, The Assignment: or, On the Observing of the Observer of the Observers, Trans. by Joel Agee, University Of Chicago Press, 2008.

"In the Swiss playwright's wracking, brilliantly conceived new novel (published in German in 1986 and resourcefully translated by Agee), nothing is what it seems. Otto von Lambert, a well-known psychiatrist, gives F., a filmmaker, the "assignment" to follow the trail of his late wife, Tina, and learn why and how she was murdered in an unidentified Middle Eastern country, her raped body thrown to the jackals at the base of a mysterious Shi'ite shrine. F. accepts because she is mesmerized by Tina's journal, which is filled with hatred for her husband and intensified by a charged note: "I am being watched." In Durrenmatt's blasted, menacing landscape everyone is being observed by everyone else literally, by field glasses, telescope, camera's eye; and figuratively, by the stealthy, obsessive scrutiny of each by each for purposes shrouded in ambiguity. The closer F. approaches some answer, the more it eludes her as mysteries are further coiled and compounded with false leads and shifting or mistaken identities. Out of these mazes within mazes the author extrapolates an arresting metaphysical mystery in 24 brief chapters, each cast as a single, spinning, convoluted sentence, each leading to further enigmas in the jagged, highly pictorial tale. Kierkegaard, who is cited repeatedly, is a presiding spirit; and philosophical, theological, mythic elements, instead of distracting, add depth and resonance to this remarkable tale." - Publishers Weekly

"Tina von Lambert lies violated and dead at the foot of the Al-Hakim ruin. Her husband feels he drove her to this sordid end, and in guilty recompense hires F's film crew to document the mysterious circumstances surrounding Tina's death. Against her better judgment, F pursues the trail to a desert hotel where appearances begin to crumble, testing her ability to distinguish reality from perception. In this tightly crafted thriller, his first American publication in nearly 20 years, Durrenmatt demonstrates considerable virtuosity: each of 24 chapters is a single sentence. We may all be "under observation," but the question is, Whose observation? The answer informs this novel's puzzle. Highly recommended" - Paul E. Hutchison

"In Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s experimental thriller The Assignment, the wife of a psychiatrist has been raped and killed near a desert ruin in North Africa. Her husband hires a woman named F. to reconstruct the unsolved crime in a documentary film. F. is soon unwittingly thrust into a paranoid world of international espionage where everyone is watched—including the watchers. After discovering a recent photograph of the supposed murder victim happily reunited with her husband, F. becomes trapped in an apocalyptic landscape riddled with political intrigue, crimes of mistaken identity, and terrorism.
F.’s labyrinthine quest for the truth is Dürrenmatt’s fictionalized warning against the dangers of a technologically advanced society that turns everyday life into one of constant scrutiny. Joel Agee’s elegant translation will introduce a fresh generation of English-speaking readers to one of European literature’s masters of language, suspense, and dystopia."

“The narrative is accelerated from the start... As the novella builds to its horripilating climax, we realize the extent to which all values have thereby been inverted. The Assignment is a parable of hell for an age consumed by images.” — New York Times Book Review

“His most ambitious book... dark and devious... almost obsessively drawn to mankind’s most fiendish crimes.” — Chicago Tribune

"Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s short novel The Assignment, originally published in German in 1986, is written in twenty-four long sentences (Dürrenmatt’s model for the novel’s structure was said to be the twenty-four sections of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier I). It is about a filmmaker, a woman simply referred to as F., hired by a famous Swiss psychiatrist named Otto von Lambert who has written a well-known book on terrorism. F’s job is to solve, and document via film the solving of, the mystery of the death of von Lambert’s wife Tina, assaulted and murdered at the foot of a ruin in Egypt called Al-Hakim. It is soon revealed that von Lambert’s reasons for commissioning the documentary are deeply rooted within his intrinsic selfishness and desire for fame (indeed, within the novel the investigation into the death of Tina von Lambert is followed closely by the international press). The psychiatrist feels a sense of responsibility for his wife’s murder, but only because he treated her as “a case, instead of a person.”1 It was this maltreatment, which Tina apparently discovered through his notes on his observations of her, that made her flee their home. Now the psychiatrist would like to have his voyeuristic actions toward his wife documented, partly as an ostensible warning to others against such an unethical doctor-patient relationship but primarily so that he might pacify his own conscience while still expanding his fame within his field, even when it is at the sake of his reputation.
Before her death, Tina von Lambert kept her own diary—which F. reads with great interest—in which she observed the attentions of her husband (whom she describes as a “monster”). In fact, she has observed her husband as much as he has observed her. Of particular interest to F. are two passages in Tina von Lambert’s diary in which she has written, chillingly, “I am being watched.” It is a statement that casts a long shadow over the narrative. Who had been observing Tina von Lambert? And if not only her husband, for what reasons did the other observe her?
It is an extremely open-ended question, and one that suggests a mimetic quality between F. and the way in which the reader of the novel “observes” F. unraveling the story of Tina von Lambert. The narrative is written in the third person subjective, and as it follows F.’s descent into the world of intelligence gathering, The Assignment considers the degree to which the roles of observer and observed define the reader’s place within society. It is interesting to note that Tina, who is both observed and observer, elicits both sympathy and contempt. Even F., one of the most The Assignment’s sympathetic characters, directs her creative energies toward wholly voyeuristic ends: Otto von Lambert has come across her while she is filming the funeral of his wife. The film is being made as part of a documentary project F. undertakes toward the “still vague idea of creating a total portrait, namely a portrait of our planet, by combining random scenes into a whole.”
In fact the preposterous, even monstrous impetus of both F.’s and von Lambert’s projects within the novel—the “total” portrait of the planet, as if such a thing were possible, and the solving of one person’s murder not out of any sense of justice but as an act of self-abnegation—are indicative of the futility Dürrenmatt expresses in The Assignment: the futility of any attempt to reach a point of certainty and origin in a search for absolute knowledge, and the madness with which human beings nevertheless try to accumulate such knowledge in the face of the destructiveness that such an accumulation inflicts on others.
For example, after accepting von Lambert’s proposal F. travels to North Africa to investigate Tina von Lambert’s death and falls into a world in which surveillance is used to gain political power, even when the knowledge gained from surveillance is nearly always flawed and warped in its transmission. The victims of this knowledge are haphazardly punished in order to reach a point of conclusion and certainty: at one point F. comes across a man who is imprisoned and then summarily executed as the supposed murderer of Tina von Lambert. (It is later revealed that the man, who is innocent of the crimes he is accused of, has simply been used as a political symbol.) It’s a telling point about how reaching a conclusion is often more important to the person who uses knowledge as a form of control than whether that conclusion contains any sense of justice.
Two other characters, both of whom become profound symbols within the novel, share F.’s and Otto von Lambert’s desire to pursue self-created, Sisyphean tasks in order to give themselves the impression of self-agency. One, known only as D., is a logician who has chosen his field because logic is “beyond all reality and removed from every sort of existential mishap.” D. feels that a very suitable definition of contemporary man might be that he is man under observation —observed by the state, for one, with more and more sophisticated methods, while man makes more and more desperate attempts to escape being observed, which in turn renders man increasingly suspect in the eyes of the state and the state even more suspect in the eyes of man
Despite this philosophy, D. professes that the act of being observed is something profoundly desired by mankind, “that [people], too, felt meaningless unless they were being observed, and that this was the reason why they all observed and took snapshots and movies of each other, for fear of experiencing the meaninglessness of their existence in the face of a dispersing universe.” Here humanity is on a pivot point between existence and non-existence, and balancing these two positions drives D. into madness; without observation it is as though human beings are cast into the darkness of non-existence.
Another character, a photographer named Polypheme (after the cyclops in the Odyssey) has built a career out of doing surveillance work for governments and weapons-manufacturing companies. Polypheme also who takes pictures of operatives being assassinated, utilizing technologically advanced cameras that allow him to divide time into infinitely small pieces, far beyond what human perception is capable of capturing. He tells F. (with the certainty that D. has used in describing the privileged place of logic as a tool in assimilating reality) that “reality [can] only be comprehended by means of a camera, aseptically, the camera alone was capable of capturing space and time within which experience took place, while without a camera, experience slid off into nothingness, since the moment something was experienced it had passed and was therefore just a memory and, like all memory, falsified, fictive.” Even the methods of the logician and the photographer, however, do not preclude the idea that, were they granted a glimpse of “reality,” they would only understand that reality through the limitations of human perception.
As in the opening segment of Citizen Kane —where a newsreel detailing a man’s death is unable to encompass the breadth of his life, giving way to a detailed narrative that is still unable to capture him—The Assignment, construes time and memory as things that are constantly fading into darkness, while humanity deludes itself into believing that the darkness is conquerable.2 In fact, the darkness’s enormity—the darkness of oblivion, time, and space—is (quite literally) unimaginable by the human beings who attempt to grasp it, and use it for their own ends. - Jordan Anderson
Friedrich Dürrenmatt, The Inspector Barlach Mysteries: The Judge and His Hangman and Suspicion, Trans. by Joel Agee, University Of Chicago Press, 2006.

"This volume offers bracing new translations of two precursors to the modern detective novel by Friedrich Dürrenmatt, whose genre-bending mysteries recall the work of Alain Robbe-Grillet and anticipate the postmodern fictions of Paul Auster and other contemporary neo-noir novelists. Both mysteries follow Inspector Barlach as he moves through worlds in which the distinction between crime and justice seems to have vanished. In The Judge and His Hangman, Barlach forgoes the arrest of a murderer in order to manipulate him into killing another, more elusive criminal. And in Suspicion, Barlach pursues a former Nazi doctor by checking into his clinic with the hope of forcing him to reveal himself. The result is two thrillers that bring existential philosophy and the detective genre into dazzling convergence."

"Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921-1990) was best known as the author of clever, morally inquisitive plays such as ''The Visit'' and ''The Physicists.'' In the early 1950s he also wrote three short, spellbinding mystery novels, which the University of Chicago Press has reissued in paperback with new translations from the German by Joel Agee: The Pledge and The Inspector Barlach Mysteries: The Judge and His Hangman & Suspicion. The latter includes a thoughtful foreword by Sven Birkerts, who praises Dürrenmatt''s talent as a captivating entertainer who could also ''play through complex moral issues with a speed-chess decisiveness and inexorability.''
. . . These are slender tales. But they have the weight and texture of classics. Mystery readers should be grateful to the University of Chicago Press for bringing these gems back to life." — Richard Lipez

Read it at Google Books

Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Selected Writings, Volume 2, Fictions, Theodore Ziolkowski Editor, Trans. by Joel Agee, University Of Chicago Press, 2006.

"The Swiss writer Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921–90) was one of the most important literary figures of the second half of the twentieth century. During the years of the cold war, arguably only Beckett, Camus, Sartre, and Brecht rivaled him as a presence in European letters. Yet outside Europe, this prolific author is primarily known for only one work, The Visit. With these long-awaited translations of his plays, fictions, and essays, Dürrenmatt becomes available again in all his brilliance to the English-speaking world.
This second volume of Selected Writings reveals a writer who may stand as Kafka’s greatest heir. Dürrenmatt’s novellas and short stories are searing, tragicomic explorations of the ironies of justice and the corruptibility of institutions. Apart from The Pledge, a requiem to the detective story that was made into a film starring Jack Nicholson, none of the works in this volume are available elsewhere in English. Among the most evocative fictions included here are two novellas: The Assignment and Traps. The Assignment tells the story of a woman filmmaker investigating a mysterious murder in an unnamed Arab country and has been hailed by Sven Birkerts as “a parable of hell for an age consumed by images.” Traps, meanwhile, is a chilling comic novella about a traveling salesman who agrees to play the role of the defendant in a mock trial among dinner companions—and then pays the ultimate penalty.
Dürrenmatt has long been considered a great writer—but one unfairly neglected in the modern world of letters. With these elegantly conceived and expertly translated volumes, a new generation of readers will rediscover his greatest works.
Friedrich Durrenmatt, Selected Writings, Volume 3, Essays, Kenneth J. Northcott Editor, Trans. by Joel Agee, Introduction by Brian Evenson, University Of Chicago Press, 2006.

"Dürrenmatt’s essays, gathered in this third volume of Selected Writings, are among his most impressive achievements. Their range alone is astonishing: he wrote with authority and charm about art, literature, philosophy, politics, and the theater. The selections here include Dürrenmatt’s best-known essays, such as “Theater Problems” and “Monster Essay on Justice and Law,” as well as the notes he took on a 1970 journey in America (in which he finds the United States “increasingly susceptible to every kind of fascism”). This third volume of Selected Writings also includes essays that shade into fiction, such as “The Winter War in Tibet,” a fantasy of a third world war waged in a vast subterranean labyrinth—a Plato’s Cave allegory rewritten for our own troubled times.
Friedrich Durrenmatt, Selected Writings, Volume I, Plays, Kenneth J. Northcott Editor, Trans. by Joel Agee, University Of Chicago Press, 2006.

"Dürrenmatt’s concerns are timeless, but they are also the product of his Swiss vantage during the cold war: his key plays, gathered in the first volume of Selected Writings, explore such themes as guilt by passivity, the refusal of responsibility, greed and political decay, and the tension between justice and freedom. In The Visit, for instance, an old lady who becomes the wealthiest person in the world returns to the village that cast her out as a young woman and offers riches to the town in exchange for the life of the man, now its mayor, who once disgraced her. Joel Agee’s crystalline translation gives a fresh lease to this play, as well as four others: The Physicists, Romulus the Great, Hercules and the Augean Stables, and The Marriage of Mr. Mississippi.
Friedrich Durrenmatt, The Pledge, Trans. by Joel Agee, University Of Chicago Press, 2006.

"Set in a small town in Switzerland, The Pledge centers around the murder of a young girl and the detective who promises the victim’s mother he will find the perpetrator. After deciding the wrong man has been arrested for the crime, the detective lays a trap for the real killer—with all the patience of a master fisherman. But cruel turns of plot conspire to make him pay dearly for his pledge. Here Friedrich Dürrenmatt conveys his brilliant ear for dialogue and a devastating sense of timing and suspense. Joel Agee’s skilled translation effectively captures the various voices in the original, as well as its chilling conclusion.
One of Dürrenmatt’s most diabolically imagined and constructed novels, The Pledge was adapted for the screen in 2000 in a film directed by Sean Penn and starring Jack Nicholson."

"The Swiss essayist Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921-90) was a prolific writer of detective novels with a low regard for detective fiction. ''You set up your stories logically, like a chess game: all the detective needs to know is the rules, he replays the moves of the game, and checkmate, the criminal is caught and justice has triumphed. This fantasy drives me crazy.'' Dürrenmatt''s tale doesn''t so much alter the rules as sweep all the figures to the floor. Three young girls, each with blond braids and red dresses, are found dismembered in the woods. A pattern seems to emerge, yet the attempt to catch the killer develops into a fruitless obsession which drives the head of the investigation insane. Dürrenmatt incorporates fairy-tale archetypes to distort the typical conventions of a psychological thriller—when little girls in red dresses skip off into the woods, should the investigation team focus their enquiries on a big, bad wolf? Not a book for anyone who likes a tidy conclusion, but as Dürrenmatt says: ''The only way to avoid getting crushed by absurdity, is to humbly include the absurd in our calculations.'' — The Guardian

"A stark essay in crime and pursuit, as terse and assured in construction as the best of Simenon." - John Coleman

Friedrich Durrenmatt, The Visit, Trans. by Joel Agee, Grove Press, 2010.

"Dürrenmatt once wrote of himself: “I can best be understood if one grasps grotesqueness,” and The Visit is a consummate, alarming Dürrenmatt blend of hilarity, horror, and vertigo. The play takes place “somewhere in Central Europe” and tells of an elderly millionairess who, merely on the promise of her millions, swiftly turns a depressed area into a boom town. But the condition attached to her largesse, which the locals learn of only after they are enmeshed, is murder. Dürrenmatt has fashioned a macabre and entertaining parable that is a scathing indictment of the power of greed."
Friedrich Durrenmatt, The Physicists, Trans. by James Kirkup, Grove Press, 1994.

"The world’s greatest physicist, Johann Wilhelm Möbius, is in a madhouse, haunted by recurring visions of King Solomon. He is kept company by two other equally deluded scientists: one who thinks he is Einstein, another who believes he is Newton. It soon becomes evident, however, that these three are not as harmlessly lunatic as they appear. Are they, in fact, really mad? Or are they playing some murderous game, with the world as the stake? For Möbius has uncovered the mystery of the universe—and therefore the key to its destruction—and Einstein and Newton are vying for this secret that would enable them to rule the earth."

"Friedrich Dürrenmatt's The Physicists is one of many physicist-centered dramas written in the 1950s and 1960s. At that time the potential that scientific innovation held was largely seen in the awesome destructive power of the atomic and hydrogens bombs. Science seemed to have outstripped man's ability to utilize it for the betterment of humanity. The Cold War, the arms race, and policies of mutually assured destruction suggested that instead science was too easily being used for bad - indeed, literally world-threatening - ends. Man could not be trusted with the knowledge that physicists were able to discover.
Dürrenmatt's physicists take one of the few options available to them to keep the knowledge they have from falling into hands ill-prepared to do what is best with it: they get themselves locked up in a mental institution.
The Physicists begins with a murder. A patient has murdered a nurse at the sanatorium. Because he is believed to be insane the criminal investigation is a largely superficial one. But the inspector does note his annoyance: three months earlier another patient had murdered another nurse.
Three physicists live together in the wing. One believes he is Einstein, one believes he is Newton (but occasionally tells people that he is in fact Einstein, though "in fact he really believes he is Newton"), and one understands that he is Johann Wilhelm Möbius but believes King Solomon talks to him. In fact, however, the three physicists are all sane.
Möbius feigns insanity because he discovered the "Unitary Theory of Elementary Particles". And he doesn't feel mankind is ready for the consequences:
'The result is - devastating. New and inconceivable forces would be unleashed, making possible a technical advance that would transcend the wildest flights of fantasy if my findings were to fall into the hands of mankind.'
The men who pretend to be Einstein and Newton are physicists in the employ of intelligence services, representing the Western and Eastern powers of Cold War times, sent there to get Möbius' great discovery.
The murders of the nurses were necessary, because each grew too convinced that the patients were, in fact, sane. At the end of the first act Möbius finds himself with the same dilemma and sees murder as the only way to protect his secret.
Things are further complicated, in the form of the founder of the sanatorium, Fräulein Doktor Mathilde von Zahnd, who is the only one who appears truly mentally unstable. She too knows more than she originally let on, and before they know it the physicists find they have dug themselves a hole out of which they can not easily escape.
Dürrenmatt's comedy is very clever, and the situation he puts his characters in an ingenious and amusing one. The moral dilemma of the modern scientist no longer excites quite as much as it did at the height of the Cold War, but it is still a very effective play." - The Complete Review

Dürrenmatt’s Fiction, Introduction by Theodore Ziolkowski

Dürrenmatt’s Drama, Introduction by Kenneth J. Northcott

Dürrenmatt’s Essays, Introduction by Brian Evenson

Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921-1990)

Uwe Johnson - He wield his language(s) with a virtuosity surpassed by no other German writer, and makes no concessions to the tastes of public

Uwe Johnson, Anniversaries (Jahrestage), Trans. by Leila Vennewitz, Harcourt, 1975.



"It is - among many other things - a book about the city as seen by a poet with a wayward eye and prose to match. Lingering on the texture of a surface, he can turn the most familiar sight into a revelation. (...) Johnson's prose defies translation: that he survives at all is a minor miracle. One would desperately wish for a major one, because Johnson in the original can be superb. (...) Reading Uwe Johnson in English is better than not reading him at all, because even in this less than perfect version he comes across as an uncommonly original and provocative voice." - Ernst Pawel



"(T)he publication of this fascinating, infuriating, inchoate jumble is something of an event in postwar German literature (.....) Johnson's way, although no doubt tiresome and gimmicky at times, is that of an admirably uncompromising and impressively earnest inventor. Not only does he wield his language(s) with a virtuosity surpassed by - arguably - no other German writer of his generation (God help his translators); he also makes almost no definable concessions to the tastes and habits of the novel-reading public. There's no sex for a start" - Times Literary Supplement



"Clearly, therfore, despite its lighter moments, its superb (and for the most part defensible) waspishness, its grand, ingenious design, and the linguistic subtlety, versatility, and inventiveness which are among Johnson's hallmarks - despite all this and more besides, there is no likelihood Jahrestage will wear well. It is a highly allusive work, addressed much of the time to insiders (.....) If it is much respected and little read, embalmed in academic libraries as a remarkable but increasingly inaccessible relic, no one should be surprised." - G. P. Butler



"[Note: this review refers to and relies on the original German edition, and all translations of quotes are our own. The English translation is an abridged version (authorized by the author), and of the 367 chapters, 64 were cut entirely and only 130 are translated in their entirety.]



Uwe Johnson's Anniversaries (Jahrestage) was originally published in four volumes between 1970 and 1983, but it is a single, unified work. The literal translation of the title is, indeed, 'anniversaries', but can also mean 'days of the year', and it is as both of these meanings that Johnson presents his text. The novel covers, day by day, a year in the life of Gesine Cresspahl, beginning 21 August 1967, and concluding 20 August 1968. Johnson anchors the narrative in the present-day, making Gesine a dedicated and somewhat obsessive reader of The New York Times, and so there are many references to the stories of the day, most every day, and often longer excerpts from the newspaper. At the same time, Gesine is providing a (more or less chronological) account of her past to her ten-year-old daughter, Marie, and there are also present-day domestic scenes from their lives.

Gesine was born 3 March 1933 in Jerichow in Germany, in a part of the country that would become East Germany. She is a single mother who moved to the United States when her daughter was four and who works for a bank. They live in Apartment 204 at 243 Riverside Drive (three rooms, all with a view of the Hudson, for $124.00 a month ...).

Marie is a precocious and independent-minded ten-year-old who has readily and completely adopted New York as her home and who only speaks German (sometimes) with her mother. Gesine's on-going account of her past is delivered in part on tape, to be listened to later by Marie, as well as in their conversations (allowing for interjections and questions by the child): it is often straightforward narrative but occasionally tortured in trying to deal with a difficult past (shifting from recounted history to conversation to letters, etc.).

It's Marie that requests her mother record much of this: "What you're thinking now, what I'll only understand later. Complaints, too." There's a wariness on both sides, about what might be revealed or the sheer weight of it all, but typically they're comforted by their agreement:

- For when I'm dead ?

- Yes. For when you're dead.

Gesine's past covers much of Germany's most troubled times, from the rise of Nazism to the war years to the occupations first (briefly) by the British and then, more permanently, by the Soviets. Her focus in the early years is very much on her parents: a father who had settled in England and was doing well there but then married and followed his wife back to Germany when she wanted to give birth to their child there.

Cresspahl marries into the Papenbrock-family, but he remains an outsider: known as 'the Englishman' (despite being German) he remains friendly with the local Jews even as ugly nationalism rises around them. Tolerant, careful, he tries to keep a low profile and do his best to get through the difficult years: Gesine is able to say "Mein Krieg war gut versteckt" ("My war was well-concealed"), and not just because of Jerichow's remote location. Arguably - Marie has her doubts - he was also an agent for the English, and when they occupied the town after the war the British did make him mayor - a position he filled capably, and one the Soviets (who then were awarded the territory) kept him in (before eventually tossing him in jail).

The flighty, depressive Lisbeth, Gesine's mother, was complicated in different ways, and never made the situation better. She was unhinged enough to watch and do nothing as infant Gesine threatened to drown (Cresspahl happened to witness the scene and plucked her out of danger), and if her violent death isn't a suicide, there's certainly enough reason to believe she would have done herself in eventually. As is, she dies when Gesine is still a small child; fortunately Cresspahl is up to the challenge of raising the girl more or less on his own. (Gesine does remain haunted by the mother-figure: when Marie asks her for her New Year's resolutions 1968, one of them is: "That I don't become like my mother" -- and even though her dread is obvious it's a remarkable admission to make to the child; it throws even the generally unperturable Marie, who tries explains it away for both of them: "You have fever, Gesine.")

Johnson began writing the book on 29 January 1968, and he lucked into quite a year. It's more than back-drop: the period is front and centre, omnipresent. The war in Viet Nam obviously dominates - the first sentence of the first dated entry refers to it ("Clearing weather in North Viet Nam permitted Air Force raids north of Hanoi", etc.) - yet it in its almost daily constancy becomes an almost repetitive drone: Johnson's choice to refer to weather conditions in his opening salvo are apt, since the Viet Nam-reports (much as the daily reports of American fatalities in Iraq have become in 2005 and 2006) resemble nothing as much as the daily weather report, with what (in print if not real life) amount to only small varying details. 1968 would also be the year of the shooting of Rudi Dutschke and assassinations of Martin Luther King jr. and Robert Kennedy (the latter two events that hit Marie harder - or at least more demonstratively - than Gesine), as well as the Prague spring. The Czech connexion is of particular importance, because Gesine is taking Czech lessons, and the book moves towards a planned trip to Prague (indeed, that is where they are set to be the day after the book closes, on 21 August 1968 (a date and place that should resonate for what else was to happen there and then, the Soviets putting a brutal end to the Prague spring)).

Anniversaries is also very much a New York-portrait, with Gesine still a part of immigrant culture while Marie is a full-fledged New Yorker ("Mit New York: sagt sie siegesgewiß, verächtlich: damit legst du mich nicht herein" ("With New York: she said, certain of prevailing, contemptuously: with that you can't fool me") Marie proclaims, knowing that she knows the city better than her mother). It's also a city that isn't doing that well: crime-ridden (their Upper West Side apartment is in what isn't - at that time - a great neighbourhood, and it sounds like they're lucky only to be robbed once over the course of the year), with racial tension, as well political unrest.

Race figures prominently too: Gesine won't stand for any racism, and proves more open-minded than most of the locals - an attitude similar to that of her father, and which she passes on to her daughter. Among the many sub-plots is Francine, the token black girl who winds up in Marie's class at the exclusive private school she attends. Unlike her classmates, Marie feels an obligation to assist the child who is completely out of her element. Johnson's girl is, at times, arguably too precocious, but even something as difficult as this he handles well, convincingly having Marie express her frustration at the injustice perpetrated on Francine, who has, for example, never been taught how to learn.

Francine and her family are types - snapshots of a world largely beyond his ken - but for all that Johnson handles them well, without condescension (largely by describing it through Marie's experiences, and never having, for example, Gesine try to be buddies with Francine's mom or anything like that). Even brave Marie has difficulty in venturing more than once to Francine's tenement home; later, Francine's mother is injured in a violent incident, and it's only natural for the Cresspahls to take in the girl (as the other children are scattered in foster homes and elsewhere), a reaching out that mirrors Gesine's fathers attempts to reach out to strangers and locals when Gesine was a child (even as it probably strikes most American readers as utterly absurd). Again, the unlikely situation works because Johnson does not paint an easy idyll, but rather suggests the actual difficulties such an arrangement would pose: it is here that Marie is presented at her most childish (and thus, in some ways, most believable), fundamentally decent and trying to be helpful but also irritated by this foreign presence who herself feels so very much out of her element. Hands-off Gesine offers a secure environment that allows Francine the space to adapt, and Johnson captures this transition well -- and without forcing a happy end: Francine goes home again (and is ultimately a lost child), the status quo barely changed (and, yes, even Marie sighs somewhat in relief).

It is a political time, and while Gesine does not shy away from it, she almost tries to keep it at a certain remove. (Ironically, the reader sees her hurtling towards one of the decisive historical moments of the age, knowing the trip she is long planning - Prague - and knowing the date on which the book ends, one day before the fateful and dreadful 21 August 1968.) It's no wonder she prefers the black-and-white accounts from the day after as provided in the newspaper, refusing even to get a television despite Marie's frequent appeals. (It's after RFK's assassination that Marie decides enough is enough: she needs her mother's signature on the rental agreement, but she's the one that hires a television (and pays the $19.50 cost) - and has it set up in her room.) It's Marie, too, that is the more active, louder with her outrage, eager to go to the marches and parades, caught up in the immediacy of things in a way that Gesine, who has seen and lived through so much, is not. On 1 May 1968 Gesine looks to Europe, but Marie has left that long behind, caught up in the here and now in a way that her mother can't seem to keep up with: - Was geht's dich an ! du hast bloß mal da gewohnt ! sagt Marie.

- Da hab ich bloß mal gewohnt.

- Hier aber haben wir eine Revolution, bloß zwanzig Blocks von unserer Haustür !

- Hast du sie gesehen ?

- Den fünften Nachmittag heute ! Selbst du solltest es wissen aus deiner Zeitung. Müßte deine Tante dir doch gesagt haben.

(- What concern is it of yours ! you just lived there once ! Marie says.

- I just lived there once.

- But here we have a revolution, just twenty blocks from our door !

- You saw it ?

- The fifth afternoon today ! Even you should know it, from your newspaper. Your aunt should have told you.)

(The 'aunt' of course being the old grey lady, The New York Times)

Even Gesine is a bit shocked at Marie running underfoot at the Columbia-protests, and admittedly the girl's unsupervised gallivanting across town is one of the less believable elements of the book. Canny and wise beyond her years, the girl is still just ten and it's hard to believe any mother would let a child that age run about (and take the subway) as freely as Gesine does.

Eager to protest and make her objections to injustice known, Marie nevertheless has wholeheartedly embraced America. She is, for all intents and purposes, an American girl, and among the few things about her that seem to annoy Gesine is the girl's unquestioning anti-communism. It's not that Gesine necessarily disapproves of the attitude itself, but rather that Marie has bought into that party line unthinkingly: communism is simply an evil, enough said -- but Gesine knows from experience that it's all more complicated than that. Gesine is also far more ambivalent about the America she has made their home. Marie can protest the war in Viet Nam and the military-industrial complex and still live happily within the system, but Gesine is nowhere near as comfortable. "Wo ist die moralische Schweiz, in die wir emigrieren könnten ?" ("Where is that moral Switzerland to which we could emigrate ?") she asks herself only half-jokingly - as experience has taught her that there is no place that allows such neutrality (hence also the question referring to a "moral Switzerland", rather than Switzerland itself, a country that can stand for neutrality without actually being that).

Some men do vie for Gesine's attention, but she's careful about letting anyone get too close. She doesn't reveal much about Marie's father, and admits on one of those tapes that she leaves for when she's dead that she can't let anyone (save her daughter) close for fear of losing them: "Ich will diesen Schmerz nicht noch einmal" ("I don't want that pain again"). The scientist Erichson - known as D.E. - is a frequent visitor and close friend, but as much an uncle-figure to the child as lover for Gesine.

Among the playful asides are some swats at German literati: Hans Magnus Enzensberger's open letter in The New York Review of Books (explaining why he resigned from his appointment at Wesleyan), picked apart over half a dozen pages, or a report in The New York Times on West German author 'Günther Glass' (his name more readily misspelt pre-Nobel prize) - and there are even some Uwe Johnson sightings, including an awkward question-and-answer session at a Jewish American Congress event.

Anniversaries is a very long book; remarkably, it hardly ever flags. The variety of narrative techniques - quotation, different voices and perspectives - help keep the reader focussed, and the different storylines (Gesine's past, Gesine's present, Marie's present, the world at large) are woven together well. It is a history of Germany, 1933 to ca. 1953, as well as of 1968 America. It is about the experience of being a European emigrant, and about being an almost-teen in the late 60s. It is about past and present and, emphatically, morality in its broadest senses. It is about society -- German and American, and society under Nazi, communist, and capitalist systems - and works as such because it isn't a moralising text and offers little forced philosophical exposition and debate: Johnson shows by example and experience. The major characters - father Cresspahl, Gesine, Marie - act, and while they don't or can't always do right, and can't always be sure of what they do, they are, in their different ways, exemplary.

Johnson mixes things up enough to keep readers alert - tossing in a grocery list (on snowy 29 December), notes for a school-essay on RFK (6 June), even variations on the colour yellow (in New York - 1 August). But it's with the effective repeated use (but not over-use) of newspaper-detail - all those bits of reality which can never be kept at bay - as well as, especially, the mother-daughter back-and-forth that Johnson achieves so much momentum. Much of the story is most powerful when Gesine is not, in fact, front and centre: especially the parts about her parents and then her father are more interesting than when she figures more prominently in her own story of childhood and youth. But in the present, and especially in her dealings at work and at home, Johnson presents a remarkably full character-portrait - enlivened also by the challenging semi-equal, Marie (who, after all, doesn't call her 'Mammi' or anything of that sort, but simply: Gesine).

There are some lapses: an odd kidnapping episode seems out of place, and much of volume three seems off-pace, but overall it's a remarkable and consistent accomplishment. For what looks like a diary-book it's, in fact, a compelling novel, and in the three generation-representatives of Cresspahl, Gesine, and Marie a book with three superbly rendered characters. For insight into life in Germany in the 1930s, and in New York in the 1960s - admittedly both times from a particular vantage point - it bears comparison to the best literary portraits of those eras and places.

It is a lot to tackle, but it is a book that is in every sense substantial, and ultimately very much worth the time. (The effort, too, one might add, but it doesn't really require much effort, readily engaging the reader.) Certainly a book that will endure, deserving of a place beside the best of the most ambitious post-World War II German novels (such as The Tin Drum, The Aesthetics of Resistance, and The Life and Adventures of Trobadora Beatrice as Chronicled by her Minstrel Laura)." - The Complete Review



"Uwe Johnson never quite knew what to do with the self-satisfied authority of superlatives. He was interested in the inconclusive, the ambiguous, and preferred observing things from the edge. The texture of a frame seemed to him more revealing than the painting, the smell of ink on one’s fingers more revealing than the content of a newspaper article. He had originally wanted to call his novel The Third Book about Achim something different: Description of a Description, which would have been the more apt title. Thus, he would only have quietly shaken his bald head and tapped out his pipe ashes when confronted with a statement like: Anniversaries is the best novel ever written about America in the German language. Nevertheless, it is true.

Anniversaries was conceived as a book of normal length, but became a life’s work, in the true sense of the word. Johnson worked for fifteen years, and sometimes he was defeated. It would take him 1,900 pages to finish, and in reading one quickly realizes that even a single page less would have been a problematic simplification. (It is all the more inexplicable that there has only been an abridged version published in English.) After the last of its four volumes appeared, he died at the early age of 49. He was very lonely in the end; life on the edge had turned into solitude. He was found in his house in England three weeks after he died.

For all its bulk, though, the book doesn’t give you much time to decide against reading it. Two long sentences, to be precise:

Long waves sweep slanting against the beach, hump muscled backs, raise trembling combs that tip over at the greenest summit. The taut roll, already streaked with white, enfolds a hollow space of air that is crushed by the clear mass as if a secret had been created and destroyed there.

Yes, I will read you, I thought, as I finished these lines last summer. I would begin Anniversaries on an anniversary – August 20th, 2009 – and planned to read its 365 entries in 365 days.

Anniversaries follows the form of a diary. It begins on August 20th, 1967, at the New Jersey coast, and ends exactly one year later, when Russian tanks invade Prague. To describe what happens in between seems almost out of the question; the book is more of a literary landscape than a novel, and a mountain wants to be climbed, not surveyed. Once, when Johnson was asked to summarize the plot before a reading, he talked for one and a half hours (no time was left for the reading itself) not because the plot was so extravagant, but because some books are long for a reason, and because some novels about the passing of time need time to pass instead of just claiming that it passes. One needs to actually read them in order to respect them, just as Hannah Arendt wanted to call a life a life only after it was lived.

The particular life we follow in Anniversaries belongs to Gesine Cressphal, who works as a translator in a Manhattan bank. She was born into Hitler’s Reich and grew up in East Germany, where, in many offices and classrooms soon after the war, pictures of Hitler were simply replaced by portraits of Stalin. Gesine has learned early on how to lie; when she arrives in New York, “freedom” isn’t much more than a word. She has left behind in Germany a dead husband, Jakob. He didn’t exactly die peacefully. (In fact, Jakob has been the protagonist of Johnson’s earlier novel Speculations about Jakob. As with Faulkner, whom Johnson admired almost more than any other writer, Johnson’s books are intertwined over decades, full of connections, rumors, and secrets between people and places, like an old neighborhood. Johnson refused to bring characters into life just to have them suffocate between the boards of a book. During his time in New York, Johnson would sometimes say to his acquaintances that he just ran into Gesine Cressphal at Grand Central. He was actually serious.)

From August of 1967 to August of 1968, at a rate of one entry per day, Gesine tells her daughter the story of her life and asks – as Johnson does in all of his writing – What brought us here? She talks about her father who, in his hometown of Jerichow in Mecklenburg, saw the evil of Nazism approaching but nevertheless accommodated himself to it in order to not lose his family. She talks about her mother who once tried to let little Gesine drown in a rain barrel. She talks about time and guilt and why one passes and the other doesn’t. She also deals with religion, Vietnam, and America as the fetish of our world – but only marginally. Throughout, a larger question looms: Is it possible, after all, that the truth doesn’t have an essence, only edges?

Long before it became the duty of cultural theorists to damn it, Johnson was mistrusting “truth.” For him, it was no more palpable than memory, which Gesine likens to a cat: “independent, incorruptible, intractable. And yet a comfortable companion, when it puts in an appearance, even if it stays out of reach.” Perhaps one learns this automatically, growing up during a dictatorship.

And yet, as a reader, I can’t let go of truth – not for moral reasons but because nothing else touches me. The truth I look for in a novel has little to do with what is depicted, with the characters or historical details. It lies instead in what one might call the tone. Over time, I forget much of what I read; only this tone stays with me. But when is a tone truthful? When is it authentic? I suppose the answer has something to do with what is personal and peculiar, with what Nabokov called, when he spoke about exhilarating reading and writing experiences, “looking through glasses which will fit no one else.” The dialect of a text, something between the lines, more audible than actually readable, its volume, its acoustic color… The hidden lust for life in Thomas Mann’s books. The curiosity and angst (those twin sisters) in Kafka’s. With people, too, one knows after a few sentences whether one wants to show them one’s favorite café.

Many North Germans feel more familiar with the English temper than with, say, the Bavarian temper. Johnson’s language has much of this polite and confident restraint, which, in every sentence, hides as much as it displays. He barely dares to say “I.” To mistake this for frigidity, however, is a popular misunderstanding, about Johnson as much as about North Germans.

When Max Frisch, one of his few long-term friends, said that it’s not the writer who finds his language, but vice versa, it was especially true for Johnson. He approaches his sentences carefully; he doesn’t triumph over them by stretching them into long technically obsessed hypotaxis or by brutally shortening them into bossy staccatos (both of which we Germans know how to do very well.) Sometimes he inadvertently falls into an English syntax shorter and more flexible than German, a syntax that flows where the German constricts. He seems to let the sentences have the shapes they chose for themselves. This has nothing to do with the trivial concept of the “death of the author.” Johnson always remains tangible in the background, but discreetly, like a concerned father who secretly hides in the car when his daughter goes to her first party. He believes in narrative, but wants neither the dubious dominance of an omnipotent narrator nor a visa into the anonymous universe of texts and textures. For where there’s no narrator, there can be no responsibility – and of course writing was for Johnson an act of social conscience.

In the Sixties, in Germany, literature and politics were still strongly looking to communicate with each other; the “Gruppe 47,” in which Günter Grass, Heinrich Böll and many others grew as writers, was regarded as a moral authority. Johnson was perhaps the most intellectual among them; certainly he was the quietest. In a time of heated debates, his tone was laconic. Lacking the vanity required for outright outrage, he analyzed where others barked. He didn’t have to be politicized by loud agitation; the infringement of political power on private life had already shaped him in his youth, when he refused to denounce “hostile elements.” It is said that the division of Germany first came into literature with Johnson, that he was a representative for the people whose lives were, like his, shaped by living in East Germany. But nothing was farther from him than to draw a line under German misery. He didn’t want to conjure up a “zero hour” or a new beginning which was as clamorous as it was convenient. The present, in his work, is too full of the past. Gesine Cresspehl always hears the voices of the dead and calls upon them when she needs them, just as Johnson’s calm and serious tone resembles someone remembering those forgotten by time. Anniversaries, then, is a singular monument to justice, unraveling the fates of dozens of people over a span of forty years along the eternal conflict of assimilation and protest.

As I’ve moved through it over the last several months, it has been the curious unity of thoughtfulness and definiteness, of irony and moral seriousness that has fascinated me most. Alone, each is more often than not hard to bear. But Johnson both respects and distrusts language. He plays with it and, in the next moment, forces it to be austere. If he gets carried away with a pun, a dramatic turn or even just a jaunty image – for example with a waiter who “tucks a smile into his mustache” – then it seems as if he wants to apologize for it in the next sentence, as if he needed to put a stop to what mustn’t get out of control.

Johnson is a moralist, but not a polemicist who would lose his authority by putting himself above his topic, even for the sake of a laugh. His sentences are humorous in themselves, but don’t tell jokes; they’re chucklers, not kneeslappers. He knows better than to celebrate the violence of a Nazi-gang with rhetorical drama, and he portrays them instead as a pathetic but brutal amateur dramatic performance. One is almost relieved when he suddenly describes a Nazi official as a pig, only to be brought up short by the ironic twist that follows: “Not in any metaphorical sense, simply on the basis of physical similarity.”

Admittedly, he isn’t easy on his readers: He rushes them through places, times and several narrative levels, at times – dauntingly, within one sentence. The frame of the plot is complex; the structure of the journal is porous. Sometimes Gesine is the narrator, sometimes she is being narrated. She merges into the narrative and surfaces again, unexpectedly. Sometimes she is in dialogue with the author himself – in Plattdeutsch, the Low German dialect. Perhaps this, too, has roots in an adolescence defined by state power, when not being too direct can save one’s life.

But the unity is greater than that; it’s as if the peculiar was only made discernible by the random. The more complex a truth is, the harder it is to bind it into sentences, and one will be more successful looking for it in the margins. Johnson approaches the truth like a partisan, indirectly; but where postmodernity often circles narcissistically around an empty center, Johnson fulfills his self-imposed task – depicting the embrace of political history and personal biography - by sometimes losing sight of it. Gesine, for example, is addicted to reading The New York Times, which she respectfully calls a “stubborn old aunt,” and which doesn’t only report the number of crosses erected on American military cemeteries during the Vietnam war, but also what wood they were made from and where it was cut.

As with a picture that loses its sharp contours as we move closer, one can get dizzy in the face of this abundance of details and episodes, the branching out of coincidences and allusions, a cocoon in which (hi)story lies like a larva. But Johnson’s language is always both concrete and allegorical. As smooth as the surface seems, there is above it a large space for reverberations.

Anniversaries is, above all, a novel about guilt. I have never read a book that dissects guilt with such precision and empathy without ever losing the clarity of its point of view. Evil is not personified in Johnson’s novels; it remains nameless, and thus threatening. Characters are people, not incarnations, and they are all entangled in their own time, their own space. That Johnson avoids a quick verdict doesn’t weaken his judgments. On the contrary, his moral questions gain power precisely by being less flexible for the lookers-on and hangers-on: the readers, us. The attraction of accusing others, which often lies in the suggestion of one’s own innocence, is what Johnson denies us; we are drawn closer already during the process of reading, by gazing into the abyss – just like Gesine’s mother, who sees synagogues burning and a Jewish girl dying during the Kristallnacht of November 9, 1938, and hours later goes into the flames herself.

Any kind of over-dramatization seems to embarrass Johnson, and yet his prose is distant and serene only as long as we stubbornly swing from one word to the next while the seething has started beneath us. No sentence in itself gives in to the fury of horror―but just as every bright photograph has a disturbingly dark negative, so also is the beauty of Johnson’s language one that chokes on itself. It describes an execution as indifferently as it describes the ocean “crocheting delicate fringes to the land.” And seemingly all of a sudden, the stores of the Jewish cloth merchants in Jerichow are burning.

Here is what’s most disturbing about Johnson’s language: that the barbarism takes hold of it so gradually, just as with people, where it may have hidden in all-too-familiar notions of envy or fear or pain. The idea that evil rages with unmistakable thunder right from the start provides us, in the present, with a false reassurance. When Hitler’s soldiers marched into Poland, Mein Kampf had been standing on German bookshelves for 14 years already.

Anniversaries studies Germany from the viewpoint of New York for a reason. Martin Luther King is shot in Memphis, and one week later the revolutionary leader of the student movement, Rudi Dutschke, is shot in Berlin. In 1968, the New World present merges with the Old World past. Wrong wars are being fought. Capitalism falters, but Communism also fails. There have been worse times than ours to rediscover Uwe Johnson.

It is worth noting, in this connection, that Anniversaries is a Heimatroman, a “home-novel.” The word Heimat, which can be your home or home country, bears a burden, a patina unlike any other German word. Its proximity to Unheimlichkeit (uncanniness) is definitely appropriate. Origin always needs the gaze of someone looking back or coming back in order to become Heimat; it only exists with distance, loss, and in the realization of the past. For Kafka, only death was a true Heimat, the actual good place.

The fact that his beloved New York didn’t need to embrace or suffocate him like a homeland was a relief to Uwe Johnson as much as to Gesine. “True,” he wrote,

our home on Manhattan’s Upper West Side is imaginary. The process of addiction to the area has been solely on our side, we cannot expect the others to reciprocate. And yet, an hour’s walk through the neighborhood inoculates us for years against moving away.

To read Anniversaries in New York, in its own rhythm, over the course of one year, has been like looking doubtfully at long-hidden pictures from the wild youth of an old lady. One will see her with different eyes from now on. And like hearing at least one familiar voice every day.

Like Anniversaries, New York is “crowded with the past, with presence.” The dialectic of freedom and constraint has always been more palpable here than anywhere else in the world. Freedom and promises can rise like water up to one’s neck; where everything seems possible, the road to nothingness seems very short. (Tell me your city, I’ll tell you mine.) But since reading Anniversaries I feel more at home in this foreign land – as if I had returned after a long time and as if Gesine Cressphal’s presence were my past and Johnson’s sentences the echo of my memory. Whoever recognizes something is at home. I’ve been here before." - Fridolin Schley



Kurt Fickert "Names and Themes in Uwe Johnson’s Jahrestage"

Durs Grünbein - I was my own dog, in the suicide strip, equidistant from East and West

Durs Grünbein, Ashes for Breakfast: Selected Poems, Trans. by
Michael Hofmann (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2005)

"[Grünbein's] poems have a nonchalant grace, and shine against their setting of Stalinoid concrete, drabness and dreck. What makes them especially appealing are their volatile shifts of perspective, a sardonic wit and the way they seem to limn out a whole series of potential directions... The unhoused quality of these poems has found as permanent and well-constructed a home in English as anyone... could wish." —James McKendrick

"Younger by five to ten years than most of the poets once gathered loosely around the former Prenzlauer Berg 'scene' in East Berlin, Durs Grünbein... has emerged as one of the most visible, prolific, and intellectually serious poets of that generation. Unlike some of his peers, who seem to have become disoriented by reunification—e.g., Uwe Kolbe and Bert Papenfuß-Gorek—Grünbein has consistently worked to develop his own idiom and poetic identity." —Neil H. Donahue

"Durs Grünbein is one of the most intelligent poets writing in German today. His subject is nothing less than 'this life, so useless, so rich.' It is wonderful to have his selected poems in Michael Hofmann's note-perfect translation." —John Ashbery

"Grünbein is a highly original poet, an heir to the riches of German and European Modernism. What's striking in this poetry is a hard, almost cynical tone which turns out to be just a lid on a jar containing many substances." —Adam Zagajewski

"Born in Dresden in 1962, when the city was under East Germany's Communist rule, Grünbein has established himself as the leading poetic voice of unified Germany after the fall of the Wall in 1990. A gifted poet and clever scavenger of various literary traditions, he picks through the linguistic debris of European culture to mold his findings into well-metered and often deeply captivating verse. Packed into this selection, which has been culled from collections published between 1988 and 1999, are electrifying insights into Germany's effort to understand its role in the world today. Grünbein's predominantly unrhymed, formal poems run on the alternating currents of present-day Germany's giddiness at having no greater responsibilities than any other nation and the country's equally overwhelming grief at having so horribly squandered its potential for prominence. With wit and psychological acumen, Grünbein's poems at their best transform the specificity of this peculiarly German dilemma into a general, human concern... " —Library Journal

''From time to time / I have these days when / I feel like embarking / on a poem again / of a kind that still isn't / all that popular,'' the young Dresden-born poet Durs Grünbein wrote in his first book, ''Grauzone Morgens'' (''Mornings in the Grayzone''), published shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall. ''I mean / one without any meta- / physical refinements or / that thing that lately has stood in / for such... that type of... standing gasping akimbo / in the tough East-West marathon.''
In spite of this proclamation, though, the selections from ''Grauzone Morgens'' that appear in English for the first time in ''Ashes for Breakfast,'' along with poems from four other collections, are overwhelmingly concerned with the effects of Germany's split identity, and the grim, smeared landscape of the former East Germany. ''The elephantine / gray of these / outlying suburbs'' created by Communist housing blocks hovers over everything. Here is ''Dresden / viciously fire-bombed back / another cold century of tiredness... the streets / full of echoes of secret echoes,'' and Grünbein himself ''nothing but a / wiry little extra / most of the time'' in the grand drama of the East German regime.
In Grünbein's post-Wall poems, the East-West divide is no less visible. His next book, ''Sch* delbasislektion'' (1991) (''Skull Base Lesson''), contains poems about dogs that render the plight of former Easterners in scenes and images that have the odd distinction of being whimsical even as they disturb. ''Umpteen years of service with a view of barbed wire fence, / Trotting back and forth upcountry and down, only a dog could endure,'' he writes, evoking entrapment and blind loyalty. ''I was my own dog, / In the suicide strip, equidistant from East and West. / It was only here that I sometimes performed / My salto mortale in the gloaming between dog and wolf.''
The dog and its more vicious predecessors finally carry Grünbein, who was born in 1962, out of his post-Wall funk and back even farther into evolutionary history. The first haunting glimpse comes in a 1994 poem about shaving, wherein the poet looks at himself in the mirror and sees ''the eye glazed in the morning light, an animal / In double jeopardy, practicing / The use of edged tools.'' From there it's a quick leap to a group of poems written to animals in zoos. There is a chimpanzee in London, an okapi in Munich and finally a penguin in New York that Grünbein sees first as a former G.D.R. official, ''eyes and medals front,'' and then, poignantly, as ''A hero of early vaudeville, of flickering black-and-white / Comedies, imperiled by flights of steps, by a windy world.'' Even the animals can't escape the pull of politics and revolution.
Whether we're party apparatchiks or poets, Grünbein explains, we're none of us too far from our roots. ''Between snack bar and coitus, how often, miles from the Olduvai Gorge, / The hairy geezer puts in an appearance, hobbling along on the backs of his hands, / Failing abjectly as he reaches for the stars, because of a crooked ladder or a jammed elevator. / (So much for 'The Origin of Species' or 'Civilization and Its Discontents.')''
''Ashes for Breakfast'' is a brilliantly layered book, which, despite Grünbein's obsessive recitation of his main themes, never becomes repetitive thanks to its almost organic sensibility. In spite of a few distractions in Michael Hofmann's generally good translation (the nonsensical compound ''haiku-unerringness,'' for example, where a slightly longer but less jarring phrase like ''the simplicity of haiku'' would have sufficed), Grünbein's poems read as if the forces of history pressing in on the present drove them into this world." - Melanie Rehak

"For those of us who truly care about poetry as a living entity, the present moment is always the best. Whether a poem is written down today or scratched into clay eons ago is of little consequence, but what does matter is that the poem can reach us where we live now. This is the reason a Babylonian epic can still reach across the millennia to capture our imaginations.
It is also why it is so important that new voices in poetry have their chance to be heard. Poetry, more than any other literary form, is a transcendental tradition that connects the past with the present; blind Greek bards with urban hip-hop slammers.
Fortunately, despite the portentous and ubiquitous death knells sounded by many cultural critics, poetry is doing just fine, and for anyone in need of evidence, the work of Durs Grünbein should suffice.
Since the late 1980s, Grünbein has established himself as the poetic wunderkind of East Germany. Now English-reading audiences will have a thorough opportunity to explore the breadth of his work in the intelligently translated collection "Ashes for Breakfast."
Grünbein was born in Dresden in 1962, and his first collection of poems, "Grauzone Morgens (Grey Area in the Morning), "was published just as socialism in East Germany began its final cycle of deterioration." Within this context of decaying ideology, the processes of disconnection and reunification became central tropes in much of Grünbein's work.
Reunification became not just a political process of consolidating the two Germanys, but in a deeper, symbolic sense a rejoining of once-internalized thought with newly freed forms of expression. If oppressive regimes have one advantage it is the ability to make us appreciate the little things. As Grünbein writes, "what adorable objects bathtubs are, enameled/ and sleek and altogether/ unapproachable with their/ heroic curves of wrought-iron."
Early in the collection, Grünbein's landscape is a dull tenement-gray palette against which is contrasted flashes of color. This landscape may be ruined, but it is not dead, and Grünbein finds the most human reprieve in simple objects such as a "yellow plastic duck" bobbing "on a lagoon of oil."
Grünbein's work reflects a world of humans disconnected from themselves and reduced to machines, and a menagerie of animals (particularly dogs) playing anthropomorphic service as metaphors of personal, social and political subjugation.
In Grünbein's next work, "Schädelbasislektion (lesson at the base of the skull)," a series under the title "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Border Dog (not Collie)'' combines many of the themes that are found throughout the poet's work. On the surface this series examines a quirky reality of man qua dog, but at a deeper level it explores the conflicts resulting from a world that has moved from homo faber (man the maker) to homme machine (man the machine). This is appropriately a world of many borders, both physical and metaphysical, a world caught between the tensions and disconnectedness of East and West, nature and science, humans and technology.
Grünbein's best work comes not with his stand-alone poems, but in poetic cycles where the momentum builds from poem to poem. This is best exemplified in a long series of poems from his 1994 collection, "Falten und Fallen (Folds and Traps)," called "Variations on No Theme." Actually, this series does have a theme, which is technology, or rather how the material of humanity exists in a technological world where "your days numbered, your life became an interval."
Grünbein's poems always seem fascinated with the simple existence of flesh and bone contrasted with the inanimate, and often the inanimate takes on expressions of human life, as when "from the vantage point of a chair leg, every table is a coffin."
This series also projects a softer and warmer tone in Grünbein's work, which is wonderfully expressed in a poem where a baby is born, "and it all began so inconsolably,/ with a piercing yell, when the world/ moved into your lungs with a rattle." Grünbein envisions a world at conflict with itself, but as a poem says, "nothing is lost, not while the grass sprouts/ from every crack."
Despite the very modern feeling to much of Grünbein's work he does not become trapped in a limited worldview, and allusions to art, history and classical literature abound and generate a type of universalism through their sometimes anachronistic placement.
One of the pleasures of collections of "selected poems" like this is the opportunity to see a poet develop over time. Grünbein's earliest work is mature to say the least, but over time his work has really come into its own. The youthful frenetic quality in his less-disciplined poetry has been replaced by a confidence and command of the form. The most recent work comes from the 1999 volume "Nach den Satiren (after the satires)." There are almost too many quotable passages to consider, but it does seem appropriate to share a few lines about his hometown of Dresden from a poignant cycle of poems under the title "Europe After the Last Rains.''
'It was at one and the same time
long doomed, still inhabited,
and already forgotten
by the last of its fly-by-night
tenants, the Furies flitting
from civilization to ashes.'
One might wrongly assume that this German poet coming out of the Eastern Bloc would be interested in politics for politics sake, but instead he finds the real germ of politics in what is immediately the personal, and after all, the role of the political as personal is one of the most essential tasks of poetry.
Grünbein now has the opportunity to reach a wider audience with this bilingual selection of his work, and much of the credit goes to his dedicated translator, Michael Hofmann. Hofmann, himself an established and respected poet, had the daunting task of making Grünbein's poetry accessible to an English-speaking audience. In large part he succeeds, and this in spite of the fact that Grünbein's German is deceptively slippery and demanding.
The German language has the ability to be precise and vague at the same time, and Grünbein uses this to his full advantage. At one moment his lines read crystal clear and can be translated readily, while at other times they are full of double meanings and compound nouns that are notoriously difficult to translate.
In the translator's preface, Hofmann owns up to his limitations and strives to focus on using his own voice to establish a tone that is as close and authentic to Grünbein's as possible. With this approach a lot of literal meaning is lost, which is fine, but Hofmann occasionally does too much to explicate meaning, which robs some of the poems of important subtext. In being a diligent translator, Hofmann occasionally forgets that much of the joy in poetry is the reader's task of finding the hidden meaning that resides beneath words and lines. Nevertheless, Hofmann has accomplished an admirable undertaking, and he never gets to the point where he leaves the poems sterile and lifeless, which happens all too often with translated poetry.
Grünbein is a vital new voice in the world of poetry, but his poems require a certain amount of effort to be truly appreciated. Many of them require several readings before yielding their full graceful and even profound significance. Grünbein does not offer the pedestrian pleasures of, say, a Billy Collins, but like Joseph Brodsky, to whom he is often compared, he is a serious and focused poet whose work has a depth that deserves our attention. If given the chance, this momentous volume will offer many pleasures." - David Hellman

"Anyone who is interested in transatlantic poetics, European poetics, poetics after communism, poetics after regime change, etc., should buy this book. It is arranged chronologically and extends from his first book, Grauzone Morgens (1988), through the zoological poems of Falten Und Fallen (1994), through Den Teuren Toten (1994) a series of 'reports on the death of insignificant people,' written in the form of ancient epitaphs and finishing with Nach Den Satiren (1999). From his publisher, we learn that Grünbein was born in Dresden in 1962, and “is the most significant and successful poet to emerge from the former East Germany, a place where, he wrote, 'the best refuge was a closed mouth.'” We also learn that Grünbein has received many awards, including Germany's most prestigious literature prize, the Georg Büchner Prize (1995). All of this sets the stage for a certain type of political reading. Although the major societal clash is now between liberal democracy and a certain type of fascist-fundamentalism, Grünbein's poetry reminds the reader of the barely buried clash of the Cold War. The author rewards the reader with poetry that is more ambivalent than purely political poetry requires. Most of the pieces here are everyday poems inflected by the political.
Grünbein's world is a grey world in which we do regular things. For example, in “A Single Tin,” Grünbein writes about a tin of sardines that has drifted up among the “flotsam & jetsam / so far inland” that it “keeps / whatever this morning promises / by way of beauty.” Things float to shore, as into our lives, some of them are awful, they jumble together and yet there is something beautiful coming in on the tide. In Grünbein's work, bits and pieces of culture float together to form poems. This is the everyday world and it is deadly serious business, yet it is also possible that it is impertinent or irrelevant. One of the questions these poems ask is What is not impertinent?
These questions are also related to the questions of garbage: How do things come together? Or the Aristotelian, what is substance and what is merely accident? What parts of our identities can we dispense with? Garbage is another recurring theme, as is seen in “Untitled”: “I said I had enjoyed / wandering over the garbage / heaps with you. But you / were wearing those crazy / shoes: canary yellow, and / we were in a hurry as / a particularly cool drizzle / started to fall.” The idea of flotsam and jetsam (or of fragments coming together) reemerges when Grünbein attends to the act of writing poetry itself. In “MonoLogical Poem # 1” he asks, “what is the whole surreal jokeshop / of terrors compared to the / infinitely chance little / tricks of a poem.”
Yet life is often dull and boring during times of soldiers: “Impregnated by the foul / breath of a soldier, / whose outing had / gone wrong, she stood / in the last carriage feeling / seasick and you had to wonder / frankly how she would / ever get out of there.” These are times of soldiers, but not times of war. In this respect, Grünbein's poems are essentially European. They are poems of memory, but not of aggression. And as was seen in Europe's response to America's war in Iraq, they would prefer diplomacy to bombs. The standard line is that because Europeans remember the ravages of war they will not allow them to occur ever again except under the direst circumstances. This memory creates a morality centered on ambivalence and skepticism.
Philosophically, grayness and ambivalence permeate the book. In “Almost a Song” Grünbein writes, “Stands to reason / almost any poem / is going to make you puke / with boredom / like an ill-fitting / speech bubble: / one line's / as good as another / on this graygray color chart.” Later in that same poem he concludes, “Otherwise / it's probably just about OK.” And this is the landscape these poems inhabit: just about OK. In fact, this is perhaps the landscape of much of the world right now. It is not a time for holocaust poets. It is a time for moving along with history. And indeed on display in these poems is the morality of moving on with history. Moving on from history is not in man's design. If we move on we carry things, and Grünbein carries a certain feeling about Europe and East Germany.
A profile in Poetry International remarks that “Grünbein urgently requested to be left out of the Flemish magazine Deus ex Machina which was planning a special on literature from the former D.D.R. a few years ago. In an interview with Der Spiegel he commented briefly and angrily: 'I was lost to the D.D.R. the moment I was born.'” Ambivalence about the D.D.R. persists throughout the poems until East Germany is placed into poetic opposition with Europe.
Or, as Grünbein writes in “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Border Dog (not Collie),” “What a country, where a word on something topical / Provokes more than the unsayable / Remaining unsaid.” The hidden history of the D.D.R. is visible in its absence from speech. In another section of “Portrait”, Grünbein writes, “In the West, so they said, the dog precedes / His master. / In the East, he trails him--at a distance. / As for me, I was my own dog, / Equidistant from East and West, in the suicide strip.” The article in Poetry International also notes that “After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Durs Grünbein became one of the first writers of the reunified Germany. His personal life clearly reflects this: he lives with wife and daughter in East Berlin, but works in a rented room in the West.” He is a skeptical unified man living his life with these tensions.
In an analysis of Grünbein's zoological parable “To an Okapi in the Munich Zoo,” Renat Bekbolatov writes, “The poet clearly displayed the formation of the new identities and new stereotypes . . . he uses the identity of a wild animal as a metaphor for the east Germans . . . The poem's main theme is that the east Germans had to adopt a new identity, however it wasn't pleasant to them; they had no choice. They came from one cage to another. The poem is a skeptical remark on the unification of the Germany, because the author understands that the German Wall meant more than just a physical wall; his view is that the Wall, being a border, created two different identities for people of East and West Germanys.” This skepticism concerning reunification (and thus, the rationalist's project) emerges through the book. If unification is not possible, flotsam and jetsam will have to do." - Francis Raven

"Translation is complicated. Need evidence? Use the Babel Fish translator on Altavista.com, where the name of East German poet Dürs Grunbein becomes "Durs green leg." While ridiculous, that may be literally correct; I wouldn't know. Which brings me, of course, to a necessary disclosure: This is a review of Ashes for Breakfast, a selection of poems by Durs Grünbein, translated from the German by the British poet Michael Hofmann. Oh, and I don't read or speak a word of German.
Which really just means that I cannot attest to what has happened to Grünbein's own words in Hofmann's collection. I can tell you that Hofmann, known for his award-winning translations of German prose, ranging from Kafka to Koeppen to Joseph Roth, has never published verse translation before. But, I can tell you that Hofmann's poetic work, sparsely emotional and concisely insightful, offers us one of the most acute and powerful voices in contemporary British letters. And, that I would also guess that there is no better bilingual than him -- a native German speaker, a gifted English-language poet, an accomplished translator, and as we learn from the introduction, a like-minded friend of Grünbein's -- to haul this selection across the linguistic border. Yet as a reviewer, I can only analyze the shipment, not the shipping (or, to riff on a translation metaphor Hofmann uses in his prefatory note, I can eat the meal, but I cannot speak to the cooking.)
Grünbein, born and raised in the formerly socialist East Germany, has been praised as the first East German poet to gain broad popularity in the now unified country. In 1995, and at the age of 33, he received the Georg-Buchner-Preis, Germany's highest literary award. Since 1988, he has published eight volumes of poetry, five of which are represented in Ashes for Breakfast, including the collection Nach Den Satiren, or After the Satires, from which the title poem "Ashes For Breakfast: Thirteen Fantasies" was taken.
In this thirteen part poem -- or series of thirteen short poems -- which sits at the center of Hofmann's book, Grünbein's fantasies, ironically, entirely lack the fantastic. Rather, they wade through the mundane, the puerile and the petty. But not really. They are Grünbein at his best.
Opening with a meditation on capitalism's effects on individuality, Grünbein presents his signature satire: the poem cycle begins "And then comes the fun part of dying." But there is nothing Larkin-esque in Grünbein's humor, no sense of bitterness in his critique. Rather, there is rather a fresh and unrelenting confrontation with the absurd reality that is the modern world.
In the ninth poem of the cycle, "(On The Daily Newspapers)", we learn that the ashes eaten with the most important meal of the day come from the blunt reportage the news offers us about this complicated world. They are stories we read and toss aside, that we ingest without thought, and yet, Grünbein tells us:
There, just as I folded them up,
The rustling pages sent a shiver down my spine.
To Grünbein, there is beauty and horror in this subtle shiver -- and life. The world is a mess, yet the mess Grünbein gives us is convincingly charming, part and parcel of our utterly comfortable (albeit mad) home. Consequently his tone, wryly self-critical but not self-effacing, and his voice, self-conscious, but literally so, not neurotically, harbors an underlying humbleness, a wide-eyed appreciation of the lunacy he witnesses. Death, he tells us, is "the deal-making, contract-breaking day," and "this life, so useless, so rich," is meant to be appreciated as much as possible in the moments of observation (even though "each moment is instantly ended").
There is an ease to Grünbein's method of getting this message across. A poem beginning
And why, you ask yourself (why being the most childish of questions),
Why am I involved in this rat race on battered ground
ends with reverence for sex: "the mole beside your navel… kissing a hand here, inclining/ Your supple torso there."
Refreshingly, Grünbein does not stand on high ground. It is through the muck that he sees the muck, and it is the muck for which he is looking. There is a critique, but also a contentedness, a conflicted love of it all: "Oh, to be a child again, grubbing in real feces." And this is the charm and the depth that is most striking about the entire Hofmann-translated selection. Of the 41 included poems, no two are alike in tone or voice, themes that are revisited are not rehashed, and yet still, a sense of Grünbein as a certain and singular poet does come across. Aware of "how many scenes there are/ That go unwitnessed," Grünbein's work -- which, in many places, is melancholy, politically tinged, or far from satire -- is always fervently curious, and always pungent in its honesty.
It is fitting, of course, that I cannot understand a word of Grünbein's German; for his is a project meant for the muddle and disorder of translation. His is a project steeped in the confusion of the modern world, content to watch and wonder and misunderstand. In an interview with a Heidelberg student paper, "Ruprecht", Grünbein states that "Ich glaube, daß ist auch heute noch eine gute Wurzel für ein intensives Beschäftigen mit Texten: Unverständnis als Quelle von Produktivität" -- or as Babel Fish puts it: "I believe that is also today still another good root for intensive employing with texts: Lack of understanding as source of productivity." Lack of understanding? I may not understand German, but I can appreciate that." - Joey Rubin

"Dresden-born poet Durs Grünbein has been likened to Georg Büchner, the original enfant terrible of German letters, and not just because he received the prestigious Büchner Prize in 1995. By the time of his death aged 24, Büchner had written three wildly passionate plays, one radically innovative novella and one scientific dissertation on the nervous systems of freshwater fish. Grünbein, too, has the allure of a young genius - his first collection of poems was published when he was 25 - and his lines simmer with a similarly jumpy intensity. He shares Büchner's fascination with biology: Grünbein writes poems about dogs, hedgehogs and penguins, and his 1991 collection Skull Base Lesson came complete with anatomical drawings.
It has taken Grünbein a good two decades to arrive in the English-speaking world, but that's less of an indication of his talent than a testament to the limited appeal of modern poetry, and modern German poetry in particular. The poems in Ashes for Breakfast have been selected and rendered into English by Michael Hofmann, himself a versatile poet and estimable translator.
"Translator" seems like a dirty word here, given that "poetry in translation" is, according to Robert Frost, an oxymoron - the former being precisely what gets lost in the latter. In fact, it makes more sense to think of this book as a collaboration than a translation. In his foreword, Hofmann points out that he sees Grünbein as an equal, not a master: his work is "not the product of steel rulers and midnight oil", but "poems that want to be poems". Hofmann cheekily extends his artistic licence: Grünbein's self-defining lyrical sequence "Porträt des jungen Künstlers als Grenzhund", becomes "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Border Dog (not Collie)". The collie is nowhere to be found in the German - not that Hofmann would care.
There's much to commend this recklessness - in fact, one is left wishing that Hofmann had taken his approach a step further. Grünbein loves to jump from one register to another - one moment he is the street poet of Berlin, the next he comes over all marble and ancient philosophy. In English, Grünbein in public-intellectual-mode is as much of a mouthful as in the German - but the more colloquial passages never quite seem to get off their teutonic stilts. At times, Hofmann's phrases ring with the triumphalism of the accomplished bilinguist rather than with their proper music. In "Robinson in the City", a "malodorous hole" in the ground yawns at the human spectator. "Stinky", I think, would have done the job just as well.
This is not to say that Ashes for Breakfast isn't an overall success. When the teeth of Hofmann's vocabulary grip into the material of Grünbein's ideas, these poems can develop an irresistible emotional pull. "Greetings from Oblivion City" has the popular appeal of a Radiohead lyric, "Portrait of the Artist" works as a riveting, veiled historical epic and "In the Provinces" is a stoically comic cycle of five poems about different species of roadkill. "No resurrection, save in the form of the larvae / Of the flies that will hatch from it tomorrow", say Grünbein and Hofmann: cynicism is a sentiment that speaks all languages." - Philip Oltermann

"For a rather long time now - approximately, since the Berlin Wall came down - the name Durs Grünbein (b. 1962) has been the answer to the question: who's the leading young poet in Germany? He comes from Dresden, that is, from the former East Germany; he has published eight collections of poems, collected several of his essays, translated some classical tragedy including Seneca and Aeschylus, written a libretto recently for the composer Johannes Maria Staud, based on Edgar Allan Poe's story "Berenice", and won several prizes.
Now his poems have been translated into English and are published in hardback in the States by Farrar Straus. Ashes for Breakfast is the title. Next year, Faber will bring out a paperback. The translations are by Michael Hofmann, who tells us, much to my surprise, that these are the first German poems he has translated in over 25 years of a productive life as a poet (in English) and translator (of German prose).
All this comes as welcome news to those of us who have long been curious to read Grünbein's work but have found, when we tried to tackle the German, that we were being over-ambitious. Now we can begin. And that's what I started to do this week, noting as I did so that even Hofmann tells us that "there is a for midableness, a dauntingness about Grünbein that I don't have, perhaps can't do, and find it difficult even to respond to".
There is, however, a way in that I have discovered: that is to begin not necessarily at the beginning of the selection but towards the end. There you will find a sequence of poems called "Europe After The Last Rains", forming a magnificent elegy for Dresden, and it is there that the English reader will be perhaps most likely to say, "Yes, I see what the admirers are talking about". One might expect a poet born in Dresden to address the subject of the fire-bombing of the city, but one could equally imagine the undertaking, through its gigantic appropriateness, to be the most inhibiting.
You may recall that Kurt Vonnegut, who, as an American prisoner of war, was actually present at the bombing of Dresden, took his time, and an astonishing roundabout route, to bring us face to face with that episode at the climax of Slaughterhouse-Five , a classic of the literature of war. I happen to have been reading this very recently. Grünbein's elegiac approach seemed, by contrast, to go rather directly to the point.
I do my best, when reading in this volume, not to use the Hofmann versions simply as a crib for the German, but to read them for their own sake first. The translator anticipates, and he is right, that printing the two texts creates its problems: "You can't settle down to anything; the original faces down the translation." This is particularly the case when, as happens not seldom, Hofmann has used an odd word or idiom that provokes one into wondering what the equivalent could have been in German.
For instance, the emperor Tiberius, in a monologue called "The Misanthrope on Capri", suddenly sounds like Dame Edna Everage. "That's not all, possums," he says. The eye darts to the opposite page to find, "Nicht nur das, liebe Freunde." One wonders what it was about the expression "dear friends," in this context, that provoked this flash of Australian camp.
The "Translator's Preface" examines at some length the question of far-fetched solutions to lyric problems: "What you translate has to come out of you; you have to be able to encompass it, in other words. You can't quite say things you couldn't have said, even if you have been given them to say." However much you want to extend your range, and try to do so, you must in some sense remain yourself. Hofmann tells us that he "grew up as an English poet: small-scale, occasional, personal, wincingly witty, articulate about dirt". "Temerity takes you further. And for me that's a real motivation: I should like to learn temerity." (Well, he already has temerity to some degree, if he describes himself as witty, even wincingly so.)
The passage continues: "But there are many poems and places where Grünbein is too skilful, too euphoric, and too rhetorical for me to follow him. Sonnet sequences, poems praising Italy, his more neutral and classical - unPoundian - vein of classicism (what I think of in him as 'marble'), anywhere, in fact, where rhyme - to Rilke the vector of praise - presents itself as an issue."
This seems covertly ideological to me, as if the translator is hinting: my artistic integrity will not permit me to rhyme. Actually Hofmann does occasionally use rhyme, but there is less in the Dresden sequence than in the original. He can't cope with "the finickiness and perfection" of certain of Grünbein's poems. What he has instead is his own "line": "My own idiosyncrasy and distinctiveness." Accordingly, he says, he has to diminish Grünbein, to limit the range of poems he is prepared to tackle, and sometimes not even make a gesture at the German poet's forms.
"The worst thing in translation, it seems to me," says Hofmann, "is the appearance of being remote-controlled, ferngesteuert ". I see the point. But another worst thing is wilfulness." - James Fenton

"Long overdue, Ashes for Breakfast is the first collection of Durs Grunbein's poetry to be published in English translation. Though still young, Grünbein has been one of the leading Germans poets for over a decade - certainly ever since he received the most prestigious German literary prize, the Georg Büchner Prize in 1995.
Ashes for Breakfast offers selections from five of his poetry collections, omitting only the playful epitaph collection, Den Teuren Toten, and the recent Cartesian epic, Vom Schnee. The range, and Grünbein's rapid evolution as poet, is certainly evident in this generous selection.
Born and raised in East Germany, Grünbein's first collection, Grauzone morgens ('Mornings in the Grayzone'), was published when it still was the GDR - though the collection only appeared in West Germany. Whereas the poems in later collections are more strictly formal, in some of these the words are literally all over the place. Among them are a series of 'Monological Poems', as well as poems titled: No.3', 'No.8', and 'Untitled', while others promise something more specific, such as a 'Reason to be temporarily in New York'. Descriptive, the poems mostly loosely unfold and leap unexpectedly to different images or thoughts.
Quickly, translator Hofmann's presence is felt: the "Kino des Status Quo" becomes "BBBBBB films", "Landungspontons strudelnd in Seenot" suddenly gets an unignorable - and doubly emphatic - political subtext rendered as "pontoons were adrift Mayday Mayday", while in one instance when he can't choose between meanings he offers both:
Da war diese grüne Hülle der Zahlungs-
fähigkeit
Becomes:
There was this green carapace of bank-
ability or do I mean creditworthiness
It's one way of conveying the ambiguity of a term - give both translations - but it is a lot extra to shove into the poem (and as the 'I' here the translator surely imposes himself much too much on the poem).
Grunbein's playing with language, and especially the tight leash he keeps it on - these are poems that are precise and concise -- poses obvious problems for the translator. The approachable 'Untitled' sounds fine in English too, beginning, for example:
A new poem began
on this foggy morning
of the anniversary of García
Lorca's murder
But "foggy morning" is only the best one can do for the German "Nebelmorgen" that Grünbein chose (rather than the "nebliger Morgen", as the literal translation of Hofmann's English would have it), and the anniversary of the murder lacks the direct power of the original "Ermordungstag". Hofmann does reasonably well with these choices, but other - simpler ones, one might think - are more questionable.
'"Accept it !"' begins:
Soviele Tage in denen nichts sich
erreignete, nichts als die
knappen Manöver des Winters
Unaccountably then Hofmann does not repeat the "nichts" ('nothing'), offering instead:
So many days and nothing
happening, only
sketchy winter maneuvers
Elsewhere Hofmann chooses to provide more translation than is perhaps called for, for example in translating what Grünbein leaves in the original:
Nicht erst seit Vico oder Machiavelli sind
I due occhi della storia blind.
Becomes:
That says it wasn't Vico or Machiavelli
Who said history is blind in both eyes.
Hofmann admits in his Preface that: "There are many poems and places where Grünbein is too skilful, too euphoric, and too rhetorical for me to follow him". This is reflected first in the choice of what poems are translated, but then also the translations themselves; Hofmann offers some explanations for how he approached them, but there's only so much satisfaction to be found in that. Fortunately, the collection is bi-lingual, the unadulterated originals facing Hofmann's versions
Among the poem-choices Hofmann makes is to take from the collection Schädelbasislektion only one long cycle, 'Portrait des Künstlers als junger Grenzhund' (which he elaborates into: 'Portrait of the Artist as a Young Border Dog (not Collie)'). Offering only this cycle misses the transitional quality of the collection, with poems written from the late 1980s through German reunification, but the impressive series of canine-portraits cum cultural-political commentary, artfully but accessibly expressed (without the denser ambition of some of the later cycles) is an obvious choice for a foreign audience.
Hofamnn offers a generous portion of Falten und Fallen, the bulk of the poems 'Variations on No Theme'. Starker, more physical, the variations make clearer some of Grünbein's obsessions, though strikingly the shades, shadows, and talk of death are still very much focussed on the present, whereas in his later poetry Grünbein leans much more on the classical and historical, and much of the death and afterlife-talk comes with classical allusions.
Death and history mix especially successfully in the selections from Nach den Satiren, and several of the poems address specifically German history (with a focus on Grünbein's native Dresden), from Germanicus's campaign to the Elbe to the firebombing of Dresden. Including the 'thirteen fantasies' of the title-poem, 'Ashes for Breakfast' (beginning cheerfully: "And then comes the fun part of dying"), it includes several of the most powerful poems and cycles, including 'Europe after the Last Ruins'.
Erklärte Nacht is then only represented by a brief excerpt, two fuller poems, 'Berlin Posthumous' and 'Arcadia for All', perhaps giving the misleading impression of a more specific approach that Grünbein might have moved towards; in fact, the actual collection is remarkably varied. The title-poem from that collection, making the claim: "Was bleibt, sind Gedichte" ("What remains, are poems"), is in its summary a regrettable omission from Hofmann's collection.
Ashes for Breakfast is a good introduction to the work of Durs Grünbein, the selection of poems at least broadly representative. His work poses huge problems for a translator, and Hofmann's approach isn't entirely satisfactory - though at least he has clearly thrown himself into this with considerable energy and quite a bit of abandon. The results can be hit or miss (and some of the English renderings miss Grünbein's qualities by quite a wide margin), but Hofmann is certainly sympathetic to this verse, and that does come across. With the German originals at hand (only in the US edition ! the Faber edition does NOT include the originals) to compare Hofmann's versions it is easier to accept (or rather overlook) some of the questionable choices -- though readers who have only English don't have it quite so easy.
Certainly recommended, but handle with care." - The Complete Review