Twentieth-Century German Poetry - Paperback

by Michael Hofmann (Author)

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

Author Biography

The noted poet Michael Hofmann has translated many German-language authors, among them Ernst Junger, Franz Kafka, Wolfgang Koeppen, and Joseph Roth. Ashes for Breakfast, a translation of Durs Grunbein, was published by FSG in 2005. He lives in London.