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    Angina Days: Selected Poems
    Angina Days: Selected Poems
    Angina Days: Selected Poems
    Ebook207 pages51 minutes

    Angina Days: Selected Poems

    By Günter Eich and Michael Hofmann

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    About this ebook

    A bilingual edition of one of the most important German poets of the twentieth century

    This is the most comprehensive English translation of the work of Günter Eich, one of the greatest postwar German poets. The author of the POW poem "Inventory," among one of the most famous lyrics in the German language, Eich was rivaled only by Paul Celan as the leading poet in the generation after Gottfried Benn and Bertolt Brecht. Expertly translated and introduced by Michael Hofmann, this collection gathers eighty poems, many drawn from Eich's later work and most of them translated here for the first time. The volume also includes the original German texts on facing pages.

    As an early member of "Gruppe 47" (from which Günter Grass and Heinrich Böll later shot to prominence), Eich (1907-72) was at the vanguard of an effort to restore German as a language for poetry after the vitriol, propaganda, and lies of the Third Reich. Short and clear, these are timeless poems in which the ominousness of fairy tales meets the delicacy and suggestiveness of Far Eastern poetry. In his late poems, he writes frequently, movingly, and often wryly of infirmity and illness. "To my mind," Hofmann writes, "there's something in Eich of Paul Klee's pictures: both are homemade, modest in scale, immediately delightful, inventive, cogent."

    Unjustly neglected in English, Eich finds his ideal translator here.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPrinceton University Press
    Release dateApr 19, 2010
    ISBN9781400834341
    Angina Days: Selected Poems

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    • 5/5
      Gunter Eich was a German poet who lived 1907-1972 and who was known for the simplicity of his poems. Translator Michael Hofmann presents a unique picture of Eich in his introduction to Angina Days (a title in reference to his health in later years). In some cases, an introduction reveals too much and tries to interpret too much. Hofmann’s biography of Eich resists that and instead focuses on Eich’s personal life and allows the reader to contemplate and define the poetry on their own. He calls Eich’s poems “humble and lived-in and somehow practical” and this collection reflects that. While the poetry is not oversimplified, each reader can likely feel as if they can successfully understand the emotions portrayed.Hofmann also says that in translating the works, ranging over Eich’s lifetime, he discovered in them “for me the source of the quiet and immense and eerie power of each: words are like stray, chance, isolated survivals after some catastrophe, of unpredictable utility and beauty.” As a side note, Eich’s poetry is compared to the art of Paul Klee.Within the poetry itself, broken into sections of Eich’s life, there is an array of symbolism with a focus on plants, food, landscape, and travel. Some are romantic, as in Munich-Frankfurt Express where he describes a train trip to see his beloved and “my desire to grow old in the vicinity of your voice.” He can also reflect on WWII with grief in Memorial: The moors we wanted to hike have been drained.Their turf has warmed our evenings.The wind is full of black dust.It scours the names off the gravestonesand etches this dayinto us.In Dreams he combines the symbolism of travel on the earth with travel in the heart:There are road signs,and easily discernible river course,lookout points in elevated positions,maps where the lakes are in blue and the forests in green-It’s easy to find one’s way around in the world.But you, companion at my side, how hidden from meis the landscape of your heart!Feeling my way in the fog, I am often overcome with fearof the thickets and the hidden precipice.I know you don’t like your thoughts to be traced,the echo of your words is intended to mislead-Roads going nowhere,pathless terrain, lapsed signage.This collection is comprehensive and reveals how Eich's outlook changes from youth through illness as he ages, since the poems are spread across 1948-1972. I found this a great exploration of German poetry.

    Book preview

    Angina Days - Günter Eich

    H.

    INTRODUCTION

    In 1946 or 1947, at a late-ish midpoint of his life, but effectively when his career was beginning (all three, mid-point, career, and life were rather skewed by the Third Reich), Günter Eich prepared a CV to be made public at a reading or readings. He had recently written poems (Camp 16 and Inventory and others) that were a departure from his early manner and wanted to indicate as much, and perhaps to warn listeners. I quote the whole of it, partly for the facts, partly for the dry pleasure of Eich’s understatement:

    I was born on 1 February 1907 in Lebus, a little one-horse town that now straddles the German border. From the hills on the left bank of the Oder I can look across the river and see the house I was born in, now in Polish hands. I grew up in various towns and villages dotted over Brandenburg. My earliest aim in life was to be a coachman. But once I learned to read, this rather exact ambition was somehow smudged by Meyer’s encyclopedia, the weightiest book in my father’s possession. The world was full of color and complication, that was what I took from this miracle of erudition. Unfortunately, we didn’t have the volumes from R to Z—and the want of them shows in me to this day.

    When we moved to Berlin just before the end of World War I, I attended a theater for the first time in my life. I went home and started writing plays in iambic pentameter. And so my school years came and went, until in spite of my total ignorance of the steam engine, I managed to pass my exams. In accordance with my father’s wishes, I studied law and jurisprudence, and on the side, from my own unfathomable inclinations, Oriental languages. A year spent in Paris fed my inclination toward the arts and weakened any aspirations to bourgeois solidity. From 1932, I lived as a freelance writer, in Dresden, Berlin, and finally in a village on the Pomeranian coast. In August 1939 I was drafted into the Wehrmacht for a six-week training course. A little late, in summer 1945, I came back, restored to the status of civilian, but with the balance of my goods and chattels on the far side of the Oder-Neisse-Line. I am presently living in Bavaria, as a registered refugee with a backpack, in readiness for the next trek.

    I wrote my first poems at the age of ten, and first saw my name in print at twenty. The poems I have for you now came about after ten years in which I didn’t write a line, in POW camp and after. They do not mean to project the reader or listener into a more beautiful world; their aim is to be objective.¹

    This was the second moment, so to speak, in Eich’s poetry: the moment of the Zero Hour and Germania rasa, the moment of plain speech after the hateful jargon and lying bluster of Nazism, the moment of the frank avowal and litany of destitution. And it is at this moment that this book begins.

    Eich’s actual beginnings—the sentimental, derivative, and conventionally lyrical poems in Gedichte (1930) and after—promised nothing beyond a minor career in provincial letters. He was scathing later about his early work and, Betjeman-like, had cause to be grateful to the Allied bomb that in 1943 demolished his flat in Berlin, taking his manuscripts with it. When he reappeared as a poet, after ten years in which I didn’t write a line, he was unrecognizable. I wouldn’t even say it was influence, but Eich’s poems, humble and lived-in and somehow practical, deserve to be set alongside the Classical Chinese poems he studied and later translated, by and about priests and hermits and wanderers—the sort of thing of which Seamus Heaney wrote, enviable stuff—/ Unfussy and believable—with their minimal assertions of flat circumstances, the mischief that can be done by a new calendar or a smell of baking, the loneliness of life in a hole in the ground, without one’s dead companions. When Eich first read from them at an early meeting of the Gruppe 47 in 1950, his peers, hearing him, sensed right away that they were dealing with writing of a superior order and awarded him their inaugural prize. (They had managed to raise a sponsor from somewhere; later they—Böll, Grass, etcetera—stumped up for it themselves.) And it was perfect, because, on reflection, Eich did exactly what the Gruppe 47 was called into being to do: to cleanse and adjust and simplify the language. (Inventory—Inventur—remains one of the most widely read poems in German, of any date; it makes a haunting pair with its exact contemporary, Paul Celan’s

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