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G. S. FRASER
think, are the translations so successful, though in some ways their
problems must have been harder. Brecht's breadth, directness and
im–
mediacy, his taste for folk rhythms, must be a help to the translator.
Gunter Grass writes in short lines, without full rhymes, not expressing
feelings directly but evoking them through naming objects; in a very
broad sense, he is in a "free verse" and "imagistic" tradition. The
following poem, "Folding Chairs," well-translated by Michael Ham–
burger, reminded me very much of some poems of Pablo Neruda's
middle period in which he uses discarded dentures, "rotted utensils,"
meaningless, decayed and depressing objects as an equivalent for his
sense of hopeless social waste:
How sad these changes are.
People unscrew the nameplates from the doors,
take the saucepan of cabbage
and heat it up again, in a different place.
What kind of furniture is this
that advertises departure?
People take up their folding chairs
and emigrate.
Ships laden with homesickness and the urge to vomit
carry patented seating contraptions
and their unpatented owners
to and fro.
Now on both sides of the great ocean
there are folding chairs;
how sad these changes are.
The blurb describes Grass as "a politically and morally committed"
poet who is, however, "innocent of any obvious design on the reader."
I suppose such a poem does uncomfortably suggest to us that we are
often trapped by a world of things, come to depend for our identity
on nameplates, saucepans and patented seating contraptions; and
that we transport, not really personally rooted or personally traveling
anywhere, not ourselves but our impedimenta. I am not sure if leaving
us entirely, as Brecht would not, to make our own moral and political
deductions from this makes for better poetry. The tone is certainly
very withdrawn, compared to Brecht.
Let me illustrate what seems to me one of the translators' difficulties
here. Grass has a grim and powerful poem, "Saturn," about Time as the
