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BETIY FALKENBERG
EAST WIND
EAST GERMAN POETRY: AN ANTHOLOGY. Edited bV Michael
Hamburger.
E. P.
Dutton
&
Co., Inc. $10.00. ($5.95 p.b.).
Michael Hamburger's bilingual anthology of East German poetry
is the first of its kind to appear in English. A better introduction would be
hard to imagine. Selective, it is yet without bias. A dozen poets are rep–
resented with enough poems to give the reader their essence. This anthology
contains not a single specimen of official poetry. If it did, we might have been
treated to lines like these by the former minister of culture, Johannes Becher:
Lighted by a dream-corne-true
Will be born the world. anew.
But, lest we jump to wrong conclusions, nearly all of the poets in these pages
have chosen to stay in the East, even at the bitter price of persecution and
censorship.
Hamburger makes a point of not giving even capsule biographies, since,
as he says, these poets have totally renounced the cult of personality. Ordinar–
ily, such editorial restraint would be admirable. But precisely because these
poets shun vanity, their biographies are especially moving, and even for us in
the West, cautionary.
Since the purpose here is to present the poems, it is generally correct to
argue that they need no further elucidation, with the possible exception of
poems like Peter Huchel's "Der Garten des Theophrast," where knowledge of
the personal circumstances surrounding the writing would enhance the
reader's perception, or at least, put him on guard.
With or without biographical notes, no reader can fail to note the absence
of all confessional, and nearly all personal, detail. Where the
"I"
breaks
through, it is generally integrated into a greater whole. Insofar as conscious–
ness and language are two-way streams, and insofar as many of these poets
aim at changing consciousness through language, they may be said to be
political, independent of their subject matter. Insofar as some are deeply
humanist in their source, they may be said to be part of an unbroken Western
tradition that knows no ideological borders.
The selection opens with Brecht, whose lyric gift was often superior to his
dramatic.
It
is not clear what determined the choice of poems from this
immense oeuvre. In the case of Brecht, and Huchel, it would have been of
interest to know the dates of the individual poems. Hamburger chooses,
