Recall

Fire,
the temptation in the blood:
the comely man. What has passed
is like sleep, dreams
along rivers,
on the waters,
without sail, in the current.

Plains – the lost
villages, the forests’ edge.
And a thin smoke
in the air,
straight.

Once,
blubber-lipped, Perkun
came, a feather in his beard,
came in the track of the elk,
the Stutterer came,
travelled the river, drew
darkness, a fishing-net, after him.

There
I was. In the old time.
What is new has never begun. I am a man,
of one flesh with his wife,
who raises his children
for an age without fear.

Johannes Bobrowski
 

Translated by Ruth and Matthew Mead

Translator to Translated

I.M. Johannes Bobrowski

River, plain,
tree, the bird
in flight, habitation
and name, strange
to me, never strange
to you – the child’s
eye, the soldier’s
step, the known
threshold.

I crossed the plain
slowly, saw your fire
in the distance.
Have I set the tree
askew on your sky,
does your bird hover
strangely?
Love
translates
as love.
Her song sung
in a strange land.

An air that kills.

Matthew Mead 

From The Autumn-Born in Autumn

Since the 1960s the English poet Matthew Mead and his German wife Ruth have translated selections from poets to whom they were drawn. This is their own choice from the many memorable poems which they have translated. The collection celebrates a fascinating era of German poetry, to which it forms a uniquely personal introduction.

Matthew Mead once wrote: ‘Of the Germans, Gottfried Benn has said many things to their end, but the important poem by a contemporary is, for me, Sabais’s Generation.’ This poem confronts Germany’s post-war experience in a way no other German writer has matched. Together with the mysterious, almost spell-like poetry of Johannes Bobrowski, it is one of the highlights of this varied collection, which ranges from the lyrical to the satirical, the witty and sardonic to the surrealist, and the elegiac in Nelly Sachs, a Nobel Prizewinner.

The poets: H.C. Artmann, Wolfgang Bächler, Horst Bienek, Johannes Bobrowski, Elisabeth Borchers, Günter Bruno Fuchs, Christian Geissler, Max Hölzer, Urs Oberlin, Christa Reinig, Heinz Winfried Sabais, Nelly Sachs