Overdue inventory

Günter Eich, a key German poet in the decades following World War II, has been unusually elusive in English translation.

A previously translated collection of Eich's work has long gone out of print, even as some of his contemporaries have become available in several translated volumes and critical biographies in English. Fortunately, renowned poet and translator Michael Hofmann has brought a selection of Eich's late poetry into sharp, searing English in Angina Days, a book that will remain the definitive translated edition of Eich's late work.

Eich was a member of the influential Group 47, a loosely knit assembly of German-language writers that included Paul Celan, Ingeborg Bachmann, a young Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Günter Grass, among others. The group, founded in 1947, tried to encourage young writers and to establish a standard for literary criticism in the chaotic world of post-Nazi Germany. In general, the group favored strong, simple language and the abandonment of overtly "poetic" sensibilities.

Eich leaned farther toward linguistic simplicity than many of his contemporaries. As a result, he was grouped under the genre of Kahlschlagliteratur, or clear-cutting literature Eich's hauntingly austere poem "Inventory" is one of the masterpieces of this style, and finds its lean prosody honed to a point in Hofmann's new translation:

Angina Days
Selected Poems of Günter Eich
Translated by Michael Hofmann
Princeton University Press 2010
195 pages

This is my cap,

my coat,

my shaving kit

in the burlap bag.

The poem continues in similar fashion, listing a prisoner's possessions, including a metal plate and cup, a nail, wool socks and "some other things/ I don't tell anyone about." Finally, the prisoner reveals that he is a writer, as the poem concludes:

The pencil lead

is my favorite:

by day it writes out lines

that come to me at night.

This is my notebook,

this my canvas,

my towel,

my thread.

Eich's scaled-back language - in Hofmann's deft translation - facilitates a devastatingly unsentimental tone appropriate for this clear-eyed consideration of what it means to be a prisoner, and what a prisoner's simple possessions mean to him. The singular nouns in each line gather dramatic weight as the poem proceeds, until the thread in the last line becomes both a way for the prisoner to stay connected to the world, and a pitiful confession of how little he has to hold on to. 

But Eich's poetry was not always so Spartan. As Hofmann explains in his introduction to Angina Days, in 1947 Eich prepared a text to read before each public presentation of his poems. His style had changed so drastically - moving toward the leaner, "clear-cutting" style - that he felt his audience deserved an explanation.

"I wrote my first poems at the age of 10, and first saw my name in print at 20. The poems I have for you now came about after 10 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," he wrote.   

The poems selected for Angina Days come from the second half of Eich's life, and are almost completely devoid of setting and narrative. People rarely appear in these poems; in their place stand strikingly sharp images, often of inanimate objects. Hofmann writes that late in life, "Eich was making poems almost without words."

Like many of his contemporaries writing in the years immediately following World War II, Eich's mission was objectivity. Unlike Paul Celan, however, whose poetry - full of coinages and word pairings - evinces the tension inherent in his investigation of whether it was possible to use the German language for poetry after it had been so twisted by the Nazis, Eich took a utilitarian approach to language, and chose to rely on simple vocabulary rather than verbal innovation. Particularly in his late poetry - Eich was equally known for his lush, playfully evocative radio plays - Eich followed this line of verbal divestment to its logical conclusion.

The poem "Of Happiness" expresses an awareness that language cannot fully grasp objects or experiences. "Two parrots are what remain/ of happiness/ the call box," Eich writes.

The sentences will be completed

by someone who has right  on his side

and the correct change.

My memory is abandoning me,

I forget my own name.

The gray of parrot feathers

eludes description.

As time went on, Eich seemed to lose his faith in the power of language. Finally, rather than struggling to describe things as they truly are, he became resigned to the fact that some objects "elude description." Rather than a depressive passivity in this realization, however, one senses a Zen-like acceptance of the world.

Günter Eich remains relatively unknown to English-language readers, despite his position as a vital figure in post-World War II German poetry, a rich period indeed. Poems like Eich's "Inventory" are not as anthemic as Celan's "Black Milk," which has been called the greatest poem to deal with the Holocaust, but Eich had different - and no less important - objectives for his poetry. Eich achieved, in his late work especially, a dry facility with language that allowed him to torque words and images to their emotional apex, without being clouded by sentiment. Rather than lyrics, Eich's poems read like mantras for a post-war world. Michael Hofmann's thrilling new translations of this neglected master will stick like barbs in the minds of English-language readers for years to come.

Stephan Delbos can be reached at
sdelbos@praguepost.com