Customer Reviews (4)

Fair collection
I don't have much to say about Holderlin's poetry, which I find a bit stodgy and ungraceful, but I have to say I cannot read it in German, which I believe is a necessary prerequisite to any true read of poetry. I would merely like to share a poem that I found beautiful:

Sunset

Where are you? Dazzled, drunken my soul grows faint
And dark with so much gladness; for even now
I listened while, too rich in golden
Sounds, the enrapturing youth, the sun-god

Intoned his evening hymn on a heavenly lyre;
All round the hills and forests re-echoed it,
Though far from here-to pious nations
Who still revere him-by now he's journeyed.

Wo bist du? Trunken dammert die Seele mir
Von aller deiner Wonne; denn eben ist's,
Dass ich gelauscht, wie, goldner Tone
Voll der entzukende Sonnenjungling

Sein Abendlied af himmlischer Leyer speilt';
Es tonten rings die Walder und Hugel nach.
Doch fern ist er zu frommen Volkern,
Die ihn noch ehren, hinweggegangen. (pp 16).

Enjoy the archaic read.

A nice selection, but go for the complete edition
This Penguin selection of Michael Hamburger's outstanding Holderlin translations is drawn from his 800+ page bilingual edition of Holderlin called "Poems and Fragments," published by Anvil Press (search for ISBN 0856463604).

If you love Holderlin, the complete 4th edition of "Poems and Fragments" is well worth the modest extra cost--it's a very hefty, very handsomely produced book, and of course it's the definitive Holderlin in English.

better to stand alone in a monolingual edition
The translations produced by Mr. Hamburger, himself a poet, reads very well indeed. But should they be used in such bilingual edition as this one, being not very literal?

In 'Dichterberuf'('The Poet's Vocation'), the 12th stanza reads:'Zu lang ist Gottliche dienstbar schon/ Und alle Himmelskrafte verscherzt, verbracht/ Die Gutigen, zur Lust, danklos, ein/ Schlaues Geschlecht und zu kennen wahnt es,' and the translation:'Too long now things divine have been cheaply used/ And all the powers of heaven, the kindly, spent/ In trifling waste by cold and cunning/ Men without thanks, who when he, the Hightest,'. We can see that the translator use the alliteration of 'cold' and 'cunning'(only 'Schlaues' in the original) to compensate that of 'verscherzt' and 'verbracht' (only 'spent' in the translation). We can understand why the previous reviewer says the translations are often surprising(and why I says they are not very literal).

excellent translations
As a german reader I must say that the author had made excellent translations.You have the feeling that he translated with heart - very rich in his speech and sometimes surprising. Some verses of Hoelderlin, which are strange and not easy to understand are in his translationsclearer and simpler to understand." But it is the sea / That takesand gives remembrance, / And love no less keeps eyes attentively fixed, /But what is lasting the poets provide" (Remembrance). ... Read more

Book Description
A keepsake of one of the greatest writers of our time, Unrecounted comes as an unexpected gift to all the readers who loved W.G. Sebald.

W.G. Sebald and Jan Peter Tripp were friends from their schooldays. Unrecounted combines 33 of what W.G. Sebald called his "micro-poems"—miniatures as unclassifiable as all his works—with 33 lithographs by the acclaimed artist Jan Peter Tripp. The art and the poems do not explain one another, but rather engage in a kind of dialog. "The longer I look at the pictures of Jan Peter Tripp," Sebald comments in his essay, "the better I understand that behind the illusions of the surface, a dread-inspiring depth is concealed. It is the metaphysical lining of reality, so to speak." The lithographs portray with stunning exactness pairs of eyes: among them the eyes of Beckett, Borges, Proust, Jasper Johns, Francis Bacon, Tripp, Sebald, Sebald's dog Morris. The poems are anti-narrative, epiphanic and brief as haiku. What the author calls "time lost, the pain of remembering, and the figure of death" here find a small home. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

WG Sebald in the Guise of a Poet
UNRECOUNTED is a collaborative work by the deceased and sorely missed WG Sebald and his life long artist friend Jan Peter Tripp. Together they blocked 33 poems and 33 lithographs on apposing pages that were meant to create a sense of communication. In Sebald's words "The longer I look at the pictures of Jan Peter Tripp, the better I understand that behind the illusions of the surface, a dread-inspiring depth is concealed. It is the metaphysical lining of reality, so to speak."

As a devoted reader of all of Sebald's output I was eagerly looking forward to yet another posthumous document from this astonishingly fine writer.What is in this handsome volume is not really 'poetry' but rather brief haiku-like musings.Not that they aren't lovely, it is just that they are not up to the challenging standards of his novels.Still one is left with a satisfied feeling having read this (sideways printed) book of thoughts.The art of Tripp is stunning - eyes of famous writers and thinkers.In the end, in Sebald's own critical self examination, these works are "time lost, the pain of remembering, and the figure of death".As such, they gain more meaning.Grady Harp, September 05

Like an unknown trunk with a stranger's garments in it
My first thought was that Sebald (1944-2001) might have been a great novelist but he wasn't too good as a poet.And my second thought was that the good people at New Directions are really milking his posthumous fame to try to sell this puzzling "keepsake," as they call it, for $22.95, when it is so manifestly inferior to his other books.But luckily I kept the book on top of my desk for awhile and presently found myself returning to it again and again, trying to puzzle out what made it different than other books of poetry I had read.These "micropoems," as the translator calls them, do creep under your skin.

Here's one:

The house

in the night
through the windows
the flickering light of
flames

That's it!As New Directions lays them out, these lines are all centered a la Michael McClure (it's hard to tell if Sebald planned this effect.)By the way the translator (Michael Hamburger) must be British and I wonder what a good US translator could have done with the German of these poems which the editor has supplied as an appendix for our eluctation at the back of the book.They are so short you could copy them all out on your lunch hour, but they gain weight and resonance by their placement next to the lithographs that inspired them-33 portraits by Sebald's best friend Jan-Peter Tripp) of people's eyes.(A lot of the poetry is about questions of seeing, perception, realization, etc)I thought I recognized some of the faces and I was right in one case only.The eyes are mostly those of famous artists (Francis Bacon, rembrandt, Jasper Johns, Barnett Newman) and writers (Capote, Borges, Burroughs) and some of the juxtapositions attain a transparency as luminous as ice water.But you don't find out whose eyes they are until the end, so the volume has the aspect of a parlor game to it.By the way, check out page 74.It says those are the eyes of Proust, but they look like Rex Harrison to me!

So you're reading these haiku and puzzling over whose eyes are whose and before you know it, you are swept away into the land of the Unerzahlt for the ride of a lifetime. ... Read more

Book Description
Bilingual Edition

Hans Magnus Enzensberger is Germany's most important and influential living poet, a lightning rod in a stormy political and cultural landscape.The Sheep Meadow Press is proud to publish Enzensberger's Selected Poems, drawn from six volumes of his work.Sheep Meadow has also published his Kiosk (translated by the author and Michael Hamburger) and Lighter Than Air: Moral Poems, (translated by Reinhold Grimm).

Come of age after the Third Reich, Enzensberger builds his poetry upon titanic German wreckage and tradition. Always historical and provocative, his humanity dares to sport a sublime malice toward all and charity for few. His revelations have something in common with certain post-Renaissance painters, whose Madonnas are both spiritual and lascivious. Lawrence Joseph, in his introduction to Kiosk, writes, "Enzensberger, more than any poet of his generation anywhere in the world, comes before the public with his own precepts, codes and taboos . . . Whose work has delved into and captured the thought of our time to the extent that Enzensberger's has?" ... Read more

Book Description
Bilingual Edition

Hans Magnus Enzensberger is Germany's most important and influential living poet, a lightning rod in a stormy political and cultural landscape.The Sheep Meadow Press is proud to publish Enzensberger'sKiosk, as well as his Selected Poems, drawn from six volumes of his work, and Lighter Than Air: Moral Poems, translated by Reinhold Grimm.

Come of age after the Third Reich, Enzensberger builds his poetry upon titanic German wreckage and tradition. Always historical and provocative, his humanity dares to sport a sublime malice toward all and charity for few. His revelations have something in common with certain post-Renaissance painters, whose Madonnas are both spiritual and lascivious. Lawrence Joseph writes, "Enzensberger, more than any poet of his generation anywhere in the world, comes before the public with his own precepts, codes and taboos . . . Whose work has delved into and captured the thought of our time to the extent that Enzensberger's has?" ... Read more

Book Description
Michael Hamburger's new collection gathers his shorter poemswritten since his `Collected Poems' of 1994. His strong and sinuous poemsare alert to the intersections of past and present, of continuity andchange. His searching form of nature poetry is informed, as Iain Galbraithput it in `PN Review', by `a language whose philosophical and metaphysicalscope is unique in contemporary British poetry'. ... Read more

Book Description
Michael Hamburger is a perennial outsider watchingtheabsurdities of life with a mixture of cynicism and insecurity. Nomatter how far he travels, he never comes home for the simple reasonthat he has no home. He belongs nowhere-which is to say he can functionanywhere. He is always alive to the singularity of every place personand circumstance he encounters. The result is an unsettling Kafkaesquefeeling of displacement that make his memoirs strangely compelling. ... Read more