Michael Hoffmann - Twentieth century German Poetry: An Anthology

Another review I wrote for amazon. I can remember being reasonably pleased with how this one turned out.

Michael Hofmann – Twentieth Century German Poetry: An Anthology

Poetry/History

An interesting choice of cover, especially given the editor and translator Michael Hofmann's praise for German poetry in his introduction on the grounds that so much of it addresses the world outside rather than being confined to the ivory tower. Certainly the twentieth century has marked German history in a number of ways, of which the Berlin Wall is one of the clearest symbols. Being one of those many English people who are mono-lingual and therefore dependant on translators, Michael Hofmann has become a translator I feel I can trust (although here he also reprints translations by other hands), one who possesses both the skill and taste for the works he translates, as is evident from his nicely polemical introduction. 

If I have one criticism of this volume, it would be that that's all we get in the way of critical apparatus. Some of the poets I've encountered before, but many are previously unknown, and a little more biographical information on each poet than just their dates would have been a real help, especially in the later part of the book when Germany was divided (there's that wall again!). It's usually not too difficult to work out which side of the divide individual poets found themselves, but especially with poets represented sometimes by only a single poem, it can sometimes feel as if they are emerging from a void, with only Hofmann's introduction for guidance. 

That aside, this is a magnificent collection, which whets one's appetite for more, especially of those poets who are sometimes sparsely represented. Surely evidence of a task successfully achieved. And it provides plenty of justification for Hofmann's provocative claim that Germany was one of *the* places for poetry in the twentieth century. I wonder if that is a claim which will stand up over the course of the twenty-first. It is of course very difficult to surmise from such a brief survey, and even the best critic is going to miss important work, especially when it is that published nearest to one's own time, but I couldn't help feeling the weakest, or perhaps just the least significant, work in this collection came from the most recent poets. Which connects with that interesting choice of cover. Perhaps that wall, that history, was an important spur to great work which is now past.