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Poetry

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The Spanner in the Works

  • Author: Axel Vieregg
Posted by brb ⋅ March 30, 2011 ⋅ Post a comment

A major portion of the poetry of Günter Eich (1907-1972) has, at last, been made accessible to an English-speaking readership in a new translation by Michael Hofmann. The judicious selection of poems gathered in the volume (‘Angina Days’, Princeton 2010) allows the reader to follow Eich’s development as a poet in detail. It is a journey which accompanies and reflects upon the personal, political and social issues of his time, the Cold War, rearmament, the German “Economic Miracle”, the Vietnam War, the suffering of the poor and oppressed. In his detailed review for The Berlin Review of Books, reviewer Axel Vieregg, himself a notable Eich scholar, offers annotations and footnotes, in an attempt to clarify some of Eich’s concerns that might otherwise be overlooked.

The Seductions of Poetry

  • Author: Rupert Thomson
Posted by brb ⋅ March 9, 2011 ⋅ Post a comment

The Poetry Lesson, by Andrei Codrescu, is a lucid yet playful book, that slips between memoir and fiction, jaunty anecdote and pure tangent, as it describes the first lesson of an ‘Introduction to Poetry Writing’ course, in the last year of its teacher’s institutional career. While Codrescu’s displays a light touch and an elegant frivolity throughout, the very cleverness of his approach leads reviewer Rupert Thomson to ponder what is left of the sense that a passion for poetry will achieve anything.

The Tragedy of Afghanistan

  • Author: Theodor Fontane
Posted by brb ⋅ January 27, 2010 ⋅ Post a comment

“Those who should hear, they’ll hear nevermore / Destroyed, dispersed is the proud host of yore / With thirteen thousand their trail they began. / Only one man returned from Afghanistan.” On the eve of the 2010 Afghanistan conference in London, The Berlin Review of Books publishes a new English translation, by Gabriele Campbell, of Theodor Fontane’s poem ‘Das Trauerspiel von Afghanistan’. First published in 1848, it tells the story of the sole survivor of a massacre suffered by the British during the First Anglo-Afghan War (1839-1842) in January 1842.

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