Review of ‘Autumn Fire’ by Ricarda Huch, tr. Timothy Adès

October 20, 2025 martyn crucefix blogging, brief poetry review, contemporary British poetry, contemporary German poetry, creative writing, ekphrastic poetry, German poetry, poetry, political poetry, religious poetry, Romantic poetry, translation, UK poetry magazines, writing Acumen Poetry Magazine, Allied bombing, Andrew Geary, Arc Publications, close analysis of poetry, Georgian poetry, Goethe Award, inner emigre, Karen Leeder, Nazi doctrine, Poetry Salzberg, rise of Hitler, Romantic imagery, Thomas Hardy, Thomas Mann, Timothy Ades, translation from the German

This review is an extended version of the one which first appeared in Acumen Poetry Magazine in the autumn of 2025. Many thanks to the reviews editor, Andrew Geary, for commissioning it.

Considered by Thomas Mann as ‘the first lady of German letters’ and as the first woman to receive the prestigious Goethe Award (1931), Ricarda Huch (1864-1947) was a literary superstar of her time, yet remains little known in English. She was an historian who published novels, philosophy, drama and poetry. With the rise of Hitler, she made her rejection of Nazi doctrine clear, remaining in Germany as an ‘inner émigré’, but surviving the war years. Autumn Fire (Poetry Salzberg, 2024) is her last collection, published in 1944, and powerfully reflects her lifelong fascination with the Romantic movement. As Karen Leeder’s scene-setting Introduction explains, this is evidenced in the poems’ formal choices as well as imagery, ‘a repertoire of sprites, flowers, scents, birdsong, gardens, moons, fairy tales, and love’. An English poetry reader would initially place this work in parallel to the least challenging of the Georgian poets of 1914.

There is frequently a faux medievalism at work, as in ‘The trees of autumn murmur’ which tells the story of a Prince who wanders into the woods and is bewitched by ‘fairies wild’ to live a sad, unloving, unhappy life. Other poems remind us of Hardy’s folkloric, time-obsessed lyrics in similarly challenging stanza forms:

On far-off floors the dancers face the middle,

The hems swing stiffly to the threshers’ drum.

Accordion and bass and fiddle

Ethereal hum.

(‘Autumn’)

Also from the stock Romantic image bank comes the isolated, tortured figure of the poet who, as spring days arrive, remains unmoved by them because mysteriously ‘troubled’ and when called upon to sing his songs (this is Huch’s own masculine gendering), finds that his creative efforts are ‘unwelcome’ to society at large (‘Morning of twittering birds’).

However, a closer reading of Huch’s poems clarifies their curiously hybrid effects, as in ‘The Old Minstrel’ in which the violent early years of the twentieth century come forward dressed in medieval garb. The narrative voice encourages the minstrel to sing and play his harp: ‘songs of golden treasure, / Times of playfulness and pleasure’. But the final lines of the poem are spoken (we must assume) by the minstrel who warns that what may come from him demands powerful trigger warnings:

Woe betide ye when I call

Forth my lions, every string,

Dumb in dusty ambuscade,

Torpid now, glistening

Thick with matted blood!

Huch boldly leaves the poem there, without any return to a possibly moderating, narrative voice. ‘The Heroes’ Tomb’ also makes use of familiar images (a tomb, a blustery November day, an old man, a passing shepherd, a youngster asking questions) to address a distanced ‘wicked war’. This poem similarly ends bloodily (though note, we are still in the era of swords rather than machine guns), as those who are inclined to stoop and listen at the tomb, can ‘make out far below the clash of swords, / And tell the drip, drip, drip, and hear the sound. / Can it be blood?’

Such lines contrast the lark’s song, the perfumed jasmine, the poplars and lime trees inhabiting so many of these pages and Huch herself seems to shuttle between a religious-based optimism and a much more modern sounding despair. In ‘Moonlit Night’, an owl flies through a wood and takes a mouse as prey. The moon seems to be portrayed as looking on, wholly indifferent, as it picks its way through the branches, ‘twinkle-toed and light’. Only the form and language here makes the poem feel less than genuinely Modern. As for the owl, it becomes proleptic of technological advances in air warfare as she sweeps off through the wood, ‘the murderess, / whose claws the victim hold, / airborne above black treetops’ emptiness’. Another predator image later provides the reader with a further shock. In ‘My heart, my lion, grasps its prey’, the latter is identified as ‘the hated’. And the passionate nature of Huch’s antagonism – though the object of her hate is never named – is startling, and she uses repetition, shortened lines and rhyme to make her point:

My heart hates yet the hated,

My heart holds fast its prey,

That none may palter or gainsay,

No liar gild the worst,

Nor lift the curse from the accursed.

Almost inevitably you feel, the elements of modern warfare seep into Huch’s poems. In the midst of another Hardyesque stanzaic poem, between the ‘honey-brown’ buds on the trees and the lark’s ‘music-making’, more familiar ‘war poem’ sounds provide the base notes: ‘The earth shakes with battle, the air with shellfire heaves’ (‘War Winter’). The ABAB quatrains of ‘The Young Fallen’ mourn those taken by war by first evoking the innocence of their childhoods, schooldays, their unfulfilled worldly ambitions. Then ‘War came’. And though much of the detail and imagery could be applied to wars fought anytime in the last few centuries, there are moments when the realities of the mid-twentieth century cannot be denied. The young men’s hands are a focus, as they ‘Not long ago reached out for toys and fun. / Those hands, conversant with the tools of murder, / Control the howitzer and grip the gun’.

In fact, Huch was living in Jena when the city was bombed by the Allies and ‘The Flying Death’ comes closer than any other poem in conveying her experiences of modern warfare. Though the Flying Death is an old-fashioned personification, its modus operandi is up to date: ‘The chimney reels, the roof-beams groan, / By distant thunder he is known’. Even as the air bombardment is imaged as approaching on ‘iron steeds’, its impact is plainly conveyed as ‘A whistling, hissing din, and more, / A jarring shriek is heard, a roar, / As if the earth would burst.’ This Poetry Salzberg publication unfortunately does not give the reader the original German, but Timothy Adès’ translations are quite brilliant in their preservation of form and rhyme, while at the same time conveying both the sweetness and the violence in Huch’s curious, powerful, under-appreciated poetry.

Excerpts from Autumn Fire, tr. Timothy Adès

Stralsund

The old grey town that blue sea girds:
The swell of rust-red sails,
The squawking, tumbling salt-sea birds,
The flash of clean fish-scales.

On this church wall the pounding wave
And tempest waste their fire:
Though organ-thunder shakes the nave,
No foe hurls down the spire.

The clouds with tender beating wing
Caress its head, that dreams
Of fierce-fought battles reddening
Its foot with gory streams.

The dead are sleeping, stone by stone,
The sounding bells request:
Eternal memory, my son,
Be thine, eternal rest!

Music

Melodies heal up our every smart;
Happiness,
Lost to us, they redress;
They are balsam to our ailing heart.

From the earth where we without respite
Toil enslaved,
As on wings of blessed angels saved
They transport us to a land of light.

Sound, sound forth, ye songs of mystery!
Worlds fly far;
Earth sinks down, our red and bloodstained star;
Love distils its essence from on high.

Durs Grünbein Reading at The Goethe-Institute, London

February 25, 2025 martyn crucefix autobiography, blogging, brief poetry review, Classical poetry, contemporary British poetry, contemporary German poetry, creative writing, ecological poetry, ecopoetry, ekphrastic poetry, German poetry, poetry, poetry in performance, political poetry, translation, writing Ashes for Breakfast, Classicism, Dresden, Dresden bombing, Durs Grünbein, Faber and Faber, Helen Vendler, Karen Leeder, Lumiere Brothers' film, Michael eskin, Michael Hofmann, Paul Celan, Philip Ottermann, poetuc doctus, Psyche Running, Seagull Books, The Goethe-Institute, World War Two

Please Note: this blog and website are now captured and preserved at the UK Web Archive held at The British Museum. Many thanks to them.

The highlight of last week was attending Durs Grünbein’s reading at The Goethe- Institute, where he was in discussion with his English translator, Karen Leeder. At the beginning of the evening, Grünbein joked that he’d not been in the UK for a few years and this was the first time he’d had to produce his passport (the blessings of Brexit). Interestingly, in the light of last weekend’s German election results, Grünbein has often been described as a poet of the reunified Germany, having been born in Dresden and now living with his family in eastern Berlin. Grünbein’s poetry is witty, wry, perceptive, and influenced by a broad range of literary texts and often presents the disillusionment of having grown up in East Germany and explores Germany’s identity in post-Cold War Europe. He has been very vocal in recent years on the issues of immigration and the defence of Ukraine. Helen Vendler commented on the ‘sardonic humour, the savagery, the violent candor—all expressed in lines of cool formal elegance’ and Philip Ottermann, in The Independent, noted ‘Grünbein loves to jump from one register to another—one moment he is the street poet of Berlin, the next … all marble and ancient philosophy’.

Grünbein’s earlier poems were translated into English by Michael Hofmann and published in Ashes for Breakfast: Selected Poems (Faber, 2005). Karen Leeder has now published Psyche Running, a selection of more recent poems from 2005–2022 (Seagull Books). During the evening, Grünbein commented on the process of those earlier translations as ‘strange’ and the results (as is Hofmann’s wont) as being very free, very sparky, and Leeder suggested there was a particular excitement in the ‘to and fro’ between author and translator to be found in them. She then suggested her approach has been rather different, perhaps a more dutiful one, still needing to make the poems ‘live’ in the target language, but also demanding a fidelity, to capture the original’s form and architecture as closely as possible. The work read during the evening suggests that her translations triumphantly achieve these goals.

Leeder said that his work can have a ‘marble’-like quality, a firm (unbending?) Classicism, and also that he has himself been labelled a ‘poeta doctus’, given the learned, wide-ranging references he incorporates. Grünbein rather demurred at these descriptions and (an idea he repeated a couple of times in slightly different forms) any interesting poem must be the result of two steps, the first poetic, the second, a more critical, a process of reflection (a later formulation suggested the two steps were ‘perceptual’ and ‘conceptual’). These two phases result in the finished poem as ‘a form of knowledge’; Grünbein pointed out that philosophy arose out of poetry in Classical times (not the other way round). The first poem he read, ‘Childhood in the Diorama’, does have a ‘marble’-like quality to it: longish, unrhymed lines in a solid verse paragraph and the child’s preference for the posed scenes of a museum’s diorama, their ‘inert’ quality. But on one occasion, the boy sensed some movement, a ‘draught, perhaps, had blown through the displays’, perhaps suggestive of the child’s development into a more unstable, fluid view of the world.

Other poems read that evening included ‘Nee Wachtel’, ‘Exaltations in Sleep’, and ‘Inspector Kobold’ which is a ‘Martian’ sort of piece describing seahorses, in ‘their whalebone corsets, like ‘tiny ocean Lipizzaners’ (here’s an alternative translation by Michael Eskin). If we are to take Grünbein’s poems as ‘forms of knowledge’ then they certainly range widely through the natural sciences, language, science more generally, astronomy, history and politics. He felt what binds all this together is the one individual life, the single life perspective, poetry as a sort of anthropological study, at which Leeder suggested there was a ‘fragility’ to much of his work, the vulnerability of the single life as much as all life (ecologically?). The poet was happy to agree to this, suggesting ‘marble’ was not at all the right term for his poetry, that there was always something ‘flowing’ about it, multiple angles and perspectives. He once claimed not to be a ‘German’ poet, but simply someone who wrote in the German language. This evening he stood by that statement: his own identity is wrapped up in language use, the mother’s language, used daily for years, and is not a function of birthplace alone (remember Grünbein grew up in East Germany and now lives in the unified Germany).

But his birthplace has been undoubtedly important in Porcelain (Seagull, 2020), the long sequence of poems (written slowly, we learned, on the February anniversaries of the Allies’ bombing of his hometown, Dresden). I reviewed this book here, when it was published). Grünbein read 10 poems from this sequence (some poems were read only in German with the English translation projected above), other poems read in both languages. Porcelain is an elegy the poet suggested, a Classical form, longing for what is lost. Poem #7 is one of the most remarkable, another museum visit by the young poet, who’d stare at a cherry stone from the 16^th century, carved with 185 tiny heads. The poem comes to regard the curious object as an ‘emblem of the future’ of Dresden, presenting as it seemed to, faces, ‘eyes wide with terror, on every tiny screaming face, / inferno on a needle tip’.

The poet suggested the whole sequence of poems is also a kind of ‘sound system’ containing echoes or samples of other poets’ work, including Paul Celan, with Grünbein’s title (Porce-lain) being a pun on the earlier poet’s name. Leeder added that it should not be read in a narrowly nationalistic fashion, that a lot more (bombed) cities than just Dresden were alluded to by the poem (Coventry, Warsaw, Odessa, Guernica). She asked Grünbein what was it that kept drawing him back to Dresden as a subject matter for poems. He thought it had something to do with the moment when he realised that his own childhood was ‘historical’, in the sense of being intimately connected to major historical events. He recalls seeing truckloads of Russian soldiers passing where he grew up, heading to the nearby Russian military barracks. This produced a sense in the young boy that much in (his) life had been determined before his arrival on the scene. In this sense, his hometown acquired a ‘mythic’ quality.

KL: You mean it was a ‘world place’?

DG: Yes – I realised it was a reference point, worldwide, its splendour and its ruins. From the city of Dresden one can draw out a lot of history, a seed point, or like a jigsaw, that can be slowly pieced together.

Perhaps half a dozen more poems were presented from more recent collections. ‘Flea Market’ is a peerless poem about German history, starting from the bric-a-brac found in such markets – the spoons, brooches, bird cages, tables – and wondering ‘what / do they say, what do they hide’? Quiet allusions to ‘uniforms and daggers of honour’, seque into the next, even more troubling, question: ‘How can one’s thoughts not go astray / faced with the piles of glasses, / and old leather suitcases?’ The poem ‘Lumière’ also alludes to the Holocaust and starts out from descriptions of the Lumière brothers’ 1896 film of a train pulling into a station. The first film-goers were frightened at the image of the train’s approach, ‘but not yet the horror / at all the implacable trains / that have criss-crossed the century, / the endless rows of sealed trucks.’

Asked where his poetry might be heading, Grünbein surprisingly suggested that he felt a more prose-like quality entering his work – not so Classical then! A soberness in some ways – but with flashes of magic, magic spells even. His earlier suggestion that the good poem is a 2-step process – perceptual, conceptual – seems to be still important, though in the final result (I’m guessing Grünbein would agree with this) the two stages must be simultaneously present in the reader’s experience.

I have to say, one of the great pleasures of the evening was the way in which both participants took the poetry seriously and gave it a good outing. This may sound odd for a poetry reading, but often these days, I find too many readings/launches contain too little poetry and rather too much gossiping, drinking and networking (all of which can be excluding for those not in the swim). Can I make a plea for more reading at readings, a little less career-building? Of course, at The Goethe-Institute we were listening to two writers at the very top of their game and what they are creating – in German and in English – is vital, lasting stuff. But, if we are publishing poetry, we should not be shy of reading it (remember, not everyone attending will be able to afford to buy the book and take it home).

A Run of Readings in October/November

October 19, 2024 martyn crucefix autobiography, contemporary British poetry, contemporary German poetry, creative writing, ecological poetry, ecopoetry, New British Poetry, poetry, poetry competitions, poetry in performance, political poetry, translation, writing Alex Murdoch, Caroline Maldonado, Common Ground, Dunlin Press, Julian Stannard, Jurgen Becker, Karen Leeder, Laia Watkins, Oxford Poetry Circle, Peter Robinson, poetry in performance, Small Publishers Fair, Steve Ely Valley Press, The Friday Poem, The Long Poem Magazine, Timothy Ades, Victoria Moul

Talk to whomsoever (among the poets you may know) and a common theme is just how hard it can be to get invitations to read. It really is hard going and for those of us – most of us – who have an aversion to the push and flaunt that is required – it can even feel quite painful. But do it we must. So it’s really nice when it produces a few results. This, by way of saying that I have a few appearances – brief in the main – not as headline reader – coming up at the end of this month and the opening of November. A couple of these readings are translation-related, two others are to mark the publication of extracts from some more experimental work (in original poetry) that I have been pursuing in the last couple of years. I’m particularly happy that these more ‘odd’ compositions have found such warm responses and it makes me think I ought to be looking to publish them in full. Though I have another, other book sitting ready to go… publishers??

Some more event details….

On 26th October, 2pm, at The Library, Conway Hall, London, as part of the Small Publishers Fair, Wivenhoe-based Dunlin Press will be launching four new pamphlets of writing: Kathmandu by Andrew Shaw, Bomb by Samuel Reid, From Stone to Clay to Butter by Lily Petch, and A Raven on a Writing Desk by Julie Hogg. These talented people were the winners of the Press’ 2024 competition for experimental writing. Sad to say, I’ll not actually be reading here, but some of my work is included in the accompanying anthology (those who just missed out I like to think!). My contribution is an extract from A Shout Across Dursey Sound, a sequence of poems set on the Beara Peninsula in Ireland. The anthology’s title is Objects (buy it here) and it includes work by Galia Admoni, MW Bewick ,Emma Bolland, Richard Capener, Tessa Foley, Anthony Ogbonnaya Chukwu, Richard Skinner, Isabella Streffen, and others.

Then, on Wednesday, 30th October, 6pm-9pm, I’m off to Oxford to read for the Oxford Poetry Circle, as announced in a previous post. This is taking place at Common Ground, on Little Clarendon Street, Oxford. There, I’ll be reading work in translation only – from my recent Rilke book published by Pushkin Press (reviewed here on The Friday Poem by Victoria Moul) and from my 2019 Shearsman Books collection of poems by Peter Huchel. I’m particularly pleased to be reading on this occasion with the brilliant and super-industrious translator, academic and friend, Karen Leeder. Other readers are Alex Murdoch and Laia Watkins – and there will be readers from the floor.

A couple of days later, the evening of Friday 1st November, I will be reading from a second experimental sequence of my own poems at the launch reading for Steve Ely’s anthology called Apocalyptic Landscape (Valley Press). My poems, a sequence called Olga Liking Sunflowers, roam through the pandemic experience, the work of David Jones, my local landscape and the delights (or otherwise) of social media. Contributors were encouraged to generate visionary responses to the crisis of the Anthropocene in the context of landscapes important to them. I will be reading alongside Steve, Jill Abram (who is organising the London launch for the book), as well as Katy Evans-Bush, JP Seabright, Anita Pati, and Caroline Maldonado. Steve Ely is also reading from his book Orasaigh, a collaboration between Steve and photographer Michael Faint, inspired by the landscape around the tidal island of Orasaigh, located on the coast of South Uist at Boisdale. This event will take place upstairs at the Devereux pub, 20 Devereux Ct, London WC2R 3JJ. Doors open 6:30, Poetry starts 7pm FREE event.

Finally, I have also been lucky enough to have a translated longer poem (by the contemporary German poet Jürgen Becker) accepted to appear in Issue 32 of The Long Poem Magazine and I will be reading ‘Travel film: re-runs’ at their launch event in the afternoon of Saturday 16th November 1.30 to 3.45, at the Barbican Library, Barbican Centre, Silk Street, London, EC2 8DS. Other readers will be: Angela Gardner, Charlie Baylis, Sue Burge, Sharon Holm, Claire Cox, Sian Thomas, Peter Robinson, Khaled Hakim, Timothy Ades, Julian Stannard. FREE ENTRY and there will be a short interval for sales and chats. Refreshments are available downstairs from the Barbican Cafe and Bar. I hope to see you at one or another of these events. I’ll leave you with a few lines from my sequence in Steve Ely’s apocalyptic anthology:

Olga likes my post of the tall sunflowers in the square.

Through google translate, her post in Russian reads: adrenaline is my doping.

I draw for the soul.

There are hundreds of images of herself. Some with wild animals.

Surely, they’re not really wild.

In a zoo. Under lock and key.

Others touch the hem of the pornographic.

Others look like cheap advertisements for luxury cars.

The kind of posts, I wonder, that end with an offer of marriage from the viewer.

Another shows her bald headed, holding a snake, just weeks after the remission of her illness.

I want to ask her: what was the exact nature of the disease?

I want to ask her.

What mark will this make in history?

I want to ask her. When will this stop?

Reading in Oxford 30th October

October 7, 2024 martyn crucefix autobiography, contemporary British poetry, contemporary German poetry, creative writing, German poetry, poetry, poetry in performance, translation, writing Alex Murdoch, Common Ground, Karen Leeder, Maia Watkins, Marain Eastwood, Oxford Poetry Circle, The Ppoet Tree Press

I will be reading from my German translations – Peter Huchel and Rainer Maria Rilke. NB the best german translator currently at work in the UK – Karen Leeder, of Queens’ College, Oxford – will also be reading. Not to be missed!!

New review of my translation of Peter Huchel’s ‘These Numbered Days’

July 31, 2023 martyn crucefix autobiography, brief poetry review, contemporary British poetry, contemporary German poetry, creative writing, German poetry, poetry, political poetry, religious poetry, translation, writing Dora Osbourne, Frank Beck, German Democratic Republic, Gezahlte Tage, Henry Beissel, Joel Spector, Karen Leeder, Michael Hamburger, Philip Fried, Schlegel-Tieck prize for translation, Shearsman Books, Sinn und Form, Steffan Davies, Stephen Parker, Suhrkamp Verlag, The Manhattan Review

When Shearsman Books published my translations from the German of Peter Huchel’s 1972 collection These Numbered Days (Gezählte Tage), we were still in the early days of Covid restrictions and so launch events and so on were very difficult. I was pleased when the book was recognised in 2020 by winning the Schlegel-Tieck Prize for translation from German awarded by the Society of Authors. The judges were Steffan Davies and Dora Osbourne. Yet the wheels of reviewing such books turn very slowly. And I am pleased once more with the appearance of a lengthy review of the book by Frank Beck which has recently appeared in the excellent journal, The Manhattan Review, edited by Philip Fried. So, with due acknowledgements, I am reproducing Frank’s review here. Do check out his work and visit The Manhattan Review, an excellent US journal with a liking for pubishing reviews and work from the UK.

These Numbered Days (Gezählte Tage) by Peter Huchel, translated from the German by Martyn Crucefix and introduced by Karen Leeder. Emersons Green, Bristol, UK: Shearsman Books, 2019. 129 pp. $18.00 (paperback).

When poets look to the stars, often they are hoping to place their human worries in a wider context, in search of consolation. But what if they find, instead, that their concerns are reflected somehow in the sky overhead? Think of the famous fragment from Sappho: alone and unhappy, she watches the moon and the Pleiades descend together, like lovers lying down in bed. Readers may feel that something similar is happening in these lines from German poet Peter Huchel, as translated by British poet Martyn Crucefix:

                        Bent already by the night
                        into his icy harness,
                        Hercules drags
                        the star’s chain-harrow
                        up the northern sky. (p. 23)

When have we felt so much heft in the distant stars? We might well wonder what weight Huchel himself was bearing when he wrote this last stanza of his poem, “Under the Constellation of Hercules” (Unterm Sternbild des Hercules).

But first, let’s see how closely the English translation corresponds to the German stanza. Crucefix replicates Huchel’s pattern of three-beat lines, varied in line 3 with a two-beat phrase. He also makes use of the ready echoes some of Huchel’s words have in English: bent for gebeugt and icy for eisige. He creates a harsh music with chain-harrow, as does the clutter of consonants in Huchel’s Kettenegge. And Crucefix ties the stanza together with the r-sounds running through each of his five lines.

Of course, acoustics aren’t everything: this closing stanza owes much of its power to the two, less portentous preceding stanzas, in which the speaker describes a small, rural settlement, “no larger/than the circle/a buzzard traces/in the evening sky.” All we are shown of the place is a rough stone wall, “glittering water,” and the smoke from a fire, “cut through with voices,/none of which you know.” This sense of elemental conflict prepares us for the star-hauling of the final lines: even in the heavens, it seems, the grinding struggles of the universe go on.

In the German-speaking world, Peter Huchel is widely considered one of the finest 20th-century poets. He composed many of his poems out loud, rather than on paper, so their resonant language often seems, in the words of one critic, “as natural as air or breath.” Huchel is also admired for the way he endured years of harassment and confinement at the hands of the East German government. His reputation was consolidated in 1984, when Huchel’s poetry and prose were collected in two volumes, meticulously annotated by Axel Vieregg, a German scholar in New Zealand who had spent decades studying the poet’s work.

English translations of Huchel’s poems have been difficult to find, although selections of them were compiled and translated by Michael Hamburger and Canadian poet Henry Beissel. (This despite Joseph Brodsky’s enthusiastic endorsement of Huchel’s poetry in The Wilson Quarterly in 1994, accompanied by translations by Joel Spector and a full-scale biography by British scholar Stephen Parker, in 1998.)

These Numbered Days brings us graceful English versions of all 63 poems in Huchel’s 1972 collection, Gezählte Tage, the fourth of his five verse collections, published between 1948 and 1979. The translated poems appear side-by-side with the German originals. An introduction by Karen Leeder helps orient the English-speaking reader in Huchel’s world, while connecting his work with the most urgent issues of today. Crucefix’s fidelity to both the meaning and the manner of Huchel’s poems won his book the prestigious Schlegel-Tieck Prize for German Translation in 2020.

Huchel was born Hellmut Huchel in 1903 (the “u” is pronounced like the double vowel in moon), the son of a civil servant and his wife, from Lichterfelde, a Berlin suburb. Hellmut spent much of his youth on his grandfather’s farm in the nearby Brandenburg countryside, where he developed a feeling of deep kinship with the natural world. After studying literature and philosophy briefly, he lived in Paris for two years, then traveled extensively in Hungary, Romania, and Turkey.

In 1931, at the age of 28, Huchel returned to Berlin, first earning his living as an editor and then by writing plays for radio. He changed his first name to Peter and began to publish his poems in Die literarische Welt and other leading German journals. Those early lyrics often draw on his memories of country life, as in “Havelnacht,” which describes a night on the Havel River in Brandenburg. Here are the poem’s last two stanzas (my translation):

                        Scents of so many past years
                        lean gently here, into the water.
                        As we go quietly along,
                        the night’s brew blows through us.

                        The greened stars are floating
                        as they drip from the oars.
                        And the wind cradles our lives,
                        as it cradles willow and crane.

As beguiling as these images are, the poem’s effectiveness depends largely on its delicately deployed A/B/A/B rhyme scheme, which I have not tried to replicate. (The German poem might remind an English-speaker of Yeats.) Already, Huchel had acquired the technical mastery that the Swiss critic Paul Schorno would later describe as “certainty of what is being said through certainty of form.”

In 1941 Huchel was drafted into the Luftwaffe, where he served until being taken prisoner by the Russians. This led to his working for Radio Berlin in the Russian-occupied sector after the war; eventually he became its cultural director. In 1949, when the Federal Republic of Germany was established in western Germany and the German Democratic Republic in the east, Huchel was named editor-in-chief of the GDR’s new literary magazine, Sinn und Form (Sense and Form). Under his direction, it came to play an important role in East German culture and even earned an international reputation.

However, Huchel’s interest in the diverse contemporary poetry flourishing abroad in those years was fundamentally at odds with Communist Party ideology, and he repeatedly came into conflict with party officials. In 1962, as East Berlin was sealed off from the West by a wall, Huchel was dismissed as editor of Sinn und Form. He was forbidden to publish in East Germany or to travel, and, along with his wife, Monica, a translator of Russian, and their son Stefan, was placed under round-the-clock surveillance at their home in Wilhelmshorst, near Potsdam.

The poems in These Numbered Days were written during the subsequent nine years, as Huchel remained under virtual house arrest. (Several of them were published in West Germany during the poet’s confinement; others appeared in English-language journals in Henry Beissel’s translations.)

In these poems, the rich, rhyming music of Huchel’s early poems is replaced by a spare but flexible flow of language that can contract to a beat or two or relax into longer lines. One of the book’s finest poems considers how the work of “The Dipper” (Die Wasseramsel), a small bird that feeds along the banks of rushing streams, resembles the poetry Huchel now wants to create:

                       If I could plunge
                        brighter downwards
                        into the flowing darkness

about me to fish out a word

                        like this dipper
                        beside the alder boughs
                        picks its food

from the stony river bed.

                        Gold-panner, fisherman,
                        relinquish all your gear.
                        The shy bird

looks to work without a sound. (p. 45)

Few poems in the collection deal with the Huchels’ troubles overtly. When they do, the tone is wry, refusing to reward oppression with anger. Even as the house around him deteriorates, presumably because repairs are not permitted, the poet declares, “I will not write/the names of my enemies/on the spongy wall” (“Weeds”). One has the sense of a man and his poetry being tested and determined not to fail. That includes trying to heed the advice offered to Huchel in a song by his friend, Wolf Biermann: “Do not become embittered/in this embittered time.”

Huchel’s few visitors in Wilhelmshorst had to subject themselves to police surveillance, with all the attendant risk in such a police state, or to approach in secret, under cover of darkness, as Huchel describes in “Weeds”:

                        Guests are always welcome,
                        those who love weeds,
                        those who do not shy away from stony paths
                        over-grown with grass.
                        No one comes.

                        The coalmen come —
                        from their filthy baskets they pour
                        the lumpen black grief
                        of earth into my cellar. (p. 123)

Huchel is still the keen observer of nature he was in his earlier books, but the natural world that once buoyed and nourished him now often mirrors his constricted situation, as in “Exile”:

                        Come evening, friends close in,
                        the shadows of hills.
                        Slowly they press across the threshold,
                        darkening the salt,
                        darkening the bread
                        and with my silence they strike up a conversation.

                        Outside in the maple
                        the wind stirs:
                        my sister, the rainwater
                        in the chalky trough,
                        imprisoned,
                        gazes up at the clouds. (p. 27)

Yet such confessions — even any use of personal pronouns — are scarce in these poems. Sometimes main verbs disappear, and the lines rely on gerunds and participles to move them forward. What is always present is Huchel’s patient watchfulness, often refracted through history and myth, as in his image of Hercules climbing the winter sky. With all roads around one blocked, the mind’s pathways become more important than ever, and allusions abound here. These poems reach out to the poet Alcaeus (a contemporary of Sappho), Tang dynasty writer Pe-Lo-Thien, Shakespeare, Kierkegaard, Virginia Woolf and other writers past and present.

Another connection that sustains Huchel, though more fleetingly, is his memory of happier times, especially his travels in the Mediterranean, as in “Dolphins”:

                        Gazing out across the sea
                        in white sunlight
                        I saw them leap
                        above the salty
                        weight of the water —
                        dolphins,

my secret brothers,
carrying my messages to Byzantium. (p. 91)

Such flashes of joy are tempered by the narrow confines of the Huchels’ lives. In “Hubertusweg” (the name of their street), the poet wonders about the policeman standing guard outside his house in the rain (“What’s in it for him . . . ?”) and then considers the vulnerability of each person before a totalitarian state (“The state’s a blade;/the people thistles.”) Yet even totalitarian states have a life-span. Huchel sees his son reading a cuneiform text about “the peaceful campaign” of the Bronze Age ruler, King Keret, and his poem concludes:

                        On the seventh day,
                        as the God IL proclaimed,
                        a hot wind blew and drank the wells dry,
                        the dogs howled,
                        the donkeys cried out with thirst.
                        And without the use of a battering ram the city surrendered.                                              (p. 121)

In 1971, in response to efforts by Heinrich Böll, Arthur Miller, Henry Beissel and others, the GDR allowed Peter Huchel and his family to emigrate to West Germany. He continued to write there until his death, in 1981. Eight years later, the Berlin Wall fell without a shot’s being fired, and Germany was soon reunited. The Huchels’ house in Wilhemshorst, where these poems were written, is now a writer’s center, sponsored by the state and local governments.

Today the once-divided city of Berlin is one of the most vibrant places in the world. Huchel’s poetry is still in print and still read, and, at number 10, Hanseatenweg, near the Tiergarten, Sinn and Form keeps producing new bimonthly issues, very much along the editorial lines Huchel had in mind. Thus far this year, alongside work by and about German-language writers, the journal offered its readers articles about Jorge Luis Borges, Clarice Lispector, Marcel Proust, Marina Tsvetaeva, and Adam Zagajewski.

—Reviewer Frank Beck is a writer and translator and serves as a trustee for Elgar Works, which publishes the scores of Edward Elgar. His recent thoughts on poetry and music can be found at WWW.DIEHOREN.COM.

Greedy alpha-creatures: the poetry of Ulrike Almut Sandig

June 22, 2023 martyn crucefix blogging, brief poetry review, contemporary British poetry, contemporary German poetry, creative writing, German poetry, poetry, political poetry, translation, writing Agenda Magazine, Angela Carter, anti-immigration party, Duino Elegies, Durs Grünbein, Grimm's Fairy Tales, John Burnside, Karen Leeder, Ledbury Poetry Festival, Mediterranean refugee crisis, migration, neo-Nazi, Patricia McCarthy, Pegida, Peter Florence, Porcelain, Rainer Maria Rilke, refugees in Europe, Seagull Books, The Children’s and Household Tales of the Brothers Grimm, Ulrike Almut Sandig, Walt Whitman

I’m shocked to realise that it is a full year since I posted my review of the stunning long poem, Porcelain, by the contemporary German poet, Durs Grünbein, in Karen Leeder’s equally impressive translation (Seagull Books, 2020). That review was originally commissioned for, and published in, Patricia McCarthy’s penultimate issue of Agenda (those who follow such things will know that Patricia has handed over the reins of the magazine to John Burnside who takes over with the resources of St Andrews behind him). In its original incarnation, the review was paired with my comments on another contemporary German poet’s work (again in Karen Leeder’s translation): this was Ulrike Almut Sandig’s 2016 collection, I Am a Field Full of Rapeseed, Give Cover to Deer and Shine Like Thirteen Oil Paintings Laid One on Top of the Other (Seagull, 2020). I am now posting my Sandig review as well, in part because I will be appearing with both Karen and Ulrike at the Ledbury Poetry Festival in a few days time. We will be talking about Rainer Maria Rilke’s great sequence, Duino Elegies (1923) as part of Peter Florence’s Dead Poets Society series. If you are in or around Ledbury on the morning of Saturday July 7th, do come along. Here’s the review . . .

The eponymous figure from Grünbein’s sequence’s 11th poem,‘Hans im Glück’, draws on one of the stories in The Children’s and Household Tales of the Brothers Grimm (1812). In the original, Hans has anything of value taken from him, bit by bit, yet he remains optimistic, refusing to acknowledge reality. Within the context of Porcelain, Grunbein treats this is as an additional image of the myth of the city of Dresden as undeserving victim. Interestingly, the same figure appears in Ulrike Almut Sandig’s collection, but her presentation of Hans is more poignant, less ironic, as even the boy’s language is stripped from him and he tries to write a letter to a loved one: “what are you up to? // + esp: where r u? / ru ru // ru”. In the context of I Am a Field Full of Rapeseed… , the boy might be thought of as a refugee, forcibly having his culture and language stripped from him, though one of the strengths of the poem is that it also works as an updated fairy tale, a little myth of loss and diminished presence with more universal application. Such re-purposing of several of Grimm’s tales is one of the most striking things about this collection. Sandig announces in another poem, “we find ourselves deep in the future of fairy tale” (‘the sweet porridge’) and she, like Angela Carter before her, redeploys the fairy tale’s surreal narratives, bold characterisation, its humour and violence, its symbolism and moral intensity for her own purposes.

The other striking aspect of Sandig’s writing here is her bold linguistic and formal choices. There is an absence of punctuation, capitalisation, of poem titles (bolded phrases mid-poem often serve as titles), of conventional forms, of a clear lyric ‘I’, of plainly pursued narratives. This results in radically shifting ground for the reader which can be both bewildering and exciting. Several poems indicate these choices are firmly rooted in issues of epistemology and ideas concerning personal identity. So, the opening poem, ‘from the wings’, ambitiously sets out a complete life from ‘screaming’ beginning to its ‘silent’ conclusion. The interim is portrayed as all fluidity, ‘a stream that flows into others / while others again flow into it’. As much as there is any discrete self to be identified, ‘I am made wholly of language’, and the individual is a creature ‘that must speak / to understand itself’. The self is also one of many ‘fragile / greedy alpha-creatures’ and understands itself to be, ultimately, ‘a fluid tuning fork I am my own / song’. In the same vein, the book closes with ‘where I am now’, which sets the self metaphorically in some remote Arctic research station, a self that is at the same time a woman swimming in a municipal pool, moving freestyle through the water, ‘parting the water before me’, in an image of self-creation and open-ended exploration that, to some, will recall Eliot’s ‘Little Gidding’: “We shall not cease from exploration”.

This is, as it were, the metaphysical background to Sandig’s vision and it gives rise to poems like ‘I am the shadow for you to hide beneath’ in which the narrative voice celebrates just such fluidity of identity in an address to “friends”/readers that has the quality of Whitman’s “I contain multitudes” (Song of Myself, #51), though with a good deal more anxiety: “every morning I get up and don’t have a clue: / is it me, Almut? Ulrike?” This is also the poem containing the book’s full title, “I am a field full of rapeseed, give cover to deer / and shine like thirteen oil paintings laid one on top / of the other” and the poem goes on, in the name of radical fluidity, the I as landscape, huntress, a text that begins to unravel just as it reaches an end, a soldier, a girl, a woman. Elsewhere, ‘to be wood in a table’, as the title suggests, continues the theme: “not to be old and not to be young, but old / enough to be several things at once”. This includes the Rilkean desire for “simple things like ‘tree’” as well as the freedom of having no name, “no longer to say: ‘I am’”.

Such poems are both celebratory in tone, but also alertly defensive. The reason is that there are forces abroad, ways of seeing and their associated politics that offer counter narratives. So, the expected calm of ‘lullaby for all those’ is really a call to arms, or at least a call to resist. It is “for all / those who put up a fight, when somebody / says: lights out, no more talking”. In a superb passage, once again Leeder’s translation of the German is brilliant, the forces of “DARKNESS” begin to emerge by implication:

we’re waiting for two

or three of those good, humming dreams

four peace treaties, five apples in deep sleep

we are waiting for six cathedrals and for

those seven fat cows, eight quiet hours

full of sleep, we’re waiting for nine friends

gone missing. we’re counting our fingers.

we’re still resisting. we won’t go to sleep.

What is being resisted are the forces of repression, of fixity not fluidity, narrowness not breadth, fundamentalist conviction not open-endedness. Sandig places a poem in the centre of the book which draws heavily on statements made by Pegida, Germany’s populist, right wing, anti-immigration party. The text is full of rallying calls expressing a faith in clarity, mastery, resolution and purification: ‘from now on / nothing will stand in our way, no language / we cannot master, we will strike out mistakes / and shake each other’s freshly washed hands”. One of the Grimm’s sourced poems, a sister speaking to her brother, presents a narrative of the boy’s development into a threatening “hunter”. Such a poem looks both ways towards the violence of neo-Nazis, but also towards the violent radicalisation of young jihadists.

Sandig’s poems dealing more obviously with issues of state power, war, migration and displacement (especially hot topics in Germany, a country in the Schengen area of Europe and seen by some as an ideal destination – see the poem ‘tale of the land of milk and honey’) are particularly impressive. The ‘ballad of the abolition of night’ draws on details of systematic torture prosecuted by the USA, “a state lagging somewhat behind / on the historical timeline of our kind”. ‘instructions for flying’ revises statements made in leaflets distributed at the Idomeni refugee camp in 2016. The same camp, close to the borders of Greece, is the focus of another poem which expresses the poet’s “moral dismay”. The disquiet is partly at her own nation’s equivocations about the refugee crisis (what if there’s not a single / jot of good Deutsch to be found in this / Land of mine”) but also personally, at finding rhymes but ultimately doing “sweet FA”.

With Grunbein, Sandig is expressing the moral complexity in the face of man’s inhumanity to man as much as any simplistic moral dismay. This is, in part, the subject of some of the Grimm poems (interestingly, in German, the word ‘grimm’ means ‘anger, ire’). ‘Grimm’ itself opens optimistically, messages being scribbled onto raw eggs, but increasing urgency leads to extra pressure and the eggs break. Still, like Hans in luck, the narrator seems “unfazed in / the crumbling ruins” though the final image is only of eggs smashed, “a well-nigh limitless / supply of fragments and rage most grim”. But Sandig is an optimist, I think. Though couched in conditionals, ‘news from the German language, 2026AD’ works hard to portray a future of more settled diversity (Iraqi dates, Turkish honey, Syrian poetry). The opposing prospect is relegated to a parenthesis – if quite a long one. But hope has the final word: “if it works, we, that’s all of you and me, / will sing a lullaby, rhyme in unison [. . .] but more than that, we will be”.

Ash-Hiccups: on ‘Porcelain’ (2005) by Durs Grünbein

June 7, 2022 martyn crucefix brief poetry review, contemporary British poetry, contemporary German poetry, creative writing, German poetry, poetry, political poetry, translation, UK poetry magazines, writing Agenda Magazine, Dresden firebombing, Durs Grünbein, John Ashbery, Joseph Brodsky, Karen Leeder, Meissen pottery, Michael Hofmann, Paul Celan, Schlegel-Tieck prize for translation, Seagull Books, Society of Authors, Winston Churchill

This review of Durs Grünbein’s stunning long poem, Porcelain, tr. Karen Leeder (Seagull Books, 2020) first appeared in a recent issue of Agenda. Leeder’s clever, formal, utterly sympathetic translation has since rightly been awarded the 2021 Schlegel-Tieck Translation Prize by the Society of Authors.

For a writer who has published over 30 books of poetry and prose in his native Germany, we have had too little of Durs Grünbein in English. Michael Hofmann‘s Ashes for Breakfast (Faber, 2005) introduced some of the earlier work and described Grünbein as possessed of melancholia, amplitude, a love of Brodsky, a love of the Classics, plus wide-ranging interests in medicine, neuroscience, contemporary art and metaphysics. John Ashbery praised Grünbein, identifying his subject as “this life, so useless, so rich” and the challenge to any translator is precisely this breadth and ambition. Happily, Karen Leeder is proving to be a really fine conduit for Grünbein’s work and here she triumphantly tackles his 2005 sequence of poems about the firebombing of his hometown, Dresden, by American and British planes in February 1945.

Porcelain is a sequence of 49 poems, 10 lines each, rhymed and grounded in Classical metre and given an air of Classical elegy by its subtitle, ‘Poem on the Downfall of My City’ (‘Poem vom Untergang meiner Stadt’). But if resolution, consolation or summing-up might be expected, this is, definitively, not what we get. The title, of course, refers to the Meissen pottery which, from the eighteenth century on, brought Dresden its great wealth and fame. But it is also a pun on the poet to whom the sequence is dedicated: Paul Celan. In Celan’s poem ‘Your eyes embraced’ there is an effort to swallow the ashes of genocide but they return to the throat as ‘Ash- / hiccups’, an image repeated in Grünbein’s opening poem: “It comes back like hiccups: elegy”. The sequence does indeed hiccup in the sense of its jerky shifts of tone, its multi-faceted images of Grunbein himself and in its close to choking articulation of the horrors of the Dresden bombing.

A self-conscious awkwardness or self-questioning is clear from the start: “Why complain, Johnny-come-lately? Dresden was long gone / when your little light first appeared”. Grünbein was born seventeen years after the bombing and accepts he cannot ‘witness’ the event in any simple way. But personal details do surface in the sequence such as in poem 8 where the young boy grows familiar with the still evident urban destruction: “proud and mute . . . the ravaged city”. He senses something of “that glory passed away” but can hardly know “the things [his] mother saw, / scarcely five years old” (poem 10). Later poems remember moments when his mother’s doll was in danger of the flames (“Flames as high as houses sucked the air along the streets”), but was rescued, unscathed, “or that is what they say” (poems 40/41). Leeder explains in her Introduction that Grünbein has been criticised in part for a sentimentality and this is perhaps such a moment. But the indication that this is reportage (family reportage at that) gives permission for sentiment and Grünbein is fully conscious of (and in control of) the massive swings in tone through the whole sequence. Poem 48 is one that might also lay itself open to charges of sentiment, focussing on a pair of lovers (Martha and Heinrich) seemingly caught up in the devastation: “Kids, the pair of you, first kisses in the thick of war, / until you met that night you’d grown up in uniform”. But Grünbein works repeatedly through allusiveness and intertextuality, so this Romeo and Juliet trope is hardened and complicated when we hear that, not only was the German air defence’s grid reference for Dresden code-named ‘Martha-Heinrich 8’, but also that both names recall characters in Goethe’s Faust.

In poem 38, Grünbein seems equally aware that some of his images of Dresden after the bombing might be open to the same criticism of a hyper-emotional tone. “Five long weeks upon the Altmarkt square, the horses / scratched the straw and watched the griddled corpses / burn. Mawkish? Ach, give over, late-born soul”. As this example shows, the sequence does confront the horrors unleashed on the city as in poem 22: “Are those people popping like chestnuts between / the gutted trams?” But looked at more carefully, even this grisly observation is nominally from the perspective of a stone angel on the cathedral roof. It is this continual innovation and manipulation of perspective that is important to the poems’ purpose and how we should read them. One important perspective Grünbein explores is the victim-narrative that predominated in thinking about the event in post-war East Germany and more recently. One aspect of this is the placing of the Dresden bombing in the historical context of German bombing of Warsaw in 1944 and the German’s systematic persecution of the Jews. Dresden’s fate did not rise ex nihilo. This latter myth, Grünbein embodies in the eroticisation of the bombing – the city as defenceless virgin – as in poem 45’s image of the city and the Elbe: “River like a sash of silver draped round her hips / enticing in the moonlight”.

From such examples, it’s easy to see why Grünbein’s own position on the bombing has been vociferously discussed and questioned. But he warns against using the destruction of the city as any kind of exemplum: “Let Dresden be. You won’t find what you are looking for” (poem 6). The reader understands he is also advising himself here, while, at the same time, acknowledging the human drive to interpret, to search for meaning, even in the most appalling events. The sequence’s treatment of Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris, the RAF Commander-in-Chief during the bombing of Dresden, is interestingly equivocal. Poem 4 alludes almost invisibly to Harris’ comment on the Dresden bombing, when he suggested that objections to it were based on a sentimental image of the city as full of “German bands and Dresden shepherdesses” when, in reality, it was a Nazi munitions and transportation centre. In fact, Harris was carrying out orders from Winston Churchill: “No sweat, Arthur, you only did what you had to do” (poem 13). And in poem 23, Grünbein also notes that some more recent left-wingers in Germany have chanted ‘Thank you, Harris!’ in their efforts to question and counter more simplistic, victim-narrative commemorations of the event.

In such ways, Porcelain revels in its own pluralities while acknowledging and itself attempting to make some sense of an epitome of senseless destruction. The final line of the book plainly states the human need to avoid finality, the fall into fixity, yet accepts the compulsion to explain, to create meaning: “Changing places, times, dimensions as he goes—goes on—creating”. And behind all this stand those exquisite china objects, the ‘white gold’ that made the city rich and famous:

Falconers are there, vintners, nymphs with conch-shell horns,

frog-faced putti, figures riding seahorses and swans.

Groups of shepherdesses, lovely gardeners, beasts of lore . . .

Porcelain—most fragile thing”

The collision of Allied bombs and Dresden’s fragile porcelain lies at the heart of Grünbein’s poems. There was no contest, of course, though some pieces and many fragments remained and were perhaps repaired. Grünbein’s poems enact this process, collecting perspectives, often incongruous, even contradictory, but bringing them into relation with each other, not to make any definitive statement, but to hold up a mirror to us, to the recurrent tension between our need to create and our drive to destroy.

Peter Huchel in Translation – review

April 27, 2021April 27, 2021 martyn crucefix brief poetry review, contemporary British poetry, contemporary German poetry, German poetry, Great War poetry, poetry, political poetry, religious poetry, translation, writing Berlin Wall, East German poetry, Germann Expressionism, inner emigre, Joel Spector, Karen Leeder, Michael Hamburger, Mireille Gansel, Paul Celan, Peter Huchel, Reading in Translation, Rebecca DeWald, Schlegel-Tieck prize for translation, Shearsman Books, Sinn und Form, Society of Authors

Marvellously thoughtful and well-informed review of my (fairly) recent translations of the poems of Peter Huchel. Also recent winner of the Society of Authors’ Schlegel-Tieck Prize for Translation 2020.

Many thanks to Rebecca DeWald and to Reading in Translation.

“Remember me, whispers the dust”: Peter Huchel’s “These Numbered Days,” translated from German by Martyn Crucefix (readingintranslation.com)

The Outlaw Beyond the Wall: the poetry of Peter Huchel

November 24, 2020November 30, 2020 martyn crucefix contemporary British poetry, contemporary German poetry, creative writing, German poetry, Great War poetry, poetry, political poetry, translation Berlin Wall, Carcanet Press, George Seferis, German Democratic Republic, Henry Beissel, Iain Galbraith, Karen Leeder, League of Proletarian Writers, Michael Hamburger, Nazi germany, Schlegel-Tieck prize for translation, Seamus Heaney, Shearsman Books, Sind und Form, Society of Authors, Stasi, Weimar Republic

To mark the shortlisting – for the Society of Authors’ Schlegel-Tieck Translation Prize 2020 – of my Peter Huchel translations, published by Shearsman Books, I’m posting here a piece I wrote about Huchel’s poetry which first appeared in Acumen 98 (September 2020). Peter Huchel’s work has its place in the tradition of the greats of twentieth-century German poetry – Rilke, Trakl, Brecht, Benn and Celan – but he is also, as Karen Leeder has argued, a “one off”.[i] Iain Galbraith also lists Huchel among a “handful of essential post-war poets” in German, but his poetry is far less well known than it deserves to be. His presence in English at all is thanks to Michael Hamburger’s 1983 translations published by Anvil[ii]. I came across isolated examples of his work a few years ago and was immediately drawn to his startling observations of the natural world which function often as “metaphors [to] take us deep into the social and historical landscape” of his era (Galbraith again). I believe he is a poet with important things to say to us in our own conflicted times and my translation of Huchel’s best collection, These Numbered Days (1972), was published last year by Shearsman Books. Here, I put Huchel’s work into the context of the great events in Europe in the twentieth century.

Huchel’s description of Pe-Lo-Thien, the poet, social critic and sometime exile from the Tang Dynasty, is intended also as a portrait of the poet himself – a dissident figure, an “outlaw, / who lives beyond the wall / with his cranes and cats” (‘Pe-Lo-Thien’). It’s no surprise that the spare, impersonal, often lapidary quality of the poems in These Numbered Days was remarked on by Karl Alfred Wolken as offering the reader something of a Chinese book in German.[iii] The poet himself, carefully scrutinising the natural world – the perception of which constitutes the substance of so many of his poems – tries to descry “Signs, / written by the hand / of a Mandarin” (‘No Answer’). If such allusions suggest a minimalist and tight-lipped quality to Huchel’s poems, this is precisely what might be expected from an artist forced to play, as he did for so many years, the role of inner émigré.

For readers of British and Irish poetry, the term ‘inner émigré’ will be familiar from Seamus Heaney’s use of it in his 1975 poem ‘Exposure’. Discussing the idea, Heaney acknowledged the term’s specific meaning in the 1920/30s in Soviet Russia as referring to a dissident who had not actually gone into exile but remained at home, disaffected from and under the surveillance of the authorities. Heaney saw himself in this light in relation to Northern Ireland. He also associated the idea with the position of George Seferis, concluding that “poetry secures some final place in your being, some little redoubt in your consciousness that will not be taken over by history or the world or disaster”.[iv] This same sense of confinement, wrestling with conscience and the frequent resort to codification which results from such a compromised position is the best way into Huchel’s work as a writer whose life and historical circumstances astonishingly led him to play the role of inner émigré twice over.

He was born Hellmut Huchel in 1903 in Alt-Lichterfelde, now part of Berlin. Due to his mother’s chronic illness, the boy was taken from the city to be raised on his grandfather’s farm at Alt-Langewisch, in the Brandenburg countryside near Potsdam. As an adult, Huchel was fond of quoting St. Augustine on the importance of memory as a “great field or a spacious palace, a storehouse for countless images of all kinds”.[v] Huchel argued that it is “the experiences of childhood, roughly between the ages of five and ten, that exercise a decisive influence in later years”.[vi] But if this period seems to have had something of the idyll about it for the 11 year old boy, it was dramatically shattered by the death of his beloved grandfather and the outbreak of war in Europe in 1914.

After his country’s defeat, the 17 year old Huchel took part in the conservative Kapp-Putsch against the Weimar Republic in 1920 which was fuelled by a resentment of the German government’s agreeing to the punishing conditions of the Treaty of Versailles. Huchel was wounded in the fighting associated with this failed coup but it was during his recovery in hospital that his sympathies for socialism and Marxism fully developed. His very early poems can be linked to the sort of art fostered by the League of Proletarian Revolutionary Writers. He has said: “What did I care about in those days? I wanted to make visible in the poem a deliberately ignored, suppressed class, the class of the people, the maidservants and coachmen”.[vii]

By 1932 he was working as an editorial assistant for Die Literarische Welt. His first collection of poems was accepted for publication under the title Der Knabenteich (‘The Boy’s Pond’). But with the rise of Hitler, Die Literarische Welt had to cease publication and it is at this moment that Huchel developed the strategy of the ‘inner émigré’. He published very little, eventually deciding to withhold Der Knabenteich. He was deeply troubled that the Nazis liked his work, reading into it as they did a version of the blood and soil nationalism they hoped to foster. So, by 1936 he was refusing permission for any publication and he did not publish any new poems during the rest of Hitler’s rule. Rather, he withdrew to the Brandenburg countryside. His response to tyranny was silence and non-cooperation, though he was eventually drafted in 1941 and ended the war in a Russian prisoner of war camp.

With the fall of the Third Reich, Huchel enthusiastically shared the democratic and socialist optimism of many of his compatriots for the reconstruction of East Germany. His short-lived faith in land reform in the immediate Soviet-Occupied post-war years is consistent with his earlier social concerns. He now began working for East German radio and in 1948 at last published his first collection, Gedichte (‘Poems’). In 1949 he became editor of the influential literary magazine Sinn und Form (‘Sense and Form’). Though Huchel’s poems were applauded both for their craft and socialist undercurrents, they did not satisfy those who were soon demanding much more explicit support for the German Democratic experiment. Huchel’s dark rural landscapes offered equivocal support at best for the governing regime and his instinctively conservative harking back to childhood and the natural world (rather than a modern revolutionary transformation of human society) were judged to fall short of the expected unquestioning celebration of the GDR’s project.

With the poet’s increasing sense of disaffection from the direction of GDR society, Huchel was once more forced to adopt the role of ‘inner émigré’. The tone of his work becomes increasingly sombre and melancholy, his poetic diction grows more clipped and cryptic, his palette narrowing. In his work at the journal Sinn und Form, he was determined to maintain editorial freedom and the publication flaunted an international outlook with contributions from Aragon, Bloch, Brecht (two special issues), Camus, Eluard, Langston Hughes, Thomas Mann, Neruda, Sartre, Yevtushenko and Zweig. Increasingly, he came into conflict with the authorities and was put under immense pressure to conform. He resisted for 13 years – in large part because of the determined support of Brecht. Brecht’s death in 1956 left Huchel exposed and he was asked to resign his editorship. He refused and so compelled the East German government publicly to force his resignation.

A year after the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961, Huchel was banished at the age of 59 to effective house arrest in Wilhelmshorst. It was at this moment that his second collection of poems, Chausseen, Chausseen (‘Roads, Roads’), appeared. He published it – in bold defiance of the GDR authorities – in the West. It was much praised in the author’s absence. Henry Beissel describes the leanness and density of these new free verse poems: “images are more insistent on turning concreteness into a code; sadness emanates from a sense of the inevitability of loss and from a world bent on self-destruction”.[viii] Huchel’s images from nature are left to speak for themselves; his is often an impersonal poetry of a particularly haunted and pessimistic kind. Yet there is stoical survival too; the poems remain marvellous acts of observation.

The poem ‘Hubertusweg’ vividly portrays this period of his life, from 1962 to 1971, living in isolation, under Stasi surveillance. Gezählte Tage (‘These Numbered Days’) appeared in 1972, the title suggesting the counted days of Huchel’s time under house arrest, his poems recording them, marking them, but also a residual sense of them actually counting towards something, his legacy as a poet, his hoped-for release. Huchel repeatedly applied for an exit visa for himself, his wife and son and in this he was supported by PEN in an internationally orchestrated campaign.

Eventually, in 1971, the Ulbricht government granted his release and he lived first in Rome, then in a borrowed house near Freiburg in West Germany. But like many GDR artists who moved to the West, Huchel was equivocal – to put it mildly – about what he found here. Because the GDR had failed to bring about a truly democratic and socialist society did not mean that he had given up his ideals and the West’s materialism, egotism and faithless profiteering were repellent to him. There is a spiritual emptiness everywhere as in ‘Subiaco’, set in Italy, where Pilate’s bowl stands emptied of water so the taint of guilt cannot be washed away. Huchel’s gloom is partly determined by his own nature, partly by his background, by political persecution and by his divorce from his Brandenburg homeland. The poet bears witness to the inadequate present.

In Huchel’s few remaining years he was lauded in the West but perhaps this was just another form of exile, though one in which he was able to speak and publish. Even so, his final collection, Die Neunte Stunde (‘The Ninth Hour’) which appeared in 1979, is a book almost exclusively of elegy and lament. The ninth hour is the hour of despair, the hour in which Christ died on the Cross, crying out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Huchel himself died in 1981, aged 78. Contemporary readers can hear something of his more personal voice – so finely attuned to the natural world, but gifted only a tragically powerless place in history, yet driven to labour and bear witness against the odds – in the words of the unnamed peasant who narrates ‘Middleham Castle’, one of Huchel’s more explicit and terrifying portraits of tyranny:

Familiar with the ways of great forests –

the year streaked with the jays’ colours,

painful brightness of frosted boughs,

the winter hair of deer stuck to bark,

fawns huddled together at evening,

warming themselves in the cloud of their breathing –

up the gorse-clad hill with rope and horses

I haul tree trunks to Middleham Castle.

Martyn Crucefix

London July 2020

[i] Karen Leeder, Introduction to These Numbered Days, Peter Huchel, tr. Martyn Crucefix (Shearsman, 2019).

[ii] The Garden of Theophrastus and other poems, tr. Michael Hamburger (Anvil Press, 2004).

[iii] Karl Alfred Wolken, in a review of Gezählte Tage (Rias Berlin, 1972), see http://www.planetlyrik.de/peter-huchel-gezahlte-tage/2011/10/

[iv] George Morgan, ‘Interview with Seamus Heaney’, Cycnos, Volume 15 No. 2, July, 2008: http://revel.unice.fr/cycnos/index.html?id=1594.

[v] Saint Augustine, Confessions, Book X, viii (Penguin, tr. R.S. Pine-Coffin).

[vi] Huchel’s acceptance speech for the 1974 Literature Prize of the Free Masons, quoted by Henry Beissel, A Thistle in His Mouth: Poems by Peter Huchel (1987), p. 10.

[vii] Quoted and translated by John Flores, Poetry in East Germany (1971), from Eduard Zak, Der Dichter Peter Huchel (1951), p. 124.

[viii] Beissel, p. 16.

Jan Wagner: the Poet as Tea-Bag and as Chameleon

February 3, 2016February 3, 2016 martyn crucefix contemporary German poetry, creative writing, German poetry, poetry, translation, writing Arc Publications, Duino Elegies, German poetry, Jan Wagner, Karen Leeder, Popescu Translation Prize, Rainer Maria Rilke, Self-Portrait with Swarm of Bees, Sonnets to Orpheus, W H Auden, Wordsworth#

Iain Galbraith’s really skillful translations of the German poet Jan Wagner have just won the Popescu European Poetry Prize. Wagner’s poems brew a formal brilliance (Karen Leeder remarks in her Introduction to Arc’s Self-Portrait with a Swarm of Bees, that “virtuoso” is the compliment most often applied to him) with an intense concentration on really existing things. In the German tradition, of course, such a meticulous and sensual evocation of things (‘die Dinge’) harks back to Rilke’s advice in the ninth of his Duino Elegies (1922):

Perhaps we are here to say: house,

bridge, fountain, gate, jug, fruit tree, window –

at most: column, tower . . .

Rilke’s cycle of poems arrives at this conclusion (“Praise this world to the angel, not some / inexpressible other”) not at all in the spirit of defeat but in a celebratory mood because it is only through honest interaction with the world that we define and refine our sense of ourselves. Equally and dialectically, through, our emotional and artistic responses to the world of things we are able to translate the inanimate and unconscious world into something more significant, lasting, spiritualized.

And these things, which live by passing away,

acknowledge your praise of them, as they vanish,

they look to us to deliver them, we, the most

fleeting of all. They long for us to change them,

utterly, in our invisible hearts – oh, endlessly,

to be within us – whoever, at last, we may be.

It is just this ebb and flow between self and other, each re-defining the other, each growing in response to the other, that Wagner seems intent on recording. But it’s not always an easy process as the poem ‘Mushrooms’ suggests. The narrator must listen for the snap of a twisted stem as if cracking a safe, “hoping for the right combination”. But when the right balance (I’m afraid it has to be this dull-seeming word) is achieved between active exploration and passive sensitivity then two worlds are miraculously joined.

But we need not get too po-faced about the process. Wagner suggests a tea-bag might help us envisage it. In two haikus, he wryly evokes both facets of such communion in a religious visionary and a rope-dangling, Indiana Jones-type adventurer:

draped only in a

sackcloth mantle. the little

hermit in his cave

a single thread leads

to the upper world. we shall

give him five minutes

Wagner reflects the often rebarbative nature of the process partly through typographical choices, abandoning capital letters throughout (a far more disturbing move in German, of course, which capitalizes all nouns, all things). It’s also reflected in the choice of fruit in ‘Quince Jelly’. Knobbly and ugly, even ripe quinces are inedible when raw, astringent and tough. Wagner acknowledges the “tough and foreign” quality of the fruit and its taste which makes “our palates baulk”. Yet the human work invested in the transformative domestic process yields great rewards:

quinces, jellied, lined up in bellied jars on

shelves and set aside for the darkness, stored for

harsher days, a cellar of days, in which they

shone, are still shining.

Such meticulous observation and sensual details held in the form of verse ensure Wagner’s things are always more than themselves and here the quince jelly is a poem, much like Wordsworth’s daffodils, an accumulation of “wealth” to flash upon “that inward eye” in days and years to come.

Wagner also chooses a ‘Chameleon’ to represent the poet. Describing the creature’s curved tail as a “pastoral staff” raises the spiritual stakes with a wonderfully light touch. The animal’s perceptive acuity is likewise explored with its tongue like a “telescope”, snapping up the “constellation” of a dragonfly. Its eye is a “fortress” yet contains a flickering pupil; an indefinable restlessness is suggested by its shed skin like “an outpost or long-discarded theory”. Most tellingly, the chameleon’s independently moving eyes enable Wagner to suggest the balance of both centrifugal and centripetal thrusts of the true perception: the animal gazes “simultaneously at the sky / and the ground, keeping his distance / from both”.

The title poem of Arc’s selection (taken from 5 collections between 2001-2014) is another portrait of the poet. ‘Self-Portrait with a Swarm of Bees’ has the narrator wearing an ever-accumulating beard of swarming bees. The risks and dangers are part of the point but the poem focuses on the accumulating “weight and spread”, suggesting the swarm extends and adds to the narrator in some intrinsic way. Indeed, he becomes “the stone-still centre of song”. In the next quatrain, the passive singer is converted into an “ancient knight” arming for battle, yet he does not either advance or retreat:

just stands there gleaming, with barely a hint

of wind behind the lustre, lingering breath,

and only vanishing becomes distinct.

This teasing last line (“und wirklich sichtbar erst mit dem verschwinden”) is best understood again through Rilke. Auden affectionately ribbed Rilke as a poet whom “die Dinge bless, / The Santa Claus of loneliness” but it is in the challenge to self confronted through honest encounters with the world of things that we re-make and re-define our sense of self. Here is the idea expressed in Rilke’s Sonnet to Orpheus, 2, 13:

To the used up – to all Nature’s musty and mute,

its brimming storehouse, its inexpressible sum –

joyously add yourself and the account’s done.

(All translations from Rilke here taken from my translations of ‘Duino Elegies’ and ‘Sonnets to Orpheus’)

Hear Galbraith read ‘December 1914’ below: