Night Begins with a Question

Many of the poets who spring to mind when we think of German poetry in English translation are Austrians - at least 'by formation' (as the late Dame Muriel Spark spoke of her Scottishness). Mostly born in the post-war Second Republic, during the politically riven First Republic subsumed in 1938 into Nazi Greater Germany, or into the richly traditional, multi-cultural Austro-Hungarian Empire, dismembered in 1918, Rainer Maria Rilke, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Georg Trakl, Paul Celan, Rose Auslander, Ingeborg Bachmann, Erich Fried, Ilse Aichinger, Ernst Jandl, Friederike Mayrocker, Raoul Schrott and Evelyn Schlag are poets whose names many readers of modern poetry will recognize. The present anthology collects work by several of these, placing them - in new translations by Scottish poets - in one of the contexts in which it makes sense to read them: in the company of some of their Austrian contemporaries, all of whom deserve to be far better known in English than they are. Every poem seeks its own, often volatile space, and categories like 'British', 'Scottish' or 'Austrian' are too narrow to frame the imaginative reach of a single authentic poem. But when Franz-Josef Murau, hero of Thomas Bernhard's novel "Die Ausloschung (Extinction)", expresses his love for Ingeborg Bachmann's great poem "Bohmen liegt am Meer" (which opens this collection), he calls it "so Austrian, but at the same time so permeated by the whole world, and by the world surrounding this world". Something similar might be said of each of poems in this compact and vital selection. This is the latest addition to the "European Originals" series which has previously showcased Scottish, Finnish and Hungarian poetry.