The collected poems of Bertolt Brecht

Bertolt Brecht, 1898-1956

Book - 2019

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Subjects
Genres
Poetry
Published
New York : Liveright Publishing Corporation, a division of W. W. Norton & Company [2019]
Language
English
German
Main Author
Bertolt Brecht, 1898-1956 (author)
Other Authors
Tom Kuhn (translator), David Constantine, 1944- (contributor), Charlotte Ryland
Edition
First edition
Physical Description
xx, 1286 pages ; 25 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references and index of titles and first lines.
ISBN
9780871407672
  • Introduction
  • Part I. Early Poems: The Domestic Breviary and Other Poems, 1913-1924
  • Uncollected Poems 1913-1918
  • Songs for the Guitar by Bert Brecht and His Friends
  • Psalms
  • Uncollected Poems 1919-1924
  • Bertolt Brecht's Domestic Breviary
  • Part II. The Berlin Years: 1925-1933
  • Uncollected Poems 1925-1926
  • Augsburg Sonnets
  • The Reader for City Dwellers
  • Uncollected Poems 1927-1930
  • Songs and Verses from Kuhle Wampe and The Mother
  • Uncollected Poems 1931-1933
  • Part III. Poems Of Exile: Svendborg Poems and Other Poems, 1933-1938
  • Uncollected Poems 1933-1934
  • Songs from Round Heads and Pointed Heads
  • Uncollected Poems 1934-1936
  • Poems for Margarete Steffin, 1932-1937
  • Poems from the German War Primer Complex
  • Uncollected Poems 1936-1937
  • Some Poems for Ruth Berlau
  • Poems on Señora Carrar
  • Uncollected Poems 1937-1938
  • Svendborg Poems
  • Part IV. The War Years: Poems in Europe and America, 1938-1945
  • Studies
  • Uncollected Poems 1939-1940
  • Steffin Collection
  • Songs for Life of Galileo, Mother Courage, The Good Person of Szechwan, and Other Plays
  • Poems for Margarete Steffin, 1938-1941
  • Children's Crusade 1939
  • Uncollected Poems 1941-1942
  • Chinese Poems
  • Hollywood Elegies
  • Uncollected Poems 1943-1945
  • Part V. After The War: Buckow Elegies and Other Late Poems, 1945-1956
  • Uncollected Late Poems
  • Buckow Elegies
  • Uncollected Poems 1953-1956
  • Notes
  • Index of English Titles and First Lines
  • Index of German Titles and First Lines
Review by New York Times Review

BERTOLT BRECHT SPENT the summer of 1953 in his holiday home by a lake halfway between Berlin and the Polish border. In this "not unaristocratic" villa with its tea pavilion and private pontoon he worked on poems that would enter his final collection, the "Buckow Elegies." Stalin had died earlier that year. In June an uprising of about one million East Germans had been brutally suppressed by a regime Brecht had fought for, and continued to defend publicly. But the "Buckow Elegies" are needled by Brecht's bad conscience. "Would it not be simpler," he asks in "The solution," if instead of punishing the populace, the government "Dissolved the people and / Elected another one?" In "The Muses" he likens pro-Stalin intellectuals to codependent prostitutes adoring their abuser. But where did that leave him? The Roman poet Horace had said that poetry outlives anything cast in bronze. Would his, Brecht wondered in one of his last contributions to the genre? Not even the Deluge Lasted forever. Came a day when its Black waters subsided. True, though, not many Lived to outlast it. For many, the aspects of Brecht (18981956) that have outlasted the black waters of time are his plays and his politics. With "The Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht," the translators Tom Kuhn and David Constantine invite English-speaking readers to discover Brecht the poet. The more than 1,000 entries - some published for the first time in English - are only about half of Brecht's lyric output. But they give a sense of the fertility of his pristine, unsentimental language and the breadth of subject and form. A collection this size is often said to contain something for everybody. In this one, every reader is sure to find something to take offense at. There's Brecht's politics for starters, the unblinking zeal with which he defended Communist violence and Communist rule. There are pornographic exercises inspired by a procession of women, many of whose brains he exploited along with their bodies. And yet. "Brecht is a great poet," the translators write in their introduction, "one of the three or four best in the whole of German literature." This volume holds enough evidence to support that claim, from the Rabelaisian brilliance of the "Domestic Breviary" (1927) and the bitter clarity of the poems written in exile from the Third Reich to the meditative grace of late poems that is found in between - or sometimes within - odes to machines and Marxist dialectic. Translating Brecht is no easy task, especially in the early rhyming poems that borrow their form from Dante and Shakespeare. The "Domestic Breviary" is full of ballads that are meant to be read out loud, preferably while smoking, to lute or guitar. The lurid palette of Expressionism colors these works and their obsession with death and decay. A newspaper item inspired "Apfelböck or the lily of the field," about a young man who kills his parents, shoves them into a cupboard and continues to live in the house until the stench forces him to sleep on the balcony. In "The ship," told in the first person, an empty vessel disintegrates and fills with parasitic creatures as it glides "Mute and fat towards the ghastly heavens." In the "Ballad of Mazeppa" a condemned man is tied to the back of his horse with ropes that cut into his flesh with every movement of the fleeing animal. Over the course of 11 stanzas the reader becomes complicit in the sadistic ride, propelled by the lilting meter and roped in, as it were, by the simple rhyme scheme. The translation retains much of that power as well as the archaic boldness of the language. Three days till the ropes that bound him revolted The heavens were green and the grass was dun! Oh the crows and the vultures above his head Were brawling already over this live carrion. The title of the "Domestic Breviary" is borrowed from Lutheran and Catholic manuals, with Brecht's didactic energy turned toward exposing a world in which human suffering is man-made and unredeemed. "The Infanticide Marie Farrar" tells the true story of a teenage domestic who had tried to abort her pregnancy "with two injections, allegedly painful," but was forced to carry to term. It works all the way through her contractions. After Marie has given birth in an outhouse she is "quite at a loss by then and barely / Able to hold him, being half stiff with cold / Because the snow blows in the servants' privy." When the child cries, she beats it to death. In the original German the interlocking rhymes have the simple mnemonic power of devotional verses for the layman; each stanza ends with a rhyming couplet exhorting the reader to compassion. In this translation the rhymes are often approximate and the refrain wan: "I beg of you, contain your wrath for all / God's creatures need the help of all." The translators' work becomes easier after this initial period in Brecht's life. By the time he writes from exile - by his own estimate, he changed country more often than shoes during the Nazi years - he begins to develop a style devoid, as the Bauhaus aesthetic would have it, of the crime of ornament. "The thought bobbed on the waves" of rhyme and meter, Brecht later said of his early output. Now the thought was the form. Meanwhile the bard became a teacher and guide offering encouragement, advice and warning to fellow political travelers. Poems like "A Lesson in Sabotage" now seem dated. But the prescience of "Questions of a worker who reads," from 1935, is borne out on every college campus: "Who built the seven gates of Thebes? / In books you will read the names of kings. / Was it the kings who dragged the stones into place?" it begins, deflating the historiography of powerful men. Even in Atlantis, he writes, "That night when the ocean engulfed it, the drowning / Roared out for their slaves." For all its dry precision Brecht's language in works like this retains poetic dignity. The poet speaks in unadorned verses like an orator with a soapbox under his feet. These lines demand to be recited slowly, with clear enunciation as in an echoing space. That sense of resonance also gives lingering power to the miniatures that Brecht penned throughout his career. Many of these speak of simple pleasures - a garden, birdsong, the splash of cold water on a work-grimed face - and the best have an enigmatic stillness that is far removed from the ideological din of the political poems. Take, for instance, "Smoke," from after Brecht had returned to what was then the German Democratic Republic: The little house among trees by the lake From the chimney smoke is rising If it weren't How sad would be House, trees and lake. And in "Changing the wheel," part of those late "Buckow Elegies," Brecht seems to question to what extent his lifelong drive for social change is an expression of a much deeper and personal restlessness: I am sitting by the side of the road. The driver is changing the wheel. I don't like where I was. I don't like where I am going to. Why do I watch the changing of the wheel With impatience? In this collection, everybody is certain to find something to take offense at. CORINNA DA FONSECA-WOLLHEIM IS a contributing classical music criticfor The Times.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [December 9, 2018]
Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* The biggest surprise of this book may be its size, including 1,050 pages of poems. More than half weren't collected in German during Brecht's lifetime; in English, only posthumous selections have appeared. Translators Kuhn and Constantine explain that Brecht (1898-1956), best known for his plays, wrote poetry virtually daily from age 15 to his death. He preferred song forms; many of his poems are in ballad meters, and many more are in the metrically varied forms of operetta and Tin Pan Alley, complete with fitting rhyme schemes. The rest comprise sonnets and free, unrhymed forms, most of which are definitely rhythmic, waiting for the reader's imagination to set them to whatever tune feels right. A great number were written with theatrical performance in mind and a point to make, so they had to be immediately accessible to listeners, and therefore to readers. This immense book of poems couldn't be less obscure or difficult not that they lack subtleties, especially of voice. Brecht was for the have-nots against the haves, the workers against the bosses, socialism against capitalism. The poetry of protest against war, fascism, prostitution, poverty, cruelty, and callousness has no finer practitioner, whose work these formally faithful translations make almost as powerful in English as in German.--Ray Olson Copyright 2018 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.