Under the Edge of Night: Selected Poems of Johannes Bobrowski

"Johannes Bobrowski (1917-1965) is, together with Peter Huchel, one of the major GDR poets of the immediate post-war era of the 1950's and early 1960's. He published three major books of poetry over the course of his career in both West German and East German editions: Sarmatische Zeit / Sarmatian Time (1961), Schattenland Ströme / Shadowland Rivers (1962), and Wetterzeichen / Weathersigns (1966). Selections from these three volumes first appeared in the United Kingdom in translations by Ruth and Matthew Mead shortly after Bobrowski's death--in 1966, 1975, and in a revised edition, in 1984. These pioneering translations, fairly literal in their approach, are now more than fifty years old. As a translator of Hölderlin (among Bobrowski's major influences), I felt that fresh translation, more responsive to Bobrowski's cadences and classical meters, was definitely in order. Unlike the Mead translations, the planned NYRB/Poets edition will be bilingual, allowing English-speaking readers to consult the original German--as is the case with such other recent American editions of German poets of Bobrowski's importance, for example those of Paul Celan, Gottfried Benn, Nelly Sachs, or Durs Grünbein (or my own recent translation of Christian Lehnert, this year's Hölderlin-Preis winner). In addition, my bilingual edition of Bobrowski's selected poetry will build on the past thirty years or so of Bobrowski scholarship: it will include a selection from the Nachlass of unpublished poems included in the 2017 Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt edition of his Gesammelts Gedichte, as well as a much-expanded series of Notes on the Poems based in the Erläuterungen published in 1998 as vol. 5 of the DVA Gesammlte Werke edition. These notes will provide English readers with information about the precise historical events and geographical areas that Bobrowski lays out in his poetic map of Sarmatia. The English title I have chosen for this selection is Sarmatian Odes--a nod to Geoffrey Hill's Mercian