The Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht

by Bertolt Brecht, Tom Kuhn (Translator), David Constantine (Translator)

Overview

Times Literary Supplement • Books of the Year ("The most generous available English collection of Brecht’s poetry.")

A landmark literary event, The Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht is the most extensive English translation of Brecht’s poetry to date.

Widely celebrated as the greatest German playwright of the twentieth century, Bertolt Brecht was also, as George Steiner observed, “that very rare phenomenon, a great poet, for whom poetry is an almost everyday visitation and drawing of breath.” Hugely prolific, Brecht also wrote more than two thousand poems—though fewer than half were published in his lifetime, and early translations were heavily censored. Now, award-winning translators David Constantine and Tom Kuhn have heroically translated more than 1,200 poems in the most comprehensive English collection of Brecht’s poetry to date. Written between 1913 and 1956, these poems celebrate Brecht’s unquenchable “love of life, the desire for better and more of it,” and reflect the technical virtuosity of an artist driven by bitter and violent politics, as well as by the untrammeled forces of love and erotic desire. A monumental achievement and a reclamation, The Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht is a must-have for any lover of twentieth-century poetry.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780871407689
Publisher:	Liveright Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	12/04/2018
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	1312
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) was a German poet, playwright, and theater director. In those capacities, and also as a polemical essayist, he contributed powerfully to the chief literary and political debates of his day, and lastingly influenced theatrical theory and practice. He left more than 2,000 poems, assuring him a place among the very best lyric poets of Germany.
David Constantine is a freelance writer and translator. His most recent volume of poetry is Elder (2014); his fourth collection of short stories, Tea at the Midland, won the Frank O’ Connor International Short Story Award in 2013.
Tom Kuhn teaches at the University of Oxford, where he is a Fellow of St Hugh’s College. He works on twentieth-century drama and German exile literature and has been, since 1996, editor of the main English-language Brecht edition.

Table of Contents

Introduction ix

Part I Early Poems: The Domestic Breviary and Other Poems, 1913-1924

Uncollected Poems 1913-1918 4

Songs for the Guitar by Bert Brecht and His Friends 47

Psalms 53

Uncollected Poems 1919-1924 73

Bertolt Brecht's Domestic Breviary 161

Part II The Berlin Years: 1925-1933

Uncollected Poems 1925-1926 256

Augsburg Sonnets 294

The Reader for City Dwellers 309

Uncollected Poems 1927-1930 344

Songs and Verses from Kuhle Wampe and The Mother 405

Uncollected Poems 1931-1933 417

Part III Poems Of Exile: Svendborg Poems and Other Poems, 1933-1938

Uncollected Poems 1933-1934 462

Songs from Round Heads and Pointed Heads 501

Uncollected Poems 1934-1936 509

Poems for Margarete Steffin, 1932-1937 573

Poems from the German War Primer Complex 590

Uncollected Poems 1936-1937 594

Some Poems for Ruth Berlau 607

Poems on Señora Carrar 614

Uncollected Poems 1937-1938 619

Svendborg Poems 649

Part IV The War Years: Poems in Europe and America, 1938-1945

Studies 741

Uncollected Poems 1939-1940 750

Steffin Collection 787

Songs for Life of Galileo, Mother Courage, The Good Person of Szechwan, and Other Plays 807

Poems for Margarete Steffin, 1938-1941 818

Children's Crusade 1939 824

Uncollected Poems 1941-1942 831

Chinese Poems 865

Hollywood Elegies 874

Uncollected Poems 1943-1945 877

Part V After The War: Buckow Elegies and Other Late Poems, 1945-1956

Uncollected Late Poems 914

Buckow Elegies 1011

Uncollected Poems 1953-1956 1024

Notes 1073

Index of English Titles and First Lines 1239

Index of German Titles and First Lines 1265

Editorial Reviews

For many, the aspects of Brecht 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…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.

The New York Times Book Review - Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim

"A breath of fresh air… Within the bold statements, the direct speech and the willful naivety there's a lyrical dynamism and verbal agility that allows its author to dance and skip his way through the potential pitfalls of political rhetoric."

Simon Armitage

"This immense collection of Brecht’s poems amounts to a running record of his many lives as a theorist, dramatist, polemicist, and now poet… The assembled throng gives the reader immediate access to the interior of Brecht’s restless, oceanic mind."

Billy Collins

"Brecht was a great a poet as he was a playwright: pungent and moving, both sharply aphoristic and generously expansive, morally committed, with a deep, complicating sense of his own mixed motives, and with unexpected moments of emotional intensity."

Edward Mendelson

"With The Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht, the translators Tom Kuhn and David Constantine invite English-speaking readers to discover Brecht the poet.... [These poems] give a sense of the fertility of his pristine, unsentimental language and the breadth of subject and form.... ‘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."

Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim

"Richly political, finally honed like a monster being restrained but gentle enough to tell the children a story."

Eileen Myles

"We need Brecht more than ever, no less for his capacity to so movingly “take pleasure also / in the song of every blackbird after me” than for the power of his political poems and songs to take on demagogues and dickheads."

Paul Muldoon

"This immense books of poems couldn't be less obscure or difficult—not that they lack subtleties, especially of voice.... 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

"A remarkable feat in getting the erotic and political fervor and humor of Bertolt Brecht into a strong answering voice."

Harold Bloom

"Surely no other writer was ever so patient, funny and astute about human frailty.... These versions hold up very well to close study, especially in matters of rhyming, usually the downfall of translators.... Kuhn and Constantine speak eloquently of the ways in which Brecht’s poem ‘are never just the servant of his politics…they exceed his engagement in the particular and necessary cause."

Michael Wood

"Universality makes [Brecht's] poetry as essential a voice of his time as Yeats, Maya Angelou, or Muriel Rukeyser.... translators Kuhn and Constantine offer English speakers an indispensable resource into the intellect and soul of one of the 20th century’s greatest writers.... The succinct and superb introductions by the editors take us on the journey of Brecht’s life.... This collection is a necessary starting place for what will hopefully be a long history of translations of Brecht’s poems into English.... The arrival of Brecht’s poems at this moment in American history could hardly be better timed — although by better I most certainly mean worse, since it offers no relief to say that the most political of Brecht’s poems could have been written this morning."

Yuval Sharon