Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim Reviews New Edition of Brecht's Collected Poetry

At the New York Times, learn about the significance and the process behind a new collection of Bertolt Brecht's poems. "For many, the aspects of Brecht (1898-1956) that have outlasted the black waters of time are his plays and his politics," Fonseca-Wollheim explains. Picking up from there: 

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.

Read on at the New York Times.