RRP: £17.95
BINDING: Hardback
ISBN: 9781870352871
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RRP: £12.95
BINDING: Paperback
ISBN: 978187035297
PUBLISHED: 1996
PAGES: 240
A Libris book
Dual text
Georg Heym
Poems
Translated from the German by Antony Hasler
Dual text
The poet and short story writer Georg Heym, who died by drowning aged twenty-four, was one of the major figures of early German modernism, belonging to the brilliant Expressionist generation that included the painters Emil Nolde, Franz Marc and Wassili Kandinsky and the young poets who were to die in the First World War like Georg Trakl, Alfred Lichtenstein and Ernst Stadler.
Heym’s often explosive and shocking images are contained in verse of strict classical form and metre, giving it a thrilling tension and force. One of his most famous poems, ‘War’, written before 1914, contains the line ‘A mighty city sank in yellow smoke’ – a premonition of the Second World War and beyond.
Antony Hasler’s is the fullest selection of Heym’s verse to appear in English.
‘Hasler has achieved, not complete rhymes, but satisfying assonances, and has built his translations round them, preserving Heym’s meaning with astonishing fidelity. His renderings, printed opposite the original texts, serve as perfect examples of the art of translation.’ – Michael Hofmann, Guardian
GEORG HEYM (1887–1912), the son of a Prussian lawyer in the government prosecution service, unwillingly studied law and became a civil servant. His short life was an unceasing revolt against the society into which he was born. He was taken up by a Berlin bohemian literary group in which he flourished until his death. In a review of the only volume of his poetry published in his lifetime (1911), a critic named him the outstanding young poet in Germany.