Ashes for Breakfast: Selected Poems

by Durs Grünbein, Michael Hofmann (Translator)

Born in Dresden in 1962, Durs Grünbein is the most significant and successful poet to emerge from the former East Germany, a place where, he wrote, "the best refuge was a closed mouth." In unsettling, often funny, sometimes savage lines whose vivid images reflect his deep love for and connection with the visual arts, Grunbein is reinventing German poetry and taking on the most pressing moral concerns of his generation. Brilliantly edited and translated by the English poet Michael Hofmann, Ashes for Breakfast expertly introduces Germany's most highly acclaimed contemporary poet to American readers.

Genres: Poetry, German Literature, Germany

320 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

Durs Grünbein is a German poet, essayist and translator living in Berlin since 1985.

Grünbein is hailed as the most significant and successful poet to emerge from the former East Germany, and his work has been awarded many major German literary prizes, including the highest, the Georg-Büchner-Preis, which he won in 1995. That same year, he also won the Peter Huchel Prize for Poetry.

In 2005, he held the position of Max Kade Distinguished Visiting Professor at Dartmouth College.

In 2006, Grünbein was elected by the academy of fine arts at Düsseldorf to the first chair of poetry (poetics and artistic aesthetics) at any German university or academy. Grünbein is a regular contributor to Frau und Hund - Zeitschrift für kursives Denken, edited by the academy's rector, the painter Markus Lüpertz.

Grünbein has also published several essay collections and new translations of plays from antiquity, among them Aeschylus' The Persians, and Seneca's Thyestes. His work, which also includes contributions to catalogues and a libretto for opera, has been translated into many languages.

Reviews

[Caroline · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very rewarding volume of poems by a modern German poet, translated by the eminent Michael Hofmann. In the introduction Hofmann writes that after twenty-five years of writing English poems and translating German prose, he felt compelled to translate these poems, that he has a sort of kinship with Grunbein.

We share a derisive melancholia, an interest in amplitude (much more developed, in his case), a love of the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky, a fascination and a belief in the classics (again, much more developed in his case). At the same time, I am painfully aware of many things that divide us; medicine, neuroscience, animals, ancient history, contemporary art, responsible metaphysics are all avocations of Grunbein’s of which I am, as they say in German, unbeleckt. Innocent. There is a formidablemess, a dauntingness about Grunbein that I don’t have, perhaps can’t do, and find it difficult even to respond to.

The rest of Hofmann’s introduction is a masterful commentary on translation in general and on Grunbein’s poetry in particular. Hofmann tried, he says, to make sure the translations are not ‘half-baked’ or ‘undercooked’ but real poems in their own right. He also discusses Lowell’s ideas about translation, as set out in Imitations in relation to his work here.

The translations are en face the originals, so one can appreciate both. The first poems are from Grauzone Morgens published in 1988, or just before the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Included here is the ironic ‘All About You’ in which the author considers the political but ends ‘gandering’ on slowly to the next crossing because ‘today is all about you’. Others discuss the politics more seriously, along with the grungy surroundings of a failing state. But sometimes he writes at arm’s length in a way, giving the sense that everyone just wants to get to New York. And sometimes he writes about poetry itself

…Poems

someone said to me the other day

only attracted him if they
were full of surprises

written at those
odd times when

something still inchoate
a daydream a single

line begins somewhere and

undoes you.


And I love Hofmann’s work here:
the original:

…und Sehn-
sucht nach Television am
Abend und dem
Betrug einer Hand

uber den Körper gleitend
wie uber Metall.

becomes

…and the de-

sire for a little television
at night and the
deception of a hand

caressing your body
work.

The poems grow more complex and contain compound references in later volumes. There are many reflections on the aftermath of the Soviet years, and wry or repulsed comments on life in the West as he travels. He writes of ancient history (Germanicus), Darwin, Robinson Crusoe. He writes of disease and aging. The next to last section ends with the poem sequence ‘Europe After the Last Rains’, with the first poem opening:

Memory has no real estate … no city
where you come home and you know where you are.

He is a stranger in his own city.

And the last section, from his book Erklarte Nacht

and the poem ‘Arcadia for All’

Arcadia , celestial cemetery, a model for every city
Where death comes and goes, and life stutters on privatised astroturf.
Forget your idylls, your landscape of the blest, your bucolic reservations.
Whatever the shephards sang, or travelers dreamed--
This here’s the place for you. City , and Gorod, metropolis, or ville.
here you promenade your own soul, beneath stoical trees
A glass man, insomniac, reflected in so much excess.
The tempo’s set by glances, flashing eye-contacts, not eclogues
Of flirtatious Daphne, Milon and Lakon closer than a pair if brothers.
You can feel the buzz in your bones, your spine in the judder of the arcade…

[Eilidh Fyfe · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 ! life is going down the drain !

[George · Rating 3 out of 5]

A compelling collection that lacks flow at times - maybe its the translation or just me

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Michael Hofmann translates Durs, a very famous german poet, into some really strange English poetry. It's really weird at times.

[chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

Impregnated by the foul
breath of a soldier,
whose outing had
gone wrong, she stood
in the last carriage feeling
seasick and you had to wonder
frankly how she would
ever get out of there.
-- "Ole"

What is the whole surreal jokeshop
of terrors compared to the
infinitely chance little
tricks of a poem.
-- "Monological Poem #1"

To digress... where to? Even that, remember,
("Goof off") was just the usual formula
For flight, for carrying on elsewhere
Thoughtlessly or otherwise.
Comes to pretty much the same thing, no?
Assembling a new excitement
Feature by feature, a face
In among the clockfaces
In the window, the glasses for love,
For higher definition TV, drive-through
Funerals and furniture for faster living,
Angels manning the checkouts, deaf
To their sweet, necrophile, hello.,
-- "Variations on No Theme"

Oh, the sorrow to be born as not an animal,
The forlornness, accepted with expressionless features.
-- "To a Chimpanzee in the London Zoo"

The dream leaks out of which orifice?
-- "In the Provinces IV (Campagna)"

Lunar shadows lengthened to cover the rank expanse
Of the gardens. Hogs were fattened
On sarcophagi. The water supply was laced with blood
From the public latrines.
-- "Club of Rome"

To be truly happy here, you need a dentist. "Such a dazzling smile..."
Because happiness is the first duty of every citizen.
Whoever is happy, is unstoppable. Nothing so cheers the loser
As the successful sparklers.
Suicide is accounted a crime. Anyone to whom an interest
In self-murder is imputed (say, by kindly neighbors)
Has only moments before a lawman shoots him dead.
You can vote for anything, it seems, but not for death.
You have yourself insured against aging, and death is not seen
As irrevocable, but more an episode to be waited out
In deep freeze till your comeback. Cult leader and media mogul
Sleep off their deaths in the safe-deposit box.
Just a pity that the earth is tainted
By the burial of all the poor devils. What's left of their bodies
Isn't bonemeal, but the everlasting e-numbers
From the frozen TV dinners in the supermarkets.
-- "Greetings from Oblivion City"

[Jan LeSuer · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Inner unrest as protection against clocks."


What is childhood anyway, after years
Of running away, an extorted wish
Quivering on your lips, a nursery chant
Like home and belonging.
Spat over your shoulder the deadly look
Back was a poor exchange
For the shinking of both day and night.
The colors washed out, the pink idyll
Of lambskin. That was it: the whiff
Of regurgitated milk, the conspiracy
Among the growns to feed and stifle you,
Great clouds of hysteria
Where you learned to walk, and to fight back.

[Harper Curtis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant poems, brilliant translations.
Grünbein is an intellectual and witty poet whose work has a very contemporary feel. The translations by Michael Hofmann stand as strong poems in their own right and the Translator's Preface shows clear insight into the task of the translator.

Here's the beginning of one section of "Ashes for Breakfast: Thirteen Fantasies" (p. 217):

And why, you ask yourself (why being the most childish of questions),
Why am I involved in this rat race on bartered ground,
Where these weaklings are kicking around a dead pigeon.

[Brigette · Rating 4 out of 5]

The poetry is good, but didn't knock my socks off. However, it's definitely worth reading this leading, contemporary German poet who grew up in the former East Germany.

[LA · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is among my most treasured. From Dresden, Durs Grunbein's genius is dark but beautiful -a reflection of his surroundings.

[Joni · Rating 4 out of 5]

doggy style