Music While Drowning: German Expressionist Poems

by David Miller (Editor), Stephen Watts (Editor), Wassily Kandinsky

Although the Expressionists are renowned for their dynamic and emotionally challenging imagery, their literary masterpieces remain a well-kept secret. Here, for the first time, is an anthology of some of the very best poems from the Expressionist era, by radical artists and writers such as Wassily Kandinsky, Egon Schiele, Georg Trakl, and Else Lasker-Schüler.

Genres: Poetry, Art

120 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 2003

About the author

Librarian Note: There are more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Reviews

[Charles · Rating 5 out of 5]

The vast range of the German expressionist poetry will be a surprise to some. Work by Gottfried Benn, George Heym, Else Lasker-Schuler, George Trakl, Wasily Kandinsky, Egon Schiele, and many more. And don't miss the magnificent Die Sonne / The Sun, by Hugo Ball. I'm starting to think that his early "expressionist" poems may be more valuable than the Dada poems for which he is possibly more famous. The introduction is terrific. David Miller, a marvelous poet himself, has done us a great service by envisioning and carrying this book through.

[John Anthony · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautifully produced book. The cover shows a reproduction of a detail from Max Beckmann’s painting Lido (1924). The painting is almost prophetic. The female standing sports a 1920s hat which could so easily be made of tin and the shadow around her nose and mouth more than hint of a moustache.

David Constantine’s introduction, German Expressionist Poetry – Premises and Context is useful and interesting. The poets included are: Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), Else Lasker-Schueller (1869-1945), August Stramm (1874-1915), Ernst Stadler (1883-1914), Max Beckmann (1884-1950), Hugo Ball (1886-1927), Gottfried Benn (1886-1956), Oskar Kokoschka (1886-1980), Georg Trakl (1887-1914), Jakob van Hoddis (1887-1942), Georg Heym (1887-1912), Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948), Hans Arp (1887-1966), Egon Schiele (1890-1918), Ivan Goll (1891-1950), Anton Schnack (1892-1970).

Afterword by David Miller and Stephen Watts.
Illustrations by Franz Marc 1913, Wassily Kandinsky 1913, Erich Heckel 1914, 1917, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff 1914, 1923, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner 1924, 1913, Hans Arp 1916, Max Beckmann 1923, Emil Nolde 1912, Kathe Kollwitz 1920.

Poems are generally from 1910-1930 with a little either side.

I knew nothing of German Expressionist Poets. Now I want to know much, much more. I found the majority of the ones included here stunning in their impact, so memorable and so worth quoting:

Else Lasker-Schueller from Hagar and Ishmael:

“The sun, implacable, scorched the land,
The desert’s yellow hide where Hagar fell
And with white negro teeth bit the sand”. (Trans. Rosemarie Winthrop)

Again from To Giselheer the King:

“Want to be buried
In the clouds,
Wherever the sun grows”. (Trans. Esther Kinsky)

And from The Blue Piano:

“It’s been in the dark of the cellar door
since the world became so cruel”.

August Stramm from Encounter:

“Your walking smiles across to me
and
rends my heart”. (Trans. Patrick Bridgwater)

And from his War Instinct:

“Eyes flash
Your look cracks
Hot
Streams the bleeding over me
And
Drenches
Runnels of sea”. (Trans. Will Stone and Anthony Vivis)

Ernst Stadler from On Crossing the Rhine Bridge at Cologne by Night:

“Skeletons of grey housefronts are laid bare,”…(Trans. Michael Hamburger)

and from his Children in Front of a London Eating-House for the Poor:

“Their clothes smelled of scolding and starving, of light-shy rooms and of the cellar”.(Trans Jeremy Adler)

Hugo Ball from Cimio:

“On your shadow, Cimio, small devils tumble
Like clicking fish emptied from a bucket onto dry land”. (Trans. Erdmute Wenzel White)

Gottfried Benn from Underground Train:
“Dark: now there is life under her clothes:
All white animal, let loose and voiceless scent”. (Trans. R. J. Kavanagh)

Georg Trakl from Eastern Front:

“Thorny wilderness girdles the town about.
From bloody doorsteps the moon
Chases terrified women.
Wild wolves have poured through the gates”. (Trans. Christopher Middleton)

I must leave it at that and show real discipline as I’ve left my favourites for you to read for yourself…

4.5* rounded up because of the excitement they brought into my life.

[J.M. Hushour · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good, but uneven. The vagueness of "Expressionism" makes a compilation like this all the more confusing.Some of the poets featured are interesting; some of them I had never even heard of, and the texts are accompanied by some nice plates of Expressionist art. Good selections from Ernst Stadler, August Stramm, Georg Trakl, and Egon Schiele. Weirdly, the boring ones are the ones selected by Schwitters and Kandinsky.

[Mark Bellerophon · Rating 4 out of 5]

A small but pretty decent collection of German Expressionist poems. It is not a dual-language book so you have to trust the translations, but most of the translators are pretty recognizable German translators. At first reading, the poems seem abnormal and jarring in structure and theme, but German Expressionist poems lack rigid forms, like for example Romanticism or Modernity--hence expression-ist, and thus can not help but seem this way. (Expressionist poems actually lend themselves to an experience not unlike reading a painting.) The also small introduction and afterword help explain and introduce this period of poetry associated with the turn the twentieth-century. As an added bonus, this book also contains German Expressionist paintings; some of which were also created by the poets themselves.

[Oliver Sheppard · Rating 5 out of 5]

A much needed anthology of German expressionist verse in English translation. It's hard to believe that, in fact, Music While Drowning may be the ONLY anthology of exclusively German Expressionist poetry translated into English that exists! A small crime. Heck, maybe a large crime! (Mel Gordon's "Expressionist Texts" could sort of count as another, but that collection is a mix of dramatic scripts and prose and is not solely devoted to poetry; in fact, poetry is only a small part of that book.)

Music While Drowning is a highly recommended overview of this important literary movement that is all too often overlooked even though it produced some of the greatest poets of the 20th century, like Gottfried Benn and Georg Trakl. Good on the Tate for assembling this essential volume.

[R. Steven · Rating 3 out of 5]

Abstract, sometimes nonsensical, never melodic, always beautiful. Some pieces reminded me more of Dadaism than Expressionism, but oh well, still a good read.

[Greg Bem · Rating 5 out of 5]

My head responded with images picked from history's rotting eye sockets.

[Courtney · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5 ⭐

[Joseph Hirsch · Rating 4 out of 5]

Expressionism at its most fundamental level is about externalizing internal states, or making the subjective concrete. When someone with a tortured soul walks on the moors, the trees appear twisted and stunted. When they feel claustrophobic and paranoid strolling through the streets, the buildings seem to be looming especially close, and the windows seem to be peering eyes.
We know much about expressionism in film and in painting, and even in music, but less is known about expressionistic poetry, at least Stateside.
Music While Drowning is no exhaustive corrective, but it is a solid survey of the practitioners of the form, both the more prominent ones and the more obscure. The selection is buttressed by a thoughtful, concise introduction that deals with definitions, and an afterword that explains how poems were chosen, and translated.
The unique choice of translation is key to the singularity of this short book. So much relies on the decisions made by the translator. Keep the rhyme scheme (even if it appears tortured in translation) or jettison it? The alteration of a single word can change the entire nature of the poem, especially if that last word is in the poem’s final stanza, where the punch is usually delivered.
To give only one example, there is a poem here by Georg Trakl with a line that I have seen (correctly) translated as “the last gold of expired stars.” Here it’s translated (also correctly) as “the final gold of failed stars,” which definitely changes the tenor.
Best of all, the impression given (by me and by others) that German expressionism is unrelentingly grim is proven false here. Granted, the time in which these works were written was one of jarring transition—cultural, technological, and spiritual—but all was not sadness, blood, and war. There are poems here devoted to the idyllic and pastoral as well as the metropolitan and martial.
Else Lasker-Schüler, for instance, while classified as expressionist, demonstrates more interest with the Bible’s first books than Berlin, her Weltanschauung more ancient than modern.
And even those obsessed with the blood and darkness—literally in the case of Gottfried Benn, a pathologist—there are moments of strange, undeniable beauty. Maybe it’s the poetic equivalent of fellow German Hegel’s dialectic. From the thesis of life and beauty against the antithesis of death and darkness is born some majestic, immortal poetry, aesthetic synthesis existing outside of both life and death.
Beautiful stuff, regardless, and a good place to start in one’s investigation of the short-lived, ill-fated movement spearheaded mostly by poets also destined to have short lives.

[Serge · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought Else Lasker-Schuler was a real find and I did not know that Kandisky was also a poet. There is the bothersome tendency in some of the poets of indulging in gratuitous orientalism but I was genuinely intrigued to find the Expressionists wrestling so feverishly with God in the poems Jacob, Hagar and Ishmael and De Profundis.

[isabelle]

beautiful