Impromptus: Selected Poems and Some Prose
(By Gottfried Benn)
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| Author | Gottfried Benn |
The first poem in Gottfried Benn’s first book, Morgue (1912)—written in an hour, published in a week, and notorious ever after—with its scandalous closing image of an aster sewn into a corpse by a playful medical student, set him on his celebrated path. And indeed, mortality, flowers, and powerful aesthetic collisions typify much of Benn’s subsequent work.
Over decades, as he suffered the vicissitudes of an often unkind fate—the death of his mother from cancer; the death of his first wife, Edith; his brief attempt to ingratiate himself with the Nazis, followed by their persecution of him; the suicide of his second wife, Herta—the harsh voice of the poems relented and mellowed. The later Benn—from which Impromptus is chiefly drawn, many of the poems translated into English for the first time—is deeply affecting: the routines and sorrows and meditations of an intelligent, pessimistic, and experienced man. Written in the low unupholstered monologue of the poet talking to himself, these poems are slender ribbons of speech on the naked edge of song and silence.
With this collection of poems and essays, curated and translated by Michael Hofmann—whose Benn translations won the John Frederick Nims Memorial Prize for best poetry in translation published in Poetry magazine in 2007—Benn, at long last, promises to attain the presence and importance that he so richly deserves.”
