I Taste Bitterness

Johannes Bobrowski

Literature & Fiction

Imprint unknown

Relates the story of life in a small West Prussian village and of the narrator's grandfather who plots and schemes to ruin the owner of the mill downstream

Levin's Mill (New Directions Classic)

Contemporary

New Directions

In the four years between the appearance of his first collection of poems in 1961 and his death at the age of forty-eight, Johannes Bobrowski gained lasting international recognition as the outstanding East German poet of his time. He received major literary awards for his poetry and fiction in Austria, Switzerland, East and West Germany. The first selection of his poems in English translation - `Shadow Land', 1966 - was greeted with enthusiasm by critics and readers alike, and was rapidly reprinted. A second selection, `From the Rivers', appeared in 1975. 
`Shadow Lands' demonstrates the range of Bobrowski's poetic achievement by bringing together all the poems which Ruth and Matthew Mead have been able to translate. It revises and consolidates their earlier selections, adding some fifty new poems. Michael Hamburger discusses the background and special qualities of Bobrowski's work in his introductory essay.

Shadow Lands: Selected Poems

Poetry

Anvil Press Poetry

Anvil Pr Poetry Ltd

Since the 1960s the English poet Matthew Mead and his German wife Ruth have translated selections from poets to whom they were drawn. This is their own choice from the many memorable poems which they have translated. The collection celebrates a fascinating era of German poetry, to which it forms a uniquely personal introduction. Matthew Mead once wrote: Of the Germans, Gottfried Benn has said many things to their end, but the important poem by a contemporary is, for me, Sabais’s Generation.’ This poem confronts Germany’s post-war experience in a way no other German writer has matched. Together with the mysterious, almost spell-like poetry of Johannes Bobrowski, it is one of the highlights of this varied collection, which ranges from the lyrical to the satirical, the witty and sardonic to the surrealist, and the elegiac in Nelly Sachs, a Nobel Prizewinner. Ruth and Matthew Mead’s selections from Sabais, The People and the Stones (1983) and Bobrowski, Shadow Lands (1984) are also published by Anvil, as is Matthew Mead’s selected poems The Autumn-Born in Autumn (2008). Born in England in 1924, Matthew Mead lived in Germany from 1962 until his death in 2009.

Word for Word: Selected Translations from German Poets

H.C. Artmann

Wolfgang Bächler

Horst Bienek

Elisabeth Borchers

Günter Bruno Fuchs

Christian Geissler

Max Hölzer

Urs Oberlin

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Johannes Bobrowski. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Johannes Bobrowski