Jan Wagner Self-Portrait with a Swarm of Bees (Arc) £10.99
Hans Magnus Enzensberger New Selected Poems (Bloodaxe) £15.00

Two orders of magnitude, you might say:  Enzensberger, born in 1929, who has bestrode German poetry since the late 1950s, who was associated with Boll and Grass in Group 47, who grew up in the west, but were fiercely critical of it.  And Jan Wagner , born in Hamburg in 1971, who has won more prizes in Germany than you can shake a stick at,  though not the same ones as HME, apparently. Both these poets have translated the poetry of other languages into German;  HME most famously in the anthology Museum der modernen Poesie (Museum of Modern Poetry) in which he introduced German readers to a range of modernist writing from William Carlos Williams to Fernando Pessoa.  Wagner has translated a range of contemporary British and American poets, including Charles Simic and Simon Armitage.

Often Wagner’s world is actually smaller.  There are wonderful poems in this book which describe what Wagner has seen: ‘frogs’, ‘chameleon’, ‘earthworms’, ‘jellyfish’.  And a group of poems about food, ‘shepherd’s pie’, ‘cheese and onion pasties’, ‘quince jelly’.  It’s interesting that throughout this book, capital letters are eschewed, reducing the scale further; a practice which HME adopted in his early books, but which HME has, in turn, abandoned.  In addition, Wagner uses a range of poetic forms from sonnets to sestinas and Sapphics, which his translator, Ian Galbraith, reproduces with miraculous skill.  In his introduction, Galbraith comments, ‘My translations were encounters with the inner workings of the element – or dimension- of poetry. It became clear that I was dealing with poetic machines.’  Thus, this smaller world is always intricately constructed, intricately machined.

Construction and machining might smack of a somewhat cerebral attitude to subject matter, but it’s clear that Wagner’s process is one distillation, to great effect.  In ‘Christmas in Huntsville Texas’, the lights power fails, what the poet then notices is ‘in the moonlight the gnawed bones of the verandas./ we strained our ears for the gentle sway/ of the forest that cradled the town, / then radios filled with carols again.’

Enzensberger’s New Selected Poems selects from volumes published between 1960 and 2003.  And Enzensberger is the kind of poet whose ambitions run from the lyric to, almost, the agitprop;  so this compendious book at 400 pages contains a vast range of poems. HME, like Volker Braun reviewed earlier in these pages, has never been afraid of biting the hands that feed him;  so, the most strident of the poems collected here do tend to kick against the pricks of the German condition.  The best of these poems are the longer ones:  the early sequence ‘Summer Poem’, and other, longer poems such as ‘Apocalypse. Umbrian Master, about 1490’ and ‘Last Supper, Venetian. Sixteenth Century’ from the magnificent collection The Sinking of the Titanic.  Or the slightly later, ‘The Frogs of Bikini’.  In these poems, HME creates narratives of spectacular empathy with the personas they project, and filled with resonant, imaginative detail.  In the first of those poems, ‘Apocalypse, Umbrian Master, about 1490’, we read, ‘…It is winter now./ His finger joints start cracking like the brushwood/ in the fireplace.’ In ‘The Frogs of Bikini’, ‘…in August, and in remote places,/ full of bulrushes, duckweed, etcetera,/ he’d listen, after all stations had closed down,/ to his heart’s content, in the gleam of a satellite,/ to the frogs.’  It’s clear that HME has an almost novelistic skill at getting under the skin of his creations.

It is, perhaps, Enzensberger’s abundant empathy with the lives of others that has thrown him into the political writing he has engaged in often over his long career.  In the much later ‘Ode to Stupidity’, that characteristic is personified as ‘you’, ‘how you shine from the bloodshot eyes of the hooligan/ and trip along in upper-class arrogance clearing its throat,// and how you waft at us with a bedraggled Muse’s bad breath/ and as polysyllabic delirium in the philosophy seminar.’ HME might be including himself in that third line, but there’s a broad-brush, slightly sneering quality here which, elsewhere, his best writing avoids absolutely.

Enzensberger has also been well-served by his translators over the years;  a roll-call of the finest poet-translators  of our time, Michael Hamburger, David Constantine, Esther Kinsky, and not least Enzensberger himself, who is a great translator of his own writing.  This volume shows just why HME is such  a major figure:  a protean genius, with a huge range of empathies.
 
Ian Pople

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