{"id":5007,"date":"2015-08-14T14:21:39","date_gmt":"2015-08-14T13:21:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=5007"},"modified":"2016-01-23T14:46:33","modified_gmt":"2016-01-23T13:46:33","slug":"new-collections-from-enzensberger-and-jan-wagner-reviewed-by-ian-pole","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=5007","title":{"rendered":"New collections from Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Jan Wagner, reviewed by Ian Pople"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jan Wagner Self-Portrait with a Swarm of Bees<\/em> (Arc) \u00a310.99
\nHans Magnus Enzensberger New Selected Poems<\/em> (Bloodaxe) \u00a315.00<\/p>\n

Two orders of magnitude, you might say:\u00a0 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.\u00a0 And Jan Wagner , born in Hamburg in 1971, who has won more prizes in Germany than you can shake a stick at,\u00a0 though not the same ones as HME, apparently. Both these poets have translated the poetry of other languages into German;\u00a0 HME most famously in the anthology Museum der modernen Poesie (Museum of Modern Poetry) <\/i>in which he introduced German readers to a range of modernist writing from William Carlos Williams to Fernando Pessoa.\u00a0 Wagner has translated a range of contemporary British and American poets, including Charles Simic and Simon Armitage.<\/p>\n

Often Wagner\u2019s world is actually smaller.\u00a0 There are wonderful poems in this book which describe what Wagner has seen: \u2018frogs\u2019, \u2018chameleon\u2019, \u2018earthworms\u2019, \u2018jellyfish\u2019.\u00a0 And a group of poems about food, \u2018shepherd\u2019s pie\u2019, \u2018cheese and onion pasties\u2019, \u2018quince jelly\u2019.\u00a0 It\u2019s 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.\u00a0 In addition, Wagner uses a range of poetic forms from sonnets to sestinas and Sapphics, which his translator, Ian Galbraith, reproduces with miraculous skill.\u00a0 In his introduction, Galbraith comments, \u2018My translations were encounters with the inner workings of the element \u2013 or dimension- of poetry. It became clear that I was dealing with poetic machines.\u2019\u00a0 Thus, this smaller world is always intricately constructed, intricately machined.<\/p>\n

Construction and machining might smack of a somewhat cerebral attitude to subject matter, but it\u2019s clear that Wagner\u2019s process is one distillation, to great effect.\u00a0 In \u2018Christmas in Huntsville Texas\u2019, the lights power fails, what the poet then notices is \u2018in 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.\u2019<\/p>\n

Enzensberger\u2019s New Selected Poems <\/i>selects from volumes published between 1960 and 2003.\u00a0 And Enzensberger is the kind of poet whose ambitions run from the lyric to, almost, the agitprop;\u00a0 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;\u00a0 so, the most strident of the poems collected here do tend to kick against the pricks of the German condition.\u00a0 The best of these poems are the longer ones:\u00a0 the early sequence \u2018Summer Poem\u2019, and other, longer poems such as \u2018Apocalypse. Umbrian Master, about 1490\u2019 and \u2018Last Supper, Venetian. Sixteenth Century\u2019 from the magnificent collection The Sinking of the Titanic<\/i>.\u00a0 Or the slightly later, \u2018The Frogs of Bikini\u2019.\u00a0 In these poems, HME creates narratives of spectacular empathy with the personas they project, and filled with resonant, imaginative detail.\u00a0 In the first of those poems, \u2018Apocalypse, Umbrian Master, about 1490\u2019, we read, \u2018\u2026It is winter now.\/ His finger joints start cracking like the brushwood\/ in the fireplace.\u2019 In \u2018The Frogs of Bikini\u2019, \u2018\u2026in August, and in remote places,\/ full of bulrushes, duckweed, etcetera,\/ he\u2019d listen, after all stations had closed down,\/ to his heart\u2019s content, in the gleam of a satellite,\/ to the frogs.\u2019\u00a0 It\u2019s clear that HME has an almost novelistic skill at getting under the skin of his creations.<\/p>\n

It is, perhaps, Enzensberger\u2019s abundant empathy with the lives of others that has thrown him into the political writing he has engaged in often over his long career.\u00a0 In the much later \u2018Ode to Stupidity\u2019, that characteristic is personified as \u2018you\u2019, \u2018how 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\u2019s bad breath\/ and as polysyllabic delirium in the philosophy seminar.\u2019 HME might be including himself in that third line, but there\u2019s a broad-brush, slightly sneering quality here which, elsewhere, his best writing avoids absolutely.<\/p>\n

Enzensberger has also been well-served by his translators over the years;\u00a0 a roll-call of the finest poet-translators \u00a0of our time, Michael Hamburger, David Constantine, Esther Kinsky, and not least Enzensberger himself, who is a great translator of his own writing.\u00a0 This volume shows just why HME is such\u00a0 a major figure:\u00a0 a protean genius, with a huge range of empathies.
\n 
\nIan Pople<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jan Wagner Self-Portrait with a Swarm of Bees (Arc) \u00a310.99 Hans Magnus Enzensberger New Selected Poems (Bloodaxe) \u00a315.00 Two orders of magnitude, you might say:\u00a0 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[13,283],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\nNew collections from Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Jan Wagner, reviewed by Ian Pople - The Manchester Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=5007\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"New collections from Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Jan Wagner, reviewed by Ian Pople - 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