‘O this is all there is – it’s not enough
It’s proof at least that I’m still on the loose.
I’m like the man who showed a brick around
To tell the world what his house once was. ‘

Brecht’s motto to his poetry selection for his friend Margarete Steffin, 1938.

Brecht wrote some 2,000 poems, now in five volumes of the thirty-volume Berlin and Frankfurt edition of his work (1989–2000). About 1,200 of these are in this new English edition, somewhat more than those published in Brecht’s own lifetime before 1956, by which time some 1,000 had been published.

This mammoth volume in English is competing with the much respected Poems, 1913–1956 (Methuen, 1976), translated by various hands and edited by the great Brecht editor, translator and doyen, the late John Willett. His volume contains some five, not four, hundred poems (as claimed in the book under review), and is distinguished by its outstandingly helpful annotation. On this important score, this new edition loses out. Because its editors and translators seem to have chosen to include as many poems as possible – sometimes regardless of quality – they left themselves no room for consistent annotation, so that many poems, including fragments, are left with no notes at all, and the reader is left wondering why many items are included. Even when notes exist, they are not as helpful as those to the Willett volume. For instance, the notes to the two poems about the Soviet writer Sergei Tretyakov here fail to say that he was the Russian translator of several of Brecht’s plays. And how helpful to most modern readers is the doubtless impeccably erudite gloss:

‘Possibly a fragment. The lexis is simple, but has classical (or Miltonian) resonances’ (p. 1149).

To compare the translations in these two volumes alone (there are two other volumes of Brecht poetry in translation, going back to the laudable H.R.Hays’s Selected poems of 1947) would be a book-length and otiose enterprise. But here is a brief comparison.

Willett:

Larder on a Finnish Estate, 1940

‘O shady store! The scent of dark green firs
Comes nightly swirling in to blend itself
With that of sweet milk from enormous churns
And smoky bacon on its cold stone shelf.

Beer, goats’ milk cheese, new bread and berries
Picked from grey undergrowth heavy with dew …
To those fighting the war on empty bellies
Far to the south: I wish it were for you.’

Constantine/Kuhn:

Finnish Larder, 1940

‘O shadowy vittles store! A pitch dark tang
Of fir rushes in as the night winds moan
And mingles with the scents of sweet milk from the can
And smoky bacon laid out on the stone.

Beer, goat’s milk cheese, fresh bread and berries
Picked from the grey bush in the early brume!
Oh would I could invite all those with empty bellies
Whom war across the sea doth now consume.’

Both editions include a note about the dedicatee of the poem. Willett’s is rather more detailed. Everyone will have their favourite versions when comparing such enjoyable poems. Often each version contains its own merits, which illuminate the German original in different ways. It is seldom possible to choose between the two versions. We must count ourselves lucky to have them both.

Brecht’s poetry, which now must have surpassed Rilke’s in popularity, is famously dry and emotionally withdrawn. But you have to beware: the emotion will often come through when he is at his most dry, as in the wonderful early ‘The infanticide Marie Farrar’:

‘Marie Farrar, born in the month of April
Rachitic, minor, distinguishing features: none
Not known, till now, to have done any evil
Asserts that she murdered a child in this fashion …’

This is one of Brecht’s greatest poems, containing nine ten-line verses. It builds up its power of compassion through the driest, detailed description of what was once an all-too common event. Brecht was just twenty-four when he wrote this lastingly beautiful poem.

Brecht’s early poetry is obsessed with bodily functions and his own lack of bodily hygiene, which he flaunted as if it were a sexual attraction. Peter Suhrkamp, Brecht’s friend and publisher, and Martin Esslin, Brecht’s commentator and critic, both thought that he purged his early anarchist self with his communist politics. This seems to make good sense if it is seen as an organic development and not simply a pragmatic choice.

In any case, as the editors of this collection make clear, Brecht’s ‘instinctual’, even sensual, anarchism never left him, as can be seen in some of the later poems – pornographic or politically cussèd – most famously in ‘The solution’, published only in the West after the riots in East Berlin and other cities in East Germany in 1953, strangely not given annotation here.

‘After the uprising of 17 June
On the orders of the Secretary of the Writers’ Union
Leaflets were distributed in the Stalinallee
Which read: that the people
Had forfeited the government’s trust
And only by working twice as hard
Could they win it back. But would it not
Be simpler if the government
Dissolved the people and
Elected another one?’

These poems against the grain lack the violence and violent imagery of some of Brecht’s early work, but remain unpredictable and idiosyncratic, and echo its libertarian tendency.

It is a luxury, and well worth the physical effort of taking up this huge volume, to be able to follow Brecht from his rural Bavarian beginning to his end in rural Buckow, east of Berlin, via Denmark, his often much-loved Finland and his not-so-loved California. Brecht was a writer and poet who had the profoundest sympathy for people and for things, often seemed to choose not to show it, but did so all the more.

In the dark times
Will there be singing?
There will be singing.
Of the dark times.

[1933]

The collected poems of Bertolt Brecht, translated and edited by Tom Kuhn and David Constantine, New York and London: Liveright/Norton, 2018

[ previously unpublished ]