Bilingual edition
Translated, with an introduction and notes, by Antony Hasler

When a volume of poetry by the young Georg Heym was published in Berlin in 1911, he was acclaimed as the German Arthur Rimbaud (the legendary French prodigy of poetic rebellion). Like Rimbaud and – even more – like Baudelaire, Heym’s often explosive and shocking images are contained in verse of strict classical form and metre, giving his work a thrilling tension and force. Boris Pasternak translated him into Russian, the influential literary critic Walter Benjamin knew his poetry by heart, the early Brecht was influenced by him, and the poet Gottfried Benn called one of his poems (included in this collection) one of the three greatest love poems of world literature.

Never sure of himself, Heym’s poetic voice was always decisive and mature in absorbing its many influences – including Marlowe, Byron, Holderlin, Edgar Allan Poe, and numerous visual artists, preeminently Van Gogh. Heym is most famous for his poem ‘War’, written in 1911; it contains the line: ‘A mighty city sank in yellow smoke’ – a premonition of the Second World War and beyond, written before the First. Heym’s imagery is often dark: his horrific visions are familiar to us now as realities. However, his range is broad and includes paradisal and romantic elegy, satire (including self-satire), and a powerful sonnet sequence on the French Revolution, influenced by his reading of Georg Büchner. Most significantly, Heym stands, in early modern Berlin, beside Baudelaire in Paris and T.S. Eliot in London, as one of the earliest and greatest of big-city poets.

Published by Libris in 2004