Chapbooks

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JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE was a monumental European presence – dramatist, impresario, novelist, essayist, scientist, administrator and extraordinarily prolific poet. This selection from his early and middle years includes the ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’ (the title of which became famous a hundred years later through Dukas’ well-known orchestral piece) and also highlights the dramatic element in Goethe’s poetry (a speech from Faust and a monologue from an unfinished play about Prometheus). Several poems set to music by Brahms and Schubert are also featured.

John Greening’s ingenious translations offer refreshing new angles for those who are already familiar with Goethe’s poetry and are an excellent introduction for those coming to it for the first time.

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Karl Marx is not known as a poet, although as a young law student he had dreamed of following a literary career and worked on poems, a novel and a play, before deciding that his future lay elsewhere. Marx’s major philosophical works include The Communist Manifesto, The German Ideology (both co-authored with Friedrich Engels) and Capital.

Some 120 of his poems from the years 1836-7 survive; the poems in this chapbook range from those on the themes and in the style fashionable at that time, love poems to his future wife and satirical verse. Together they offer, along with Philip Wilson’s illuminating introduction, a fascinating glimpse into the mind and times of one of history’s great thinkers.

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This bilingual chapbook offers a selection from Heinrich Heine’s sequence of poems Die Nordsee (The North Sea) which formed part of his Buch der Lieder (Book of Songs). Published in 1827 when Heine was in his late 20s, the Book of Songs launched his career, which over the following thirty years made him the major figure in German literature in the generation following Goethe and Schiller.

The North Sea sequence is expressive of Heine’s complicated relation to Romanticism, of which he was both an exponent and an ironic observer. Written in free verse rather than the rhymed quatrains he usually used, these poems explore the intersections between myth and everyday life in vivid scenes which mirror the fluid motions and moods of the sea.

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What happened to Kraków’s Jews? The poet Piotr Florczyk, who was born in Kraków, set himself the task of finding out, and to this end listened to recorded testimonies of Holocaust survivors from Kraków at the Visual History Archive during a period of research study at the University of Southern California’s Shoah Foundation Centre.

In the poems collected here, Florczyk retells the stories of these survivors for a new audience, exploring their interactions with their surroundings, their families, their neighbours and their oppressors.

Thus there emerges, through the work of the poet as story-teller, not only a shared history of Kraków but, for the reader, a sense of those voices that might otherwise be forgotten, speaking again in poems of extraordinary clarity and simplicity.

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