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Product Description:

This volume arises from a seminar held at Oxford University in 1998 to mark the centenary of Brecht's birth and includes seminal contributions from leading critics. It sheds new light on individual poems as well as giving an overview of Brecht's poetry from the earliest days to the GDR years. Here are Brecht poems in parallel translation as well as translations and original poems by major poets such as Tom Paulin, Jamie McKendrick, Derek Mahon, and David Constantine.

Brecht is increasingly realized as one of the most important lyric voices of the twentieth century. Alongside Rilke, he is honored as Germany's greatest modern poet, but his poetry is relatively unknown in the English-speaking world. The title of this volume takes its cue from an allegorical poem about the artist's legacy and looks at how poets and translators might read Brecht today.

"Now that the ballads, love lyrics, satires, mock pastorals, homilies, and political verse have been assembled, it is clear that Brecht was that very rare phenomenon: a great poet for whom poetry is an almost everyday visitation and drawing of breath ... there is no doubt that the two great German poets of the twentieth century were Rilke and Brecht."
-George Steiner