by Tom Kuhn
The Collected Poems of
BERTOLT
BRECHT
TRANSLATED AND EDITED BY
TOM KUHN AND DAVID CONSTANTINE
WITH THE ASSISTANCE OF CHARLOTTE RYLAND
LIVERIGHT PUBLISHING CORPORATION
A Division of W. W. Norton & Company
Independent Publishers Since 1923
New York | London
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CONTENTS
Introduction
PART I
EARLY POEMS
The Domestic Breviary and Other Poems, 1913–1924
Uncollected Poems 1913–1918
Songs for the Guitar by Bert Brecht and His Friends
Psalms
Uncollected Poems 1919–1924
Bertolt Brecht’s Domestic Breviary
PART II
THE BERLIN YEARS
1925–1933
Uncollected Poems 1925–1926
Augsburg Sonnets
The Reader for City Dwellers
Uncollected Poems 1927–1930
Songs and Verses from Kuhle Wampe and The Mother
Uncollected Poems 1931–1933
PART III
POEMS OF EXILE
Svendborg Poems and Other Poems, 1933–1938
Uncollected Poems 1933–1934
Songs from Round Heads and Pointed Heads
Uncollected Poems 1934–1936
Poems for Margarete Steffin, 1932–1937
Poems from the German War Primer Complex
Uncollected Poems 1936–1937
Some Poems for Ruth Berlau
Poems on Señora Carrar
Uncollected Poems 1937–1938
Svendborg Poems
PART IV
THE WAR YEARS
Poems in Europe and America, 1938–1945
Studies
Uncollected Poems 1939–1940
Steffin Collection
Songs for Life of Galileo, Mother Courage, The Good Person of Szechwan, and Other Plays
Poems for Margarete Steffin, 1938–1941
Children’s Crusade 1939
Uncollected Poems 1941–1942
Chinese Poems
Hollywood Elegies
Uncollected Poems 1943–1945
PART V
AFTER THE WAR
Buckow Elegies and Other Late Poems, 1945–1956
Uncollected Late Poems
Buckow Elegies
Uncollected Poems 1953–1956
Notes
Index of English Titles and First Lines
Index of German Titles and First Lines
INTRODUCTION
T. S. Eliot, writing on Tennyson, found in him “three qualities which are seldom found together except in the greatest poets: abundance, variety, and complete competence.” Brecht is a great poet, one of the three or four best in the whole of German literature (a literature not short of first-rate poetry). He is abundant: the Berlin-Frankfurt edition of his complete works contains more than two thousand poems. He is various, on many topics, from shifting points of view, in all the registers and in many tones of voice. He is widely eclectic, a thieving magpie out of much of world literature, he took from Greece and Rome, China, Japan, Britain, France, America, his own compatriots, the living and the long-dead, across frontiers of space and time. His technical virtuosity in traditional forms and in forms he invented or developed for his own needs, is breathtaking. He works effectively in hexameters, in tight rhyming quatrains, sonnets, ballads, unrhyming verse in irregular meters, and in numerous other shapes and forms as the poetic occasion demands. And for any just assessment of his total poetic oeuvre we should have to consider his dramas too: the tense, sometimes violent verse of Saint Joan of the Stockyards, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, and (out of Hölderlin’s idiosyncratic translation) Antigone; the poignant lyricism of passages in The Good Person of Szechwan, the parodistic Shakespearean blank verse of Arturo Ui; the songs in many plays; and more, much more, besides. Brecht was a thorough poet. Throughout his writing life he thought constantly about the idea and the practice of poetry, about forms, about their nature, possibilities, best uses; and he adapted his thinking and his practice continually to answer the violently disrupting demands of the times and the places he lived in. This constant reflection on poetry, and the lifelong making of poetry, produced in Brecht a rare coherence of important things to say and of apt ways of saying them.
In the English-speaking world, where he is still best known as a dramatist and theoretician on drama, the problem of course is translation. Hence the significance of this ambitious and much more comprehensive attempt to come to terms in English with his vast and varied output in the lyric genre. But Brecht was himself skeptical about translating poems. He thought that the greatest fault was to try to translate too much. He once wrote that one should aim only to translate “the thoughts and the attitude” of the poet—although then in practice he seems to have preferred translations that stuck as close as possible to the original in every imaginable respect. The trouble is that, for the poet, rhythm and rhyme and indeed every other constituent part are also, precisely, part of the “attitude” of a poem. And Brecht was notoriously picky about translators. For English translations of his poems he kept trying to engage W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, or Archibald MacLeish—all with remarkably little success. So it was to lesser voices that the task first fell, and not with promising results. When various poems came out in American literary journals in 1946, Brecht was shocked by the quality of the translations and reckoned the whole chapter “a catastrophe.” Then it was H. R. Hays, Hoffman Hays, a prolific but little-known American writer, translator, and anthropologist who got to know Brecht during his American exile, who went on to publish a first slim selection of Brecht’s poems in English (in parallel text) in 1947. Shockingly, there were only two further slight collections of Brecht’s poems in English between Hays’s book and John Willett’s collection of 1976, nearly thirty years later, with translations by many hands of over four hundred poems. The initial reception of that later volume was enthusiastic, as of a revelation for poets and readers in the English-speaking world. George Steiner opined that it disclosed Brecht as “that very rare phenomenon, a great poet, for whom poetry is an almost everyday visitation and drawing of breath.” There were glowing reviews all round. But as time went on the poet Brecht began to sink again.
Admittedly, the reception in the German-speaking world had and has been slow as well. Partly because of Brecht’s own reticence. Steiner was right, there was scarcely a week of Brecht’s adult life, from his teenage years on, in which he was not, alongside everything else, also writing poems. But, although he published great collections during his own lifetime, there were also many poems, finished and accomplished, which he set aside, or seemed happy to reserve for “private” use. Less than half of his output of poems was published by the time of his death in 1956, and many poems first saw the light of day—as our endnotes reveal—in the 1980s or even 1990s. Earlier editors and translators were bashful, both with regard to the poems about sex and relationships, and with regard to the politics. Indeed, in the West it was taken as axiomatic that poetry and politics were in conflict and that, in Brecht’s case, the great poet could only emerge in despite of the dirty politics. For us, looking back, it has been easier to set aside these sorts of fears, and so we are delighted and excited to be able to show much more of Brecht the poet, in the over twelve hundred poems of this volume.
Some in Britain and America—those who have not read his work, or not with an open m
ind—still wrongly think of him as dogmatically bound into a politics which, so the “reasoning” goes, became redundant when the walls fell. But anyone who will look honestly at where we are now, at the state we are in, at our frequent helplessness in the face of mechanisms we have ourselves developed and unleashed, at the evasiveness, mendacity, and abject uselessness of much public discourse, anyone confronting all that, who then reads Brecht, will surely acknowledge his up-to-the-minute relevance. And the best way of distinguishing what he is really doing from what he is often thought to be doing, is through his poetry. Poetry, by its very nature, resists being reduced to any dogmatic, let alone fundamentalist, view of the world. Poems may debate with an ideology but they won’t be bound by it. Brecht knew that; he knew very well what the peculiar resources and effects of poetry are. He knew that poetry can help in ways which are peculiarly its own.
Brecht was a great believer in productive doubt—see particularly ‘The doubter’ and ‘In praise of doubt’—he thought it the means to realizing that things do not have to be the way they are. He took Christ’s (and Paul’s) saying that faith may move mountains and swapped the word “faith”—in German, Glaube, belief—for Unglaube, disbelief. It is disbelief, skepticism, that moves mountains, in Brecht’s view. And he devised ways of writing verse which would actually quicken in the reader a readiness to think again, to see things differently. We hope this will be apparent (and will work!) in our translations. He may be short and simple, in lines that are at once a unit of sense and a unit of verse, end-stopping them with full rhymes. Or he makes long sentences, in complex syntax, and drives them over the line endings, on and on, so that the reader’s understanding is tensed and extended, new possibilities are offered in a state more like simultaneity than sequence. He composes lines that begin to qualify or contradict themselves even as they run over. He will reverse a proposition so that—as in ‘Beds for the night’—you see it now this way, now that. He has many such strategies, he continually developed them to serve his needs, which changed to face up to the demands of the worsening times. Often his own point of view, the view he wishes to persuade a reader to adopt, is not in doubt. And maybe you agree with him already, or come through reading to see that it might indeed be so. But more important than that is whether the mind and the feelings are quickened as we read, alerted to something urgently requiring our attention in the real world. That is the value-added of poetry over a party-political speech. It lies in the inducing us to make, as D. H. Lawrence says, “a new effort of attention.” That attentiveness is itself the most valuable effect of poetry. Reading a poem we are alerted to and brought to acknowledge more ways of being human than we can encompass in our own circumscribed lives. And in the case of Brecht, the faculty he most wishes to waken and nurture—productive doubt—is, of course, in practice beyond his control. Quickened into doubting, we are entirely at liberty to doubt the speaker who has quickened us. Brecht—a lover of what he called “the beautiful contradictoriness of things,” who knew full well, and often said, that if you take out the contradictions, the contradictoriness, you take out the life—Brecht, willy-nilly, as we read his poems, has to let us be, to make our own minds up. The innumerable personae he adopts work similarly. In a contradictory plethora of voices, from very many angles, he tries out attitudes, assuming them as better and worse ways of being human. He offers them to us, and they may attract us or repel.
Brecht thrived in “contraries.” Like William Blake, he believed “Without Contraries is no progression.” From the very beginning of his life as a writer he loved to define himself against others. He works contrarily. Hence his compulsive appropriating of other people’s texts and procedures, his love of contrafacture. He wrote his first play Baal against Hanns Johst’s Der Einsame (The Lonely One), and one of his last, The Days of the Commune, against Nordahl Grieg’s The Defeat. His Domestic Breviary is, in its whole conception and execution and in several particular poems within it, a contrafacture of the devotional manuals used in both the Lutheran and the Catholic churches. There are an extraordinary number of “translations” in this collection. Typically, one of his very gifted collaborators—Elisabeth Hauptmann, for example—would supply Brecht with a version which he then worked up into a poem of his own. In most translators there is a productive fighting between the demands of the text, which as translators they serve, and their own autonomy as writers. In Brecht’s case it is more a matter of quickly seeing and seizing what he wants for his own ends. Like Goethe, Brecht had in all his variety, in his multiplicity of personae, a very sure sense of who he was and what he needed for his art. Good instances of that are his taking, and scarcely altering, August Oehler’s German translations of some Ancient Greek epigrams, and his writing his own versions of Arthur Waley’s classical Chinese poems. From both, he learned; and at once he applied what he had learned to his own poetic practice. Brecht is a maker of tradition, his epigones are legion. But he himself surveyed previous traditions for what he could use. He saw in European Romanticism, in Shelley, for example, the practice of a belief in the power of poetry to incite revolt against an oppressive and demeaning social order. At the same time, he worked in the rhetorical tradition of his own country’s deeply religious seventeenth century. He sought to persuade. By the strategies of rhetoric he tried to get people to attend to their own salvation, and not in the hereafter but in this their one and only life now.
Brecht led an “exemplary” life. The course and shape of it were to a great extent determined by events in his nation and in the world. For all his often vehemently asserted individuality, he led a life which was in large measure typical; and as a writer he drew attention to that typicalness. Born in 1898, having served as a medical orderly in the First World War, he was a close witness of much of its aftermath: the revolutions of 1918–19, their hopes and their bloody suppression; the failed putsches against the Weimar Republic by Wolfgang Kapp and Walther von Lüttwitz in 1920 and by Hitler in 1923; hyperinflation; the increasingly violent polarization of politics during the later years of the Republic; the collapse of the markets in 1929; mass unemployment and grievous hardship among working people. And in 1933, on the day after the Reichstag Fire, he went into exile, first in Scandinavia, then in the United States. Postwar then, he was uneasily at home in the new German Democratic Republic (GDR). The popular uprising against the young Republic, in June 1953, made painfully public the real and figurative contrariness of his life. He might have lived in the West, and opposed its capitalism. Instead, more painfully, he chose to live in a disappointing realization of the communism he had for three decades struggled to advance. He died in 1956, having learned of Stalin’s crimes and a couple of months before the failed revolution in Hungary. Millions of people lived through or died in the events of that half century. Every one of those lives has its exemplary or figurative sense. Brecht had eyes to see that sense and in his writings he made it clear. So he appears, very often in the third person, as an emblematic figure: the Playwright, the Teacher, the Thinker, the Exile; or as a named personage: poor B.B., Me-ti, Herr Keuner.
Brecht’s desire, as he often said, was to create the conditions “for a life worthy of human beings.” He had adversaries, first a very brutal capitalism and then Hitler’s National Socialism, whose ideologies would stunt or quite eradicate the citizen’s humanity. The regime that came to power in Germany in 1933 consciously set itself not just to break with but actually to extirpate the tradition of German humanism best represented in the Weimar of Goethe and Schiller. On a hill overlooking that town they built a concentration camp, Buchenwald, enclosing within it an oak tree particularly associated with Goethe, who loved the place. And from that tree they hanged people. Brecht believed that the triumph of Hitler’s ideology would entail the death of our humanity. There could be no negotiation, it was a matter of life and death. The struggle was necessary and—Brecht fully understood this—it deformed those who engaged in it. The very fight against inhumanity reduced the humanity of those who foug
ht. That is why in ‘To those born after,’ one of the twentieth century’s iconic poems, he asks that he and his generation be viewed with sympathetic understanding for what the struggle had done to them who had wanted to prepare the land for friendliness but could not themselves be friendly. He is exemplary in that too: in bad conscience, in disappointment, in witnessing the failure of rational argument, in losing heart, in the whole terrible cost of the struggle, the damage done, the waste of lives, the loss of comrades and beloved friends. But against that, from the outset to the end, he deployed his instinctual anarchic enjoyment of life. Then he is Brecht as Baal, as the adventurer, trickster, lover of sex and trees, rivers and clouds, he is the sensualist who delights in chess and dialectics, the thinker who takes pleasure in the lovely everyday phenomena of the local world, its worn steps, its flowers in need of watering, its tools and trades. Countless poems here pulse with Brecht’s celebration of life. And the love of life, the desire for better and more of it, for a livelier life for more and more people, is, of course, what drives his struggle for justice, mutual aid, lives fit to be looked at in their humanity.
Saying earlier that Brecht continues to be topical we were “only” saying that his poems do what poems do. All true poems, written wherever and however long ago, address us, if we let them, in our lives now. Their principle is Terence’s “nothing human is foreign to me”; and insofar as we ourselves can live up to that principle, they will touch us. Brecht read the poems of Po Chü-i, Horace, Hölderlin, Rimbaud, Wordsworth, and many more besides, and he understood their bearing, in one fashion or another, on his own situation as he read. Poems achieve this continuing efficacy by beginning, as Blake insisted they should, in “minute particulars,” in concrete graspable earthly truths, out of those (but never losing touch with them) then extending into the figurative. Achieving that, they will continue being a joy and a very present help wherever they find readers to read them.