After Every War

[Dave Monroe]

After Every War:
Twentieth-Century Women Poets

Eavan Boland
Translations from the German

Paper | 2006 | $12.95 / £8.50 | ISBN: 0-691-12779-4
Cloth | 2004 | $19.95 / £12.95 | ISBN: 0-691-11745-4
184 pp. | 6 x 9 | 9 halftones

They are nine women with much in common--all German
speaking, all poets, all personal witnesses to the
horror and devastation that was World War II. Yet, in
this deeply moving collection, each provides a
singularly personal glimpse into the effects of war on
language, place, poetry, and womanhood.

After Every War is a book of translations of women
poets living in Europe in the decades before and after
World War II: Rose Ausländer, Elisabeth Langgässer,
Nelly Sachs, Gertrud Kolmar, Else Lasker-Schüler,
Ingeborg Bachmann, Marie Luise Kaschnitz, Dagmar Nick,
and Hilde Domin. Several of the writers are Jewish
and, therefore, also witnesses and participants in one
of the darkest occasions of human cruelty, the
Holocaust. Their poems, as well as those of the other
writers, provide a unique biography of the time--but
with a difference. These poets see public events
through the lens of deep private losses. They chart
the small occasions, the bittersweet family ties, the
fruit dish on a table, the lost soul arriving at a
railway station; in other words, the sheer
ordinariness through which cataclysm is experienced,
and by which life is cruelly shattered. They reclaim
these moments and draw the reader into them.

The poems are translated and introduced, with
biographical notes on the authors, by renowned Irish
poet Eavan Boland. Her interest in the topic is not
abstract. As an Irish woman, she has observed the
heartbreaking effects of violence on her own country.
Her experience has drawn her closer to these nine
poets, enabling her to render into English the
beautiful, ruminative quality of their work and to
present their poems for what they are: documentaries
of resilience--of language, of music, and of the human
spirit--in the hardest of times.

http://pup.princeton.edu/titles/7818.html

Introduction

http://www.pupress.princeton.edu/chapters/i7818.pdf

http://www.pupress.princeton.edu/chapters/i7818.html


 
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