Variations on No Theme: Poems / A Bilingual Edition
About this ebook
Born in Dresden in 1962, Durs Grünbein is the most significant poet to emerge from the former East Germany. Though he is a poet who is not expressly political, his work emerges from a tumultuous Germany, one where the poet confronts time and history head-on and not only in the abstract.
The thirty-nine poems that make up Variations on No Theme were initially published in German in 1994. They are unsettling, wry, aggressive, sardonic, and deeply seductive. Not quite sonnets, and not quite recognizable in their formal structure, these poems offer, as Helen Vendler put it, a “model of disequilibrium." From the first words: “To digress . . . where to?,” the reader is met with a knowing yet searching intelligence, one that takes the form of a second-person address and brings to life the wrestlings of thought and material reality.
In a brilliant translation by Michael Hofmann, who also provides a new introduction, Variations on No Theme is a masterful, enduring psychic portrait of a mind in its time.
About the author
Durs Grünbein was born in Dresden and now lives in Berlin and Rome. Since 2005, he has been a professor of poetics and aesthetics at the Kunstakademie, Düsseldorf. His work, which includes books of poetry, essays, translations, and libretti, has won many awards, including the Georg Büchner Prize and the Zbigniew Herbert International Literary Award. Farrar, Straus and Giroux published a book of his selected poems, Ashes for Breakfast, in 2005.
Michael Hofmann’s awards for translation include the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Prize, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize, the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize, the Schlegel-Tieck Prize (four times), and the American Academy’s Thornton Wilder Prize in Translation.
