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He loved luxury and ate like a pig. But the servant who brought him his chocolate in bed found him in floods of tears. Mortality proposed itself to him in the form of music. |
Gunter Eich, author of the POW poem “Inventory,” one of the most famous lyrics in the German language, was rivaled only by Paul Celan as the leading poet in the generation after Gottfried Benn and Bertolt Brecht. As an early member of “Gruppe 47″ (from which Günter Grass and Heinrich Böll later shot to prominence), Eich (1907-72) was at the vanguard of an effort to restore German as a language for poetry after the vitriol, propaganda, and lies of the Third Reich.
Michael Hofmann has published six books of poems: Nights in the Iron Hotel (1983), Acrimony (1986), K.S. in Lakeland: New and Selected Poems (1990), Corona, Corona (1993), Approximately Nowhere (1999), and a recent Selected Poems from Faber. His translation of recent Nobel Prize winner Herta Mueller’s Land of Green Plums is available from Northwestern University Press.
