german
A translator must meet a compelling need — to reinvent Franz Kafka’s voice in an English that resounds in the present moment.
There is enough candor and humor, along with a handful of bracingly moody characters, to make Mariana Leky’s vision of perpetual love compelling.
Evidently, plain-spoken language plus doubt and apprehension equate to novels that, once opened, are very hard to put down.
The standard view of Kafka reduces him to the patron saint of neurotics.
A collection of poems and essays by the admired German poet Gottfried Benn, who, because of his brief association with Nazism, has been absent from our mainstream, non-specialized, English-language view of modern German poetry.
Refreshingly, playwright Marianna Salzmann manages to be political without being didactic. Her characters live (rather than preach) through history, grappling with the transition from totalitarianism to democracy.
Though its central events are in the past, conveyed by characters by means of often ambiguous shreds of memory and musing, “In Times of Fading Light” is a work of quiet power and beauty, dense with sorrow, telling detail, and suspense.
Yvan Goll may be the great shape-shifter, the Zelig, of twentieth-century poetry.
As the year nears its end, time is running out to write at length about some of the new books that gave me pleasure. Thus this quick list of favorites. As usual, my taste runs to prose that’s off-the-beaten-path.
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