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Selected Poems
Poems in German with translations on facing pages by Michael Hamburger and Christopher Middleton. A Helen and Kurt Wolff book.
63 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1966
1 person is currently reading
21 people want to read
About the author
Günter Grass
313 books1,841 followersNovels, notably
The Tin Drum
(1959) and
Dog Years
(1963), of German writer Günter Wilhelm Grass, who won the Nobel Prize of 1999 for literature, concern the political and social climate of Germany during and after World War II.
This novelist, poet, playwright, illustrator, graphic artist, and sculptor since 1945 lived in West Germany but in his fiction frequently returned to the Danzig of his childhood. He always identified as a Kashubian.
He is best known for his first novel, The Tin Drum (1959), a key text in European magic realism. He named this style “broadened reality.” “Cat and Mouse” (1961) and Dog Years (1963) also succeeded in the period. These three novels make up his “Danzig trilogy.”
Helene Grass (née Knoff, 1898 - 1954), a Roman Catholic of Kashubian-Polish origin, bore Günter Grass to Willy Grass (1899 - 1979), a Protestant ethnic German. Parents reared Grass as a Catholic. The family lived in an apartment, attached to its grocery store in Danzig-Langfuhr (now Gdańsk-Wrzeszcz). He has one sister, born in 1930.
Grass attended the Danzig gymnasium Conradinum. He volunteered for submarine service with the Kriegsmarine "to get out of the confinement he felt as a teenager in his parents' house" which he considered - in a very negative way - civic Catholic lower middle class. In 1943 he became a Luftwaffenhelfer, then he was drafted into the Reichsarbeitsdienst, and in November 1944, shortly after his seventeenth birthday, into the Waffen-Schutzstaffel. The seventeen-year-old Grass saw combat with the 10th Schutzstaffel panzer division Frundsberg from February 1945 until he was wounded on 20 April 1945 and sent to an American prisoner of war camp.
In 1946 and 1947, he worked in a mine and received an education of a stonemason. For many years, he studied sculpture and graphics, first at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and then at the Universität der Künste Berlin. He also worked as an author and traveled frequently. He married in 1954 and from 1960 lived in Berlin as well as part-time in Schleswig-Holstein. Divorced in 1978, he remarried in 1979. From 1983 to 1986 he held the presidency of the Berlin Akademie der Künste (Berlin Academy of Arts).
During the German unification process in 1989 he argued for separation of the two states, because he thought a unified Germany would resume its past aggression. He moved to the northern German city of Lübeck in 1995. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1999. In 2006, Grass caused controversy with his disclosure of his Waffen-Schutzstaffel service during the final months of World War II, which he had kept a secret until publishing his memoir that year. He died of complications of lung infection on 13th of April, 2015 at a Lübeck hospital. He was 87.
This novelist, poet, playwright, illustrator, graphic artist, and sculptor since 1945 lived in West Germany but in his fiction frequently returned to the Danzig of his childhood. He always identified as a Kashubian.
He is best known for his first novel, The Tin Drum (1959), a key text in European magic realism. He named this style “broadened reality.” “Cat and Mouse” (1961) and Dog Years (1963) also succeeded in the period. These three novels make up his “Danzig trilogy.”
Helene Grass (née Knoff, 1898 - 1954), a Roman Catholic of Kashubian-Polish origin, bore Günter Grass to Willy Grass (1899 - 1979), a Protestant ethnic German. Parents reared Grass as a Catholic. The family lived in an apartment, attached to its grocery store in Danzig-Langfuhr (now Gdańsk-Wrzeszcz). He has one sister, born in 1930.
Grass attended the Danzig gymnasium Conradinum. He volunteered for submarine service with the Kriegsmarine "to get out of the confinement he felt as a teenager in his parents' house" which he considered - in a very negative way - civic Catholic lower middle class. In 1943 he became a Luftwaffenhelfer, then he was drafted into the Reichsarbeitsdienst, and in November 1944, shortly after his seventeenth birthday, into the Waffen-Schutzstaffel. The seventeen-year-old Grass saw combat with the 10th Schutzstaffel panzer division Frundsberg from February 1945 until he was wounded on 20 April 1945 and sent to an American prisoner of war camp.
In 1946 and 1947, he worked in a mine and received an education of a stonemason. For many years, he studied sculpture and graphics, first at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and then at the Universität der Künste Berlin. He also worked as an author and traveled frequently. He married in 1954 and from 1960 lived in Berlin as well as part-time in Schleswig-Holstein. Divorced in 1978, he remarried in 1979. From 1983 to 1986 he held the presidency of the Berlin Akademie der Künste (Berlin Academy of Arts).
During the German unification process in 1989 he argued for separation of the two states, because he thought a unified Germany would resume its past aggression. He moved to the northern German city of Lübeck in 1995. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1999. In 2006, Grass caused controversy with his disclosure of his Waffen-Schutzstaffel service during the final months of World War II, which he had kept a secret until publishing his memoir that year. He died of complications of lung infection on 13th of April, 2015 at a Lübeck hospital. He was 87.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
November 9, 2015
Gunter Grass's controversial poem about Israel, Iran, and War:
What Must Be Said
Why do I stay silent, conceal for too long
What clearly is and has been
Practiced in war games, at the end of which we as survivors
Are at best footnotes.
It is the alleged right to first strike
That could annihilate the Iranian people--
Enslaved by a loud-mouth
And guided to organized jubilation--
Because in their territory,
It is suspected, a bomb is being built.
Yet why do I forbid myself
To name that other country
In which, for years, even if secretly,
There has been a growing nuclear potential at hand
But beyond control, because no inspection is available?
The universal concealment of these facts,
To which my silence subordinated itself,
I sense as incriminating lies
And force--the punishment is promised
As soon as it is ignored;
The verdict of "anti-Semitism" is familiar.
Now, though, because in my country
Which from time to time has sought and confronted
Its very own crime
That is without compare
In turn on a purely commercial basis, if also
With nimble lips calling it a reparation, declares
A further U-boat should be delivered to Israel,
Whose specialty consists of guiding all-destroying warheads to where the existence
Of a single atomic bomb is unproven,
But as a fear wishes to be conclusive,
I say what must be said.
Why though have I stayed silent until now?
Because I thought my origin,
Afflicted by a stain never to be expunged
Kept the state of Israel, to which I am bound
And wish to stay bound,
From accepting this fact as pronounced truth.
Why do I say only now,
Aged and with my last ink,
That the nuclear power of Israel endangers
The already fragile world peace?
Because it must be said
What even tomorrow may be too late to say;
Also because we--as Germans burdened enough--
Could be the suppliers to a crime
That is foreseeable, wherefore our complicity
Could not be redeemed through any of the usual excuses.
And granted: I am silent no longer
Because I am tired of the hypocrisy
Of the West; in addition to which it is to be hoped
That this will free many from silence,
That they may prompt the perpetrator of the recognized danger
To renounce violence and
Likewise insist
That an unhindered and permanent control
Of the Israeli nuclear potential
And the Iranian nuclear sites
Be authorized through an international agency
By the governments of both countries.
Only this way are all, the Israelis and Palestinians,
Even more, all people, that in this
Region occupied by mania
Live cheek by jowl among enemies,
And also us, to be helped.
What Must Be Said
Why do I stay silent, conceal for too long
What clearly is and has been
Practiced in war games, at the end of which we as survivors
Are at best footnotes.
It is the alleged right to first strike
That could annihilate the Iranian people--
Enslaved by a loud-mouth
And guided to organized jubilation--
Because in their territory,
It is suspected, a bomb is being built.
Yet why do I forbid myself
To name that other country
In which, for years, even if secretly,
There has been a growing nuclear potential at hand
But beyond control, because no inspection is available?
The universal concealment of these facts,
To which my silence subordinated itself,
I sense as incriminating lies
And force--the punishment is promised
As soon as it is ignored;
The verdict of "anti-Semitism" is familiar.
Now, though, because in my country
Which from time to time has sought and confronted
Its very own crime
That is without compare
In turn on a purely commercial basis, if also
With nimble lips calling it a reparation, declares
A further U-boat should be delivered to Israel,
Whose specialty consists of guiding all-destroying warheads to where the existence
Of a single atomic bomb is unproven,
But as a fear wishes to be conclusive,
I say what must be said.
Why though have I stayed silent until now?
Because I thought my origin,
Afflicted by a stain never to be expunged
Kept the state of Israel, to which I am bound
And wish to stay bound,
From accepting this fact as pronounced truth.
Why do I say only now,
Aged and with my last ink,
That the nuclear power of Israel endangers
The already fragile world peace?
Because it must be said
What even tomorrow may be too late to say;
Also because we--as Germans burdened enough--
Could be the suppliers to a crime
That is foreseeable, wherefore our complicity
Could not be redeemed through any of the usual excuses.
And granted: I am silent no longer
Because I am tired of the hypocrisy
Of the West; in addition to which it is to be hoped
That this will free many from silence,
That they may prompt the perpetrator of the recognized danger
To renounce violence and
Likewise insist
That an unhindered and permanent control
Of the Israeli nuclear potential
And the Iranian nuclear sites
Be authorized through an international agency
By the governments of both countries.
Only this way are all, the Israelis and Palestinians,
Even more, all people, that in this
Region occupied by mania
Live cheek by jowl among enemies,
And also us, to be helped.
January 22, 2022
We are waiting for the rain to stop,
although we have got accustomed
to standing behind the curtain, being invisible.
Spoons have become sieves, nobody dares now
to stretch a hand out.
Many things are floating in the streets,
things people carefully hid in the dry time.
How awkward to see your neighbour's stale old beds.
Often we stand by the water-gauge
and compare our worries like watches.
Some things can be regulated.
But when the butts overflow, the inherited cup fills,
we shall have to pray.
The cellar is submerged, we brought the crates up
and are checking their contents against the list.
So far nothing has been lost.
Because the water is now certain to drop soon,
we have begun to sew sunshades.
It will be difficult to cross the square once more,
distinct, with a shadow heavy as lead.
We shall miss the curtain at first,
and go into the cellar often
to consider the mark
which the water bequeathed us.
* * *
It's getting worse hereabouts every year.
Often we have guests in, to share the swarm.
But soon people leave again -
having commended the cheese.
It's not the sting.
No, but the sense that what's going on
is older than the hand -
and has every future in its grasp.
When the beds go quiet
and the black stone hangs by innumerable singing threads,
threads which break and start again,
mended, a little more clear,
when I light a pipe
and sit facing the lake
with a thick sound swimming over it,
I'm helpless.
Let's give up trying to sleep.
My sons are wide awake,
my daughters crowd to the mirror,
my wife has lit candles.
Now we pin our faith on flames
costing twenty pfennigs,
which the midge come to,
a brief promise.
* * *
When the interval seemed to have been overcome
Aurelia arrived with the bone.
Look at my flute and my white shift,
look at the giraffe peering over the fence,
those are my blood, which is listening.
Now I'll defeat all the thrushes.
When the yellow dog ran over the meadow
the concert expired.
Later the bones could not be found.
The scores lay under the chairs,
the conductor seized his air-gun
and shot all the blackbirds.
* * *
Who up-ended the garden seat?
Now here it lies, useless and green,
stammers with four proven legs,
looks for the proof in the air.
Stan it up again. As before
to sit beneath the summer,
drink tea with an aunt and break
biscuits, holy wafers.
No, this summer is done for.
The aunt is feeding white worms,
the biscuits are crumbling and fit
into no inherited pyx.
Also, you're drinking your tea
too hot, on the point of leaving,
rushed, with defensive glances
to the left, to the right, to the left.
Once up-ended, garden seats
stand vacant, conscious of autumn,
between wet goose berry bushes,
occupied only by rain, departure, the sentence cut short,
by the moon that never sits still.
* * *
Those days we slept in a trumpet.
It was very quiet in there,
we never dreamed it would sound,
lay, as if to prove it,
open-mouthed in the gorge -
those days, before we were blown out.
Was it a child, on his head
a helmet of studied newspaper,
was it a scatty hussar
who walked at a command out of the picture,
was it even those days death
who breathed that way on his rubber stamp?
Today, I don't know who work us,
disguised as flower in vases,
or else in sugar bowls,
threatened by anyone who drinks coffee
and questions his conscience:
one lump or two, or even three.
Now we're on the run and our luggage with us.
All half-empty paper bags, every crater in our beer,
cast-off coats, clocks that have stopped,
graves paid for by other people,
and women very short of time,
for a while we fill them.
In drawers full of linen and love,
in a stove which says no
and warms its own standpoint only,
in a telephone our ears have stayed behind
and listen, already conciliant,
to the new tone for busy.
Those days we slept in a trumpet.
Backward and forward we dreamed,
avenues, symmetrically planted.
On a tranquil unending back
we lay against that arch,
and never dreamed it would sound.
* * *
How sad these changes are.
People unscrew the nameplates from the doors,
take the saucepan of cabbage
and heat it up again, in a different place.
What sort of furniture is this
that advertises departure?
People take up their furniture chairs
and emigrate.
Ships laden with homesickness and the urge to vomit
carry patented seating contraptions
and their unpatented owners
to and fro.
Now on both sides of the great ocean
there are folding chairs;
how sad these changes are.
* * *
If the seagull insists
I shall build a ship,
shall be happy at
the launching,
wear a dazzling shirt,
perhaps also weep champagne
or secrete soft soap,
both being indispensable.
Who will make the speech?
Who can sight-read the words
without going blind?
The President?
By what name shall I christen you?
Shall I call your sinking ANNA
or else COLUMBUS?
* * *
An empty bus
hurtles through the starry night.
Perhaps the driver is singing
and is happy because he sings.
* * *
When with her right hand she reaches
over her right shoulder into the quiver,
she puts forward her left leg.
When she hit me,
her object hit my soul
which is to her like an object.
Mostly it is object resting
against which on Mondays
my knee smashes
But she, with her hunting permit,
may be photographed only
running and among hounds.
When she says yes and hits,
she hits the object in nature,
but also stuffed ones.
I have always refused
to let my shadow-casting body
be hurt by a shadowless idea.
But you, Diana,
with your bow,
are to me objective and answerable.
* * *
Whoever whishes
to release, to breathe out
that caries which long has lurked behind the toothpase
has no choice but to open his mouth.
Now let us open our mouths,
go to offices and hand in
the bad gold teeth
which we broke and plucked from the dead.
Before you can hope to
displace, to spew out fat fathers -
now that we too are fathers and putting on fat -
you've no choice bu to open your mouths;
just as our children in time will
open their mouths, will displace,
will spew out the great caries,
the bad gold teeth, the fat fathers.
* * *
In this big house -
from the rats
who know about the drains,
to the pigeons
who know nothing -
I live and suppose much.
Came home late,
opened the house
with my key
and noticed as I hunted for my key
that I needed a key
to enter my own home.
Was quite hungry,
ate a chicken
with my hands
and noticed as I ate the chicken
that I was eating chicken
which was cold and dead.
Then stooped,
took off both shoes
and noticed as I took off my shoes
that we have to stoop
if we want to take
shoes off.
I lay horizontal,
smoked the cigarette,
and in the darkness was certain
that someone held out his open hand
when I knocked the ashes
from my cigarette.
At night Saturn comes
and holds out his hand.
With my ashes, he
cleans his teeth, Saturn.
We shall climb
into his jaw.
although we have got accustomed
to standing behind the curtain, being invisible.
Spoons have become sieves, nobody dares now
to stretch a hand out.
Many things are floating in the streets,
things people carefully hid in the dry time.
How awkward to see your neighbour's stale old beds.
Often we stand by the water-gauge
and compare our worries like watches.
Some things can be regulated.
But when the butts overflow, the inherited cup fills,
we shall have to pray.
The cellar is submerged, we brought the crates up
and are checking their contents against the list.
So far nothing has been lost.
Because the water is now certain to drop soon,
we have begun to sew sunshades.
It will be difficult to cross the square once more,
distinct, with a shadow heavy as lead.
We shall miss the curtain at first,
and go into the cellar often
to consider the mark
which the water bequeathed us.
- The Flood, pg. 13
* * *
It's getting worse hereabouts every year.
Often we have guests in, to share the swarm.
But soon people leave again -
having commended the cheese.
It's not the sting.
No, but the sense that what's going on
is older than the hand -
and has every future in its grasp.
When the beds go quiet
and the black stone hangs by innumerable singing threads,
threads which break and start again,
mended, a little more clear,
when I light a pipe
and sit facing the lake
with a thick sound swimming over it,
I'm helpless.
Let's give up trying to sleep.
My sons are wide awake,
my daughters crowd to the mirror,
my wife has lit candles.
Now we pin our faith on flames
costing twenty pfennigs,
which the midge come to,
a brief promise.
- The Midge Plague, pg. 15
* * *
When the interval seemed to have been overcome
Aurelia arrived with the bone.
Look at my flute and my white shift,
look at the giraffe peering over the fence,
those are my blood, which is listening.
Now I'll defeat all the thrushes.
When the yellow dog ran over the meadow
the concert expired.
Later the bones could not be found.
The scores lay under the chairs,
the conductor seized his air-gun
and shot all the blackbirds.
- Open Air Concert, pg. 21
* * *
Who up-ended the garden seat?
Now here it lies, useless and green,
stammers with four proven legs,
looks for the proof in the air.
Stan it up again. As before
to sit beneath the summer,
drink tea with an aunt and break
biscuits, holy wafers.
No, this summer is done for.
The aunt is feeding white worms,
the biscuits are crumbling and fit
into no inherited pyx.
Also, you're drinking your tea
too hot, on the point of leaving,
rushed, with defensive glances
to the left, to the right, to the left.
Once up-ended, garden seats
stand vacant, conscious of autumn,
between wet goose berry bushes,
occupied only by rain, departure, the sentence cut short,
by the moon that never sits still.
- Furniture Out of Doors, pg. 29
* * *
Those days we slept in a trumpet.
It was very quiet in there,
we never dreamed it would sound,
lay, as if to prove it,
open-mouthed in the gorge -
those days, before we were blown out.
Was it a child, on his head
a helmet of studied newspaper,
was it a scatty hussar
who walked at a command out of the picture,
was it even those days death
who breathed that way on his rubber stamp?
Today, I don't know who work us,
disguised as flower in vases,
or else in sugar bowls,
threatened by anyone who drinks coffee
and questions his conscience:
one lump or two, or even three.
Now we're on the run and our luggage with us.
All half-empty paper bags, every crater in our beer,
cast-off coats, clocks that have stopped,
graves paid for by other people,
and women very short of time,
for a while we fill them.
In drawers full of linen and love,
in a stove which says no
and warms its own standpoint only,
in a telephone our ears have stayed behind
and listen, already conciliant,
to the new tone for busy.
Those days we slept in a trumpet.
Backward and forward we dreamed,
avenues, symmetrically planted.
On a tranquil unending back
we lay against that arch,
and never dreamed it would sound.
- Music for Brass, pg. 31
* * *
How sad these changes are.
People unscrew the nameplates from the doors,
take the saucepan of cabbage
and heat it up again, in a different place.
What sort of furniture is this
that advertises departure?
People take up their furniture chairs
and emigrate.
Ships laden with homesickness and the urge to vomit
carry patented seating contraptions
and their unpatented owners
to and fro.
Now on both sides of the great ocean
there are folding chairs;
how sad these changes are.
- Folding Chairs, pg. 37
* * *
If the seagull insists
I shall build a ship,
shall be happy at
the launching,
wear a dazzling shirt,
perhaps also weep champagne
or secrete soft soap,
both being indispensable.
Who will make the speech?
Who can sight-read the words
without going blind?
The President?
By what name shall I christen you?
Shall I call your sinking ANNA
or else COLUMBUS?
- Launching, pg. 41
* * *
An empty bus
hurtles through the starry night.
Perhaps the driver is singing
and is happy because he sings.
- Happiness, pg. 47
* * *
When with her right hand she reaches
over her right shoulder into the quiver,
she puts forward her left leg.
When she hit me,
her object hit my soul
which is to her like an object.
Mostly it is object resting
against which on Mondays
my knee smashes
But she, with her hunting permit,
may be photographed only
running and among hounds.
When she says yes and hits,
she hits the object in nature,
but also stuffed ones.
I have always refused
to let my shadow-casting body
be hurt by a shadowless idea.
But you, Diana,
with your bow,
are to me objective and answerable.
- Diana - Or, The Object, pg. 51
* * *
Whoever whishes
to release, to breathe out
that caries which long has lurked behind the toothpase
has no choice but to open his mouth.
Now let us open our mouths,
go to offices and hand in
the bad gold teeth
which we broke and plucked from the dead.
Before you can hope to
displace, to spew out fat fathers -
now that we too are fathers and putting on fat -
you've no choice bu to open your mouths;
just as our children in time will
open their mouths, will displace,
will spew out the great caries,
the bad gold teeth, the fat fathers.
- Little Address Calling for a Great Opening of Mouths - Or, The Gargoyle Speaks, pg. 55
* * *
In this big house -
from the rats
who know about the drains,
to the pigeons
who know nothing -
I live and suppose much.
Came home late,
opened the house
with my key
and noticed as I hunted for my key
that I needed a key
to enter my own home.
Was quite hungry,
ate a chicken
with my hands
and noticed as I ate the chicken
that I was eating chicken
which was cold and dead.
Then stooped,
took off both shoes
and noticed as I took off my shoes
that we have to stoop
if we want to take
shoes off.
I lay horizontal,
smoked the cigarette,
and in the darkness was certain
that someone held out his open hand
when I knocked the ashes
from my cigarette.
At night Saturn comes
and holds out his hand.
With my ashes, he
cleans his teeth, Saturn.
We shall climb
into his jaw.
- Saturn, pg. 61
August 5, 2025
I read The Tin Drum when I was in high school and it remains one of the most remarkable and wondrous stories I've ever read (and I'm planning to reread it soon).
I picked up this collection of poetry by Gunter Grass in a thrift store recently, and I was intrigued by the idea of the original German text would face the translated poem. Which is cool and the reason I'll be keeping this collection in my own library.
But this is also a prime example of why novelists are not always great poets. Most writers/novelists will dabble in poetry because it does teach you the economy of words and helps to develop rhythms and descriptions that feel more lush and less passive and pedantic.
Maybe these poems work better in the German, because the translations were harsh, lacked any real sense of what makes a poem a poem and not just some words arranged on a page to look like a poem.
I won't hold this against my admiration for "The Tin Drum."
I picked up this collection of poetry by Gunter Grass in a thrift store recently, and I was intrigued by the idea of the original German text would face the translated poem. Which is cool and the reason I'll be keeping this collection in my own library.
But this is also a prime example of why novelists are not always great poets. Most writers/novelists will dabble in poetry because it does teach you the economy of words and helps to develop rhythms and descriptions that feel more lush and less passive and pedantic.
Maybe these poems work better in the German, because the translations were harsh, lacked any real sense of what makes a poem a poem and not just some words arranged on a page to look like a poem.
I won't hold this against my admiration for "The Tin Drum."
January 1, 2022
Grass has a unique and memorable style. His poems are, I suppose in a typical German way, goofy and angular. He rejects the smooth elegance of a lot of modern poetry in favor of poems that quietly squeak and chirp. They are modest, unassuming, inconspicuous and textured. There is a vaguely left wing, abstract and surreal tone that I quite like. Most modern poetry is pretentious and turgid, but Grass has a quiet simplicity, and and angularness, that really appeals to my taste. This is a pretty solid greatest hits compilation but I do feel that there could have been more.
March 31, 2024
I was delighted to get my hands on this collection of Günter Grass’s poems from the 1950s and 1960s. What a collection it is - intelligent, witty, inventive and at times challenging; I can see myself rereading these into my old age and never being bored. My favorite poems in this collection at this time are Do Something, Marriage, the topical Placed Amid Old Men, and the brilliant In The Botanical Garden. If I am ever going to boil a pig’s head, I will be sure to read the The Jellied Pig's Head for the recipe first!
December 19, 2022
Nachts kommet Saturn
Und Hilton seine Hand auf.
Mit meiner Asche
Putting seine Zähne Saturn.
In seinen Rachen
werden wir steigen.
Und Hilton seine Hand auf.
Mit meiner Asche
Putting seine Zähne Saturn.
In seinen Rachen
werden wir steigen.
December 11, 2023
Intriguing metaphors conjure the past into the present wrestling with the obligation to protest leavened with a love of food and place.
Not easy poems but compelling even in translation.
Not easy poems but compelling even in translation.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews