Of Entirety Say the Sentence

by Ernst Meister, Graham W. Foust (Translator), Samuel Frederick (Translator)

"Like his subject matter Meister's writing is ominous, intangible and inescapable."— Publishers Weekly "The translators of Wallless Space were brave to take on Meister's dense and unusual poetry, and so far their work has been excellent. . . . Foust and Frederick have preserved the phonetic elements of Meister's verse—assonance, alliteration, rhyme, anaphora—without sacrificing the poet's distilled diction and powerfully short dimeter and trimeter lines."—Christopher Shannon, Words Without Borders One of the last books by post-war German poet and Georg Büchner Prize winner Ernst Meister—and the third to be translated into English by poet Graham Foust and scholar Samuel Frederick— Of Entirety Say the Sentence is his most expansive book. With rich allusions to Hölderlin and Celan, these poems are staggering in their scope of mortality, time, and infinity. Mankind
has his song to sing,
and even though I am
shaken by the world's silence,
I don't want to fling anything
over the crown of his head. Ernst Meister (1911-1979) was born in Hagen, Germany. He was posthumously awarded the most prestigious award for German literature, the Georg Büchner Prize. Graham Foust is the author of several collections of poetry, including To Anacreon in Heaven and Other Poems (Flood Editions, April 2013). He teaches at the University of Denver. Samuel Frederick is the author of Narratives Digression in Robert Walser , Thomas Bernhard , and Adalbert Stifter (Northwestern University Press, 2012). He is an assistant professor of German at the Pennsylvania State University.

Genres: Poetry

192 pages, Paperback

First published October 13, 2015

About the author

Ernst Meister was a German poet and writer.

Meister's poetry falls within a dark abstract landscape of existentialism, with tortured themes influenced by his experiences during World War II. In his 1976 collection of poems, Im Zeitspalt (In Time's Rift), Meister frankly addresses mortality and the nothingness of our existence as both mind and body decay into death. His poetry is noted for is spare brevity and difficult syntax and has been compared to the work of Romanian poet Paul Celan (1920 - 1970), Meister's contemporary in German letters. However, despite writing 16 collections of verse, Meister was not involved with the dominant literary and cultural elite and his works were relatively unknown during his lifetime.
Contents

Reviews

[Matthew · Rating 2 out of 5]

I love that this has the original German and an English translation. Though my German is terrible, I could see that many choices were made in the translation, of course. I don't know if a better translation is possible. I didn't get much from these poems, unfortunately.

[Zack]

låter säkert bättre på tyska

[SARDON · Rating 4 out of 5]

Though philosopher-poets may be a rare breed in the cultural traditions of certain countries, there is no such rarity in the history of German letters. Meister's work both exemplifies this fact and also sharply diverges from the often nebulous metaphysics associated with his national predecessors, particularly Romantics such as Hölderlin and Novalis.

Crafting his own space within the stark aesthetics of existentialism and expressionism, Meister was one of those rare poets who could extract the themes of mortality and mutability saturating a war-beleaguered Europe and write about them in an admirably detached yet lucid manner. Of course, similar statements could be said of Gottfried Benn and the Austrian, Georg Trakl; however, neither of those poets possessed the philosophical rigor consistently demonstrated by Meister.

Conveyed through lines taut enough to suggest true minimalism--as opposed to stylistic gimmickry--his striking juxtapositions of the self-conscious mind always trying and failing to think its way through an ultimately indifferent yet self-sufficient cosmos are often both profound and poignant. Whether addressing the self-confining prison of language--"Were I not myself/replete with misery, I/would not/move my tongue."--or human finitude humbled before universal immensity--"the I has to lose,/precisely because/the ether, unconscious,/is the god/of everything."--the sustained thematic tension of knowledge and its futility keeps these poems far from being mere miserablist truisms.

And even if I, along with other reviewers, have suggested a certain aridity regarding the general character of this German poet, acutely drawn moments of sardonic humor do exist in his work: "Salvaged. No/fat man, savoring/a meal in France, rather/his flesh/sated with water, carcass,/blooming white, algae/into the one rose...". And just as notable are those moments when Meister's often impersonal voice lapses to a romantic vulnerability all the more tender for its ceaseless death-awareness: "If we would once again/be given eyes/after some time/in the corpse, in death.../As we made love/you examined/my cranium/very closely."

Though poetry--once the most esteemed of literary forms--has been given a very small corner of the market by philistines-in-suits while philosophy continually becomes further estranged from lived experience by the artifice of academic trends, it is comforting to see the work of a genuinely philosophically-inclined poet no less than Ernst Meister be given a second life. Thanks to the expertise and tenacity of the translators, Graham Foust and Samuel Frederick, we have yet another example of a poet whose obscurity during his lifetime clearly had nothing to do with a lack of depth and originality. This collection, along with the rest of Meister's work published by Wave Books, is highly recommended for those who, while not possessing a blind enthusiasm for life itself, at least find some measure of value in contemplating the strange difficulty of existing as a self-conscious being presently mired in a world of flesh

[Cooper Renner · Rating 3 out of 5]

Though I know very little German, the original poems facing the English translations seem much more musical than the English—alliteration, assonance, repetition of word or partial word. Most of these in content feel like obscure annotations from the poet’s mind. Some are less oblique. To a German reader they must be rather lovely for the sound supporting the images. English is such a bald and flat language for sound—massive vocabulary with little music to it.

[Greg Bem · Rating 4 out of 5]

I felt my insides wretch and moan out of pity or respect, as an entrance to resolution but not quite touching it.

[danielle; ▵ · Rating 1 out of 5]

Didn’t get much from this collection; felt like words removed from meaning.