Selected Poems

by David Constantine

The strange and beautiful language of his late poems is re-created in these remarkable verse translations. Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843) was one of Europe's greatest poets. Constantine's translations make him accessible, even informal. This is a stimulating introduction to the work of a poet who addresses us ever more urgently as the millennium ends. This edition contains several new translations, including one of the great elegy "" - Bread and Wine."" The odes and hymns are more fully represented, and there are further extracts, in an equivalent English, from Hölderlin's extraordinary German versions of Sophocles.

Genres: Poetry

160 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1991

About the author

Born in 1944, David Constantine worked for thirty years as a university teacher of German language and literature. He has published several volumes of poetry, most recently, Nine Fathom Deep (2009). He is a translator of Hölderlin, Brecht, Goethe, Kleist, Michaux and Jaccottet. In 2003 his translation of Hans Magnus Enzensberger's Lighter Than Air won the Corneliu M Popescu Prize for European Poetry Translation. His translation of Goethe's Faust, Part I was published by Penguin in 2005; Part II in April 2009. He is also author of one novel, Davies, and Fields of Fire: A Life of Sir William Hamilton. His four short story collections are Back at the Spike, the highly acclaimed Under the Dam (Comma, 2005), and The Shieling (Comma, 2009), which was shortlisted for the 2010 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award. Constantine's story 'Tea at the Midland' won the BBC National Short Story Award 2010, and won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award in 2013 for the collection (Comma Press, 2012). He lives in Oxford where, for ten years, he edited Modern Poetry in Translation with his wife Helen (until 2011). David's short story 'In Another Country' has been adapted into 45 Years - a major Film4-funded feature film, directed by Andrew Haigh and starring Tom Courtenay & Charlotte Rampling. This film won two silver bear awards at the Berlinale International Film festival in February 2015. David is also the author of the forthcoming novel, released by Comma Press, The Life-Writer.

Reviews

[Jess · Rating 2 out of 5]

So it turns out Holderlin is best experiences set to music and in German.

I have had this for a long time, traveling back and forth across the country with it thinking "I like Ode to Joy, I'll probably enjoy the rest of his poetry."

Nah uh.

That RH2017 challenge is out of the way, at least...