Poems

by Georg Heym

Georg Heym was one of the towering figures of the great age of modern German poetry despite having drowned at the age of 24. A poet of the big city, he takes the tradition to its limits; his dark imagery and horrific visions, conveyed in tight metric forms of inexorable force, foreshadowing the experience of both world wars. Hasler's is the fullest selection to appear in English.

Genres: Poetry, German Literature, Germany

240 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1984

About the author

Georg Heym was a German writer. He is particularly known for his poetry, representative of early Expressionism.
Heym was born in Hirschberg, Lower Silesia in 1887 to Hermann and Jenny Heym. Throughout his short life, he was constantly in conflict with social conventions. His parents, members of the Wilhemine middle class, had trouble comprehending their son's rebellious behavior. Heym's own attitude towards his parents was paradoxical; on the one hand he held a deep affection for them, but on the other he strongly resisted any attempts to suppress his individuality and autonomy.
In 1900 the Heyms moved to Berlin, and there Georg began unsuccessfully attending a series of different schools. Eventually, he arrived at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Gymnasium at Neuruppin in Brandenburg. He was very unsatisfied, and as a way to achieve some release he began writing poetry. After he graduated and went to study law at Würzburg, he started writing plays as well. However, publishers largely ignored his work.
In 1910 Heym met the poet and writer Simon Guttmann, who invited Heym to join the recently founded Der Neue Club, a descendant of a student society at the University of Berlin. Other members of this Club included Kurt Hiller, Jakob van Hoddis, and Erwin Loewenson (also known as Golo Gangi); often visiting were Else Lasker-Schüler, Gottfried Benn, and Karl Kraus. Although the Club had no actual stated objective, its members all shared a sense of rebellion against contemporary culture and possessed a desire for political and aesthetic upheaval. The Club held "Neopathetisches Cabaret" meetings in which members presented work, and it was here that Heym first gained notice. His poetry immediately attracted praise. In January 1911, Ernst Rowohlt published Heym's first book and the only one to appear in his lifetime: Der ewige Tag (The Eternal Day).
Heym later went through several judicial jobs, none of which he held for long due to his lack of respect for authority. On 16 January 1912, Heym and his friend Ernst Balcke went on a skating trip to the frozen river Havel. They never returned. A few days later their bodies were found. Appearances indicated that Balcke had fallen through the ice and Heym had attempted to save him but fell in as well. Heym remained alive for half an hour, calling out for help. His cries were heard by some nearby forestry workers, but they were unable to reach him.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg...

Reviews

[Cielo d'Irlanda · Rating 5 out of 5]

"POESIE" è un'importante opera nella quale si fondono l'anima del poeta Georg Heym e il nobile impegno del traduttore Sergio Baldelli, che ci consegna un'accurata raccolta difficilmente realizzabile senza una grande passione per la poesia, lo studio approfondito delle lingue, l'onestà intellettuale.
Tali elementi costituiscono garanzia di qualità e fedeltà ai componimenti originali in lingua tedesca, presenti nel libro accanto alle liriche in italiano.
Il traduttore rende così omaggio alla grande sensibilità di un poeta che, pur nella sua breve vita, ci ha lasciato un'eredità di poesie ricche di vivide immagini della natura, del quotidiano e della nostra storia, attraverso le quali esprime i comuni stati d'animo che incontra l'uomo nel corso della sua esistenza.
In virtù di questo, "POESIE" è un libro che parla direttamente al cuore di ognuno di noi.

[Barry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Never thought I would find a true heir of Baudelaire and Rimbaud in German. Sometimes descends to Goth cliche, but there are amazing things here.

[Tighy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read Heym for the first time and it made me goosebumps, especially when I read the first poems ... I didn't expect to read anything like that. In Heym's poetry you are dragged into an atmosphere full of the turmoil of a land beyond our passing world, beyond time, beyond suffering, love, mourning and joy. Conceiving everything as under the impulse of a Luciferian obsession, he forces his reader to look at human fragility in horror, using fundamental motives that intertwine eachother, such as the motive of the dead, the end of the world, the detainees, the disabled, the endless journey, of winter or night.
The one who tried to regain man's centrality, competing with god in creating his own universe, perished at just 24 years old in the icy water of the Havel River.

[elderfoil...the whatever champion · Rating 5 out of 5]

a. top dog Heym never disappoints...now we will call the beast by its own name...

b. yikes; utterly relentless; unless you're open to apocalyptic, don't

c. while reading "The Night," two ants that weren't there crawled across the bottom white of the page

d. Van Gogh-lover; pg. 128-9, "Printemps," (now also the name of a French department store chain)

e. rather untranslatable; this edition by Hasler tries to retain Heym's rhymes and meters, rendering many of the poems almost unreadable in a way---choppy, discordant, missing their composition

f. dying in 1912, the third month of his twenty-fourth year

[Klaus Mattes · Rating 5 out of 5]

Das Erscheinen seines ersten Gedichtbands, der nicht unbedingt repräsentativ fürs Gesamtwerk war, hat er noch erlebt. Der Berliner starb jung. Mit nicht einmal 25 Jahren ertrank er beim Eislaufen. Zu der Zeit war der Stil, als dessen größter Meister er meines Erachtens gelten darf, der Expressionismus, noch nicht einmal definiert worden. Auch wenn ihm der junge Gottfried Benn hart auf den Fersen war.
Dennoch ist Heym ein Muster-Expressionist. Allenthalben sind bei ihm Gewalt, Tod, Wahnsinn, Krieg, Krankheit, Untergang gegenwärtig. Nietzsche-Einfluss ist auch unverkennbar. Weder Humor noch Frauenliebe lagen ihm wirklich. Und doch gibt es sehr zarte Szenen mit Kindern und friedliche Landschaften. Dieses typisch expressionistische Vitalisieren an sich unbelebter Objekte hat er. Hingegen ist seine Neigung zu Balladen und lang ausschwingenden Sätzen eher kein Expressionismus.
Wie groß und wie faschistisch wäre er vielleicht noch geworden? (Vergleiche: Gottfried Benn!) Er, der, anders als viele bekannte Expressionisten, kein Jude war, er, der gern über Getötete schrieb. Man weiß das nicht.

Nacht

Der graue Himmel hängt mit Wolken tief,
Darin ein kurzer, gelber Schein so tot
Hinirrt und stirbt, am trüben Ufer hin
Lehnen die alten Häuser, schwarz und schief

Mit spitzen Hüten. Und der Regen rauscht
In öden Straßen und in Gassen krumm.
Stimmen ferne im Dunkel. – Wieder stumm.
Und nur der dichte Regen rauscht und rauscht.

Am Wasser, in dem nassen Flackerschein
Der Lampen, manchmal geht ein Wandrer noch,
Im Sturm, den Hut tief in die Stirn hinein.

Und wenig kleine Lichter sind verstreut
Im Häuserdunkel. Doch der Strom zieht ewig
Unter der Brücke fort in Dunkel weit.

[Claudia Ciardi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Heym’s poetry has the melting taste of melancholy. All its texture seems to wait for abandon. The youg life of this poet, broken while he was skating on the ice of river Havel, is an offer done to the deities of the City (Der Gott der Stadt, as one of his poems plays). High tribute to Berlin by a romantic soul, pregnant of Classical German lyricism, who’s become a peculiar fascinating tongue of European poetic tradition mixed to the new mood of Metropolis.
A new Italian translation of Georg Heym’s lyric was edited by Claudia Ciardi and published by Via del Vento edizioni / "Ci invitarono i cortili", December 2011:
http://www.viadelvento.it/catalogo/sc...

[Joseph Hirsch · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is my first protracted exposure to Georg Heym (I've read samples of his work in larger collections before). Heym is lumped in with other German expressionists (perhaps rightly so) but for me these poems have more of a Gothic or late Romantic feel to them. Some of the poems deal with death and decay, and Heym's descriptive powers are morbid and precise enough to satisfy the dourest Lovecraft or Poe fan. Heym has been compared to Baudelaire, but unlike the author of Fleurs de Mal, the German doesn't seem to revel in wickedness or even acknowledge much of a sexual component to it. There's a curious, fatalistic element to the darker poems, as if the unseen narrator is more concerned with observation than revelry.

There is also some beautiful "nature poesy" in the book, little epigrammatic paeans to golden autumns and winter's frost. If it isn't already obvious to the reader, Heym is hard to categorize or pigeon-hole, but since it isn't necessary to classify poets like butterflies in a collection, it's not worth losing sleep over. Perhaps he could best be described as building a literary bridge between the romantic and expressionistic movements, straddling the time when man could bemoan his fall from grace to that time where man started fearing God was an implacable steel machine. Suffice it to say that he is a great poet, who, notwithstanding his premature death, demonstrates total command of the form, especially in the longer multi-part poems.

The German major in me disagrees with some of the translator's word choices (for instance he opts for "sable" a few times when I would have chosen "black"), but the ultimate effect of Herr Hasler's diligence and faithfulness to the original text is undeniable. I look forward to reading some of Heym's fiction, starting with "Der Dieb"/ "The Thief."