Miss Deutsch and Mr Yarmolinsky translate four of those poems by Klabund which the wind failed to scatter. They print Klemm, Becher, Leonhardt, Schickele, and worse. On the other hand they omit Jakob van Hoddis, who left behind him not forty volumes, but sixteen brief poems, finished roughly but perfectly, remarkable for movement, for thunder, for a cruel extreme fantasy. His peculiar qualities would be hard to recapture in English, but they are worth the effort. The absence of Hasenclever is less important; he is repeated by the other expressionists. With Hans Arp the case is different. He is sometimes called the greatest living German poet, but he is also called a dadaist, which may explain his exclusion even from an anthology which is designed "to convey the mood and manner of current German verse."
Its picture of this mood and manner could hardly be just, but it is not lacking entirely in force. It includes Mombert (the "lonely cosmic tear") and Heym, whose poems have the imaginative brutality of Munich posters. It prints a single poem by Theodor Däubler and another by Alfred Lichtenstein. It translates Gottfried Benn, who believes in a return to primitive passions and who writes with particular gusto about dissections in the morgue. Evidently the translators do not fear the most brutal naturalism. On the other hand, paradoxically, they have a weakness for the decorative and are capable of prettifying passages where the original is rough and new. They avoid real novelty almost as strictly as they avoid obscurity: an attitude which, though honest, prevents their doing justice to some of the best of modern poetry.
But happily not to all. If this wind which blew his pages from the grasp of Klabund, if this providential wind arose to sweep away everything which is pompous, verbose, sentimental, or careless from contemporary German verse, there would still remain a considerable body of poetry, and it would retain a perfume of its own, a combination of fantasy with barbarity, pessimism, and culture which can be found in no other literature, and which derives neither from Whitman nor Mallarmé. The real task of Miss Deutsch and Mr Yarmolinsky was to convey this perfume, and fortunately it was strong enough to endure a translation less honest and even more fragmentary than theirs.
