Johannes Bobrowski, Leila Vennewitz (Tr.) Darkness and a Little Light

Annotation

East German poet Bobrowski (1917-1965) wrote darkly beautiful, pensive stories reflecting his Jewish, German and Eastern European ancestry, his sense of displacement (he was interned in a Russian POW camp until 1949) and his yearning for a vanished way of life more rooted in nature and tradition. Several of these 12 deftly translated stories are suggestive, fragmentary sketches or anecdotes; some stitch together overheard conversations, memories and night thoughts, like the haunting title piece, which oscillates between affirmation and existential despair. Others resemble wish-fulfillment fairy tales; for example, "Lithuanian Story," about a beggar who throws coins into a lake, hoping to drown a Tsarist general, or "Mouse Feast," in which an elderly Jewish shopkeeper desperately asks the moon how to respond to the German invasion of his native Poland. The collection's strongest story, "Boehlendorff," magnificently profiles fiery, erratic Baltic poet Kasimir Boehlendorff, charting his wanderings in revolutionary Europe between 1797 and 1825. The bard's prefigurement of a new secular order that is free from political oppression and religious superstition ends ironically, with his suicide.