Impromptus: Selected Poems and Some Prose (First American Edition)

Gottfried Benn (author); Michael Hofmann (translator, editor)

ISBN 10: 0374175373 / ISBN 13: 9780374175375

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2013

About this Item

First printing of the first American edition, with full number line. A fine copy in a fine jacket. A clean copy with price ($35.00) intact on front flap. Comes with archival-quality jacket protector. Note: Slightly pulled head of spine (as pictured) on an otherwise beautiful copy. Although not marked in any such way, this book came from the library of poet and literary critic J.D. McClatchy, from his estate in Stonington, Connecticut.

Seller Inventory # McClatchy-514

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Impromptus: Selected Poems and Some Prose (First American Edition)
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York
• Publication Date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374175373
• ISBN 13: 9780374175375
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Fine
• Seller catalogs:
  • Poetry
  • German Literature

About this title

Synopsis

An extraordinary collection of poetry and prose from the master of German expressionism

The first poem in Gottfried Benn's first book, Morgue (1912)—written in an hour, published in a week, and notorious ever after—with its scandalous closing image of an aster sewn into a corpse by a playful medical student, set Benn on the path to celebrity and notoriety. And indeed, mortality, flowers, and powerful aesthetic collisions typify much of his subsequent work.

Over the decades, as Benn suffered the vicissitudes of fate (the death of his mother from cancer; the death of his first wife, Edith; his brief attempt to ingratiate himself with the Nazis, followed by their persecution of him; the suicide of his second wife, Herta), the harsh voice of the poems relented and mellowed. His later poetry—from which Impromptus is chiefly drawn, many of the poems translated into English for the first time—is deeply affecting: it reflects the routines and sorrows and meditations of an intelligent, pessimistic, and experienced man. Written in the low, unupholstered monologue of the poet talking to himself, these works are slender ribbons of speech on the naked edge of song and silence.

With this collection of poems and essays—edited and translated by the award-winning poet Michael Hofmann—Benn, at long last, promises to attain the presence and importance in the English-speaking world that he so richly deserves.

About the Author

Gottfried Benn (1886–1956) earned his medical degree in 1910 and began publishing poems two years later. The leading poet of German expressionism, and the author of brilliant essays and dialogues, he spent both world wars as an officer attached to the German Medical Corps. Benn lived and practiced in Berlin, was married three times, and won the Georg Büchner Prize in 1951. Michael Hofmann is the author of several books of poems and many translations from the German. He edited Twentieth-Century German Poetry (FSG, 2006) and teaches at the University of Florida in Gainesville.