Word for Word: Selected Translations from German Poets

Since the 1960s the English poet Matthew Mead and his German wife Ruth have translated selections from poets to whom they were drawn. This is their own choice from the many memorable poems which they have translated. The collection celebrates a fascinating era of German poetry, to which it forms a uniquely personal introduction.

Matthew Mead once wrote: Of the Germans, Gottfried Benn has said many things to their end, but the important poem by a contemporary is, for me, Sabais’s Generation’.’ This poem confronts Germany’s post-war experience in a way no other German writer has matched. Together with the mysterious, almost spell-like poetry of Johannes Bobrowski, it is one of the highlights of this varied collection, which ranges from the lyrical to the satirical, the witty and sardonic to the surrealist, and the elegiac in Nelly Sachs, a Nobel Prizewinner.

Ruth and Matthew Mead’s selections from Sabais, The People and the Stones’ (1983) and Bobrowski, Shadow Lands’ (1984) are also published by Anvil, as is Matthew Mead’s selected poems The Autumn-Born in Autumn’ (2008). Born in England in 1924, Matthew Mead lived in Germany from 1962 until his death in 2009.