Six Poems (1952–1964)

Translated from the German by W.D. JACKSON

Ingeborg Bachmann was an Austrian poet, born in 1926, who also worked in other genres. She lived under war conditions in the market town of Klagenfurt between the ages of twelve and eighteen. Before the war her father had been a headmaster. He then became a Nazi officer, serving mainly in the East. Bachmann later said that her childhood came to an end in 1938, when the Nazis marched into the main square of Klagenfurt, and the ‘bawling, singing and marching’ went on for weeks…

Nearly all of Bachmann’s more important poems were written in the fifties in the aftermath of the war. Many of their apparent difficulties disappear if one remembers this and takes them as – for the most part metaphorical – representations of a defeated and devastated society in the process of redefining itself and trying to recover from whatever had happened. She was oppressed by the fact that she could see no reason why similar inhumanity and mass-destruction should not afflict the world again.

‘It is probably too late for the world, but for the individual there always remains a chance.’
                                                                                                                              Joseph Brodsky

1 Early Noon

Quietly the lime turns green, and summer’s show begins.
The day-moon, shining mattly, shimmers
far from the cities.
                Noon already.
                And already the sun-beams stir in the well;
the märchen-bird’s broken wing has already
fluttered beneath the debris.
Disfigured from throwing stones, a hand
sinks in the growing corn.

Where the skies of Germany blacken the earth,
...