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INGEBORG BACHMANN was born in 1926 in Klagenfurt, a small Austrian city near what were then the German, Yugoslavian and Italian borders, a place where languages and boundaries had a special significance. Although she published only two collections of poetry before being overtaken by a crisis which led her away from the lyric genre, she is one of the most significant German poets of the twentieth century. Bachmann’s arrival on the poetry scene with her first collection, Die gestundete Zeit (Mortgaged time) in 1953 was a major media event. At the age of 27 she was awarded the coveted prize of the 'Gruppe 47', and a year later the news magazine Der Spiegel ran a title story and cover photograph of her. Her initial celebrity had as much to do with her exoticism as with the sense that she gave voice to a particular historical moment. She challenged the expansive consumerist thinking and security of the restorative programmes of the 1950s, by illuminating an altogether darker side of progress.

Don't turn around.
Lace up your shoe.
Chase back the dogs.
Throw the fish in the sea.
Extinguish the lupins.
Harder days are coming.

   Bachmann managed to create a new modern poetic language which was at once of its time, yet did not obscure its roots in German tradition. Striking are the many genitive metaphors in which temporal and spatial categories threaten to collapse into one another, the shifting rhythms, the lack of rhymes, and the fusion of abstract language with powerfully concrete images. Her second collection of 1956 Anrufung des großen Bären (Invocation of the Great Bear) shows a distinct development of her thought. Her relation to the world is more sober and there is an increased preoccupation with language as a subject. In one sense Bachmann had an overwhelming confidence in the utopian potential of the poetic word. This was expressed famously in her poem ‘Böhmen liegt am Meer’ (‘Bohemia lies by the Sea’): ‘I border still on a word and on a different land,/I border like little else, on everything more and more’. But she became increasingly aware of the possible contamination of the word and the counterfeit currency of contemporary word-tricksters. Her linguistic scepticism had a philosophical root in her studies of Wittgenstein and Heidegger, and her later poems and her Frankfurt lectures ‘Probleme zeitgenössischer Dichtung’ (‘Problems of Contemporary Poetry’) are part of a continuing reflection on the possibilities and inadequacies of language. Amongst her handful of final poems ‘Keine Delikatessen’ (‘No delicacies’) of 1963 records a decision to abandon the lyric mode.

Should I
dress up a metaphor
with an almond blossom?
Crucify syntax
on a trick of light?
Who will beat their brains
over such superfluities -

   Bachmann did not in fact stop writing poems completely, but shifted her energies into other genres: her short-story collections, radio plays, libretti for Heinz Werner Henze’s operas, and especially her first novel Malina of 1971, a dark, complex work that was intended as the first part of a trilogy Todesarten (Ways of Dying).  This was never completed: only nine years after she was awarded the prestigious Büchner prize, she died, aged 47, in a fire in her apartment.

   Bachmann’s antifascist credentials and her commitment to peace are well known. Indeed she was to claim that her childhood came to an end when Hitler and his troops marched triumphantly into the main city square of Klagenfurt. The ‘War Diary’, published in English here for the first time, is however a far more artless and personal account of war. Far from the elliptical voice most readily associated with Bachmann, one is struck by the directness and simple honesty of the piece; the passions, stubbornness, and humour of a young woman, and her real fear, are all profoundly moving. But one also gets a sense of her literary tastes at this time (Baudelaire, Rilke and Mann) and the philosophical fascination which would lead to her academic career and, one might add, the clarity and precision of her later writing. The five poems are from her literary estate. They were not intended for publication, but they were nevertheless not destroyed, as was the case with many other letters and poems. Although ‘William Turner: Gegenlicht’, ‘Bibliotheken’ and Wartesaal’ have been published in a journal, none of the poems presented here has appeared in English before; and ‘Jakobs Ring’ and ‘Der Gastfreund’ appear in German for the first time too. These poems belong to two distinct periods of her life. Although the forensic work that would permit precise dating has not been done, it can safely be assumed that Jakobs Ring and Der Gastfreund were written in the 1940s, and that the other poems belong to the period of the late 1950s or early 1960s. The critic Hans Höller has made a strong argument that Bachmann’s early and late poems are best read together, and indeed without the unifying vision of a discrete creative period associated with a collection, they appear to offer a more transparent commentary on the development of her thought and work. Both early poems suggest a strong biographical frame of reference, although much must remain speculation until more of her biographical writing and correspondence is released for publication -something not expected in my lifetime. What can be said with confidence is that both share the rich, cryptic and archly poetic language of the early period with its frequent mythic reference, and seem to echo works of her fellow poet Paul Celan. The translators argue that the title of ‘Jakobs Ring’ refers to the complex mandala, the eighteenth minor cycle of which is the Israel cycle. ‘Der Gastfreund’ makes the characteristic link between love, language and identity in a strikingly sensual diction. The three final poems demonstrate the spare and reduced mode of her later work, which speaks with a greater assurance paradoxically as it assumes a greater intimacy with loss. The loss here is once again of language, intimacy and self. And yet these poems are not totally despairing: the emphasis on light is interesting as in many of the later poems written after the move to Italy, and in two of these at least there is once again a sense of a ‘bordering’ on life: fingers pointing ‘directly at life or at the sky’ and ‘tracks reaching to the sky’. Finally they bear witness to the painful search for the ‘bright words’ that will communicate that hope.