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WD Jackson writes: Sarah Kirsch was born in Limlingerode, a small town in what later became the German Democratic Republic, on April 16th, 1935. After school she moved to Halle where she studied biology, having acquired a love of plants and animals from her mother. According to her translator, Margitt Lehbert, “Her given name was Ingrid Bernstein; she changed her first name in protest against Germany’s history and her father’s anti-Semitism . . .” (Winter Music, 1994). While studying for her degree, she became friendly with a number of authors and, in spite of knowing little about poetry, began to write it. In an interview in February 1995 with the Munich author Gunna Wendt, she remarked that if she had known more she might have felt too inhibited to try to write herself. In 1957 she married the poet Rainer Kirsch and later published two books together with him (they were divorced in 1968). From the beginning her poetry concerned itself, in its inimitable way, not only with love and nature but with “unwirklichen Gestalten”, unreal creatures – the invisible, the mythological, the magical. As a member of the East German Writers’ Union in the early 60s, she was expected to conform to socialist realism but declined to do so. In 1968 she moved to East Berlin, where she felt safer: “The correspondents of Western newspapers were there – one couldn’t go missing all of a sudden.” Her writing was more or less tolerated until in 1977 she became involved in the furore surrounding the writer and singer Wolf Biermann, who was summarily exiled by the East German authorities after a concert in Cologne in which he criticized the régime. Sarah Kirsch and many other writers signed a public letter of protest, as a result of which pressure was put on her to leave. In an unpublished section of the interview referred to above, she explained: “My son was in his second year at school, and I knew that either I was going to have to bring him up to tell lies or . . . All around me I could see really young people suffering from always having to conform and lie, lie, lie . . . And so I went.” She was granted an exit visa and emigrated with her son to West Berlin.

Sarah Kirsch has published ten volumes of poetry, as well as prose, and has been awarded the Austrian Prize for European Literature, the West German Critics’ Prize, the Friedrich Hölderlin Prize, the Petrarch Prize, the Heinrich Heine Prize and, most recently, the prestigious Georg Büchner Prize. Since the early 80s she has been living in a converted village school-house in the countryside in Schleswig-Holstein, whose foggy shore-line and sodden landscapes of willows and pastures are prominent in her poetry. She has also travelled extensively since leaving East Germany and seems capable of assimilating virtually anywhere into her writings.

Although politics has seldom been in the foreground of Sarah Kirsch’s writings, one inevitably finds oneself – at any rate in Germany – reading her poetry as a reaction, however indirect, to the historical events she has lived through. In Das simple Leben (1994) – a prose-work in diary-form, interspersed with poems, about the hardships and joys of her life in “T” – she virtually presents the composition of her latest collection, Erlkönigs Tochter, in this way. Her radio is frequently on, and the book includes her reactions, however brief, to the news of the time – the Gulf War and the disintegration of the Soviet Union – as well as descriptions of journeys, usually to read her poetry, through the desolated countryside and cities of the former GDR. It also provides a moving – and amusing – account of receiving her Stasi-files, including the shock of finding out who had informed on whom (“In no other Eastern Bloc country did the secret police have as many voluntary helpers as here”) and “a few funny stories I had long forgotten. One lieutenant-colonel even wrote a report on how, when we were saying goodbye to Eva Maria Hagen with Moses (her son) and some other children, I went up to him where he was standing in plain clothes and almost touched him with my finger: ‘Children, look at this man here: that’s what a tell-tale looks like!’ Or I said to another, ‘Well, aren’t you badly disguised again today!’” Even so, the experience was clearly a disturbing one, and a number of poems in Erlkönigs Tochter are related in one way or another to her “former life”.

Although Sarah Kirsch’s poetry developed in Eastern Europe, it is profoundly relevant as well – as I attempt to show – to the culture not only of Germany’s Wirtschaftswunder but to that of the Western world in general. However, in common with painters like Francis Bacon and Paul Klee (she is herself a painter of watercolours), Sarah Kirsch does not consciously concern herself over-much with where her subject-matter originates: “That’s none of my business”, as she says in Das simple Leben. Her “material” (as she calls it) has remained similar over the years, but her style has gradually perfected itself to such a point that one would now scarcely want to add or remove a syllable. Syllables are in fact what she often works on. As she disarmingly explained in her interview with Gunna Wendt: “It’s like doing an extremely difficult crossword. There is actually only one solution.”

Naturally, the translator can only hope to give some idea of this extraordinary versification. One particular difficulty of translating Sarah Kirsch’s poetry into English is that it is marked by an extremely sparing use of punctuation. In combination with her frequently idiosyncratic syntax, this helps to create a feeling that one is moving beyond the bounds of ‘normal’ language and social conventions. Because German is a highly inflected language the reader is soon able, for the most part, to find his or her way around in sentences which may at first appear as foggy as Kirsch’s landscapes. In English, simply omitting the punctuation – especially in her more recent work – results too often in unintentional ambiguity, lack of clarity and rhythmic awkwardness. I have attempted to solve this problem – and to reproduce the poetry’s sense and rhythmical effects as closely as possible – by the use of the slash.

‘Report from Munich’ is a conflated and partly fictionalized account of two readings, the first of which took place in October 1993 and the other in February 1995. ‘Black Beans’ is from Zaubersprüche (1974) and ‘Winter Music’ from Schneewärme (1989). The remainder of the translations are from Erlkönigs Tochter (1993), the title of which refers to the famous ballad written by Goethe in 1792: