Translated here by David Constantine and Tom Kuhn, Love Poems begins a major collaboration by these two gifted Oxford scholars to bring the vast body of Papa’s poetry into English. Upon a lifetime of reflection, I have found that the poems will do different things to each who reads them, but most important, I want people to enjoy my father’s poems and for them to be remembered.

—BARBARA BRECHT-SCHALL,

from an interview with Robert Weil,
Berlin, January 2014

TRANSLATORS’ INTRODUCTION

T. S. Eliot, writing on Tennyson, found in him “three qualities which are seldom found together except in the greatest poets: abundance, variety, and complete competence.” Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) is a great poet, one of the three or four best in the whole of German literature (a literature not short of first-rate poetry). He is abundant: the Berlin-­Frankfurt edition of his complete works contains more than two thousand poems. He is various, on many topics, from shifting points of view, in all the registers. He is widely eclectic, a thieving magpie of much of world literature, he took from Greece and Rome, China, Japan, Britain, America, his own compatriots, the living and the long dead, across frontiers of space and time. His technical virtuosity in traditional forms and in forms he invented or developed for his own needs, is breathtaking. He works effectively in hexameters, in tight rhyming quatrains, sonnets, ballads, unrhyming verse in irregular meters and in numerous other shapes and forms as the poetic occasion demands. For any just assessment of his total poetic oeuvre we should have to consider his dramas, too: the tense, sometimes violent verse of Saint Joan of the Stockyards, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, and (out of Hölderlin’s idiosyncratic translation) Antigone; the poignant lyricism of passages in The Good Person of Szechwan, the parodistic Shakespearian blank verse of Arturo Ui; the songs in many plays; and more, much more, besides. Brecht was a thorough poet. Throughout his writing life he thought constantly about the idea and the practice of poetry, about forms, about their nature, possibilities, best uses; and he adapted his thinking and his practice continually to answer the violently disrupting demands of the times and the places he lived in. This constant reflection on poetry, and the lifelong making of poetry, produced in Brecht a rare coherence of important things to say and of apt ways of saying them.

In the English-speaking world Brecht is still best known as a dramatist and theoretician on drama; and even his standing there is perhaps less than it should be since some in Britain and America—those who have not read his work, or not with an open mind—wrongly think of him as dogmatically bound into a politics which, so the “reasoning” goes, has no relevance since the walls came down. We will not argue against that wrong view here. But any doubters about Brecht might be helped into a closer understanding of him through the poetry. Poetry, by its very nature, resists being reduced to any dogmatic, let alone fundamentalist, view of the world. Poems may debate with an ideology but won’t be bound by it. Brecht knew that; he knew very well what the peculiar resources and effects of poetry are. He knew that poetry can help in ways which are peculiarly its own.