Oberlin College Press

Gunter Eich

VALUABLE NAIL (translated by Stuart Friebert, David Walker & David Young)

Paper $14.95 (ISBN 0-932440-09-6) Cloth $19.95 (ISBN 0-932440-08-8)

After World War II the German language, distorted by propaganda and shattered by lies, seemed lost as a vehicle for literary expression. It was Gunter Eich, a soldier and prisoner of war, who most of all among his generation began to resurrect his native tongue as a language for poetry. He accomplished this through an honesty and simplicity that developed into increasingly complex poetic structures and the prose poems, "moles," of his old age.

This volume, published in 1981, was the first to bring Germany's most important postwar poet to the attention of English-speaking readers. It belongs in the library of anyone who cares about modern and postmodern poetry.

DEFINITIVE

And let the snow
come through the door-cracks,
the wind blows, that's his job.

And let Lena be forgotten,
the girl who drank
the spirits from the lamp.

Went into the il-
lustrations of Meyer's Lexicon,
Brehm's Wildlife.

Intestines, mountainranges, beach carrion,
and let the snow
come through the door-cracks

up to the bed, up to the spleen,
where the memory sits,
where Lena sits,

the leopard, the feverish gull,
arithmetic puzzles in yellow
wrappers, by subscription.

And let the wind blow
because that's all he can do
and don't begrudge Lena

one more swig from the lamp
and let the snow
come through the door-cracks.

--Gunter Eich
translated by David Young