Ernst Meister, according to poet and translator Michael Hamburger, wrote poetry that was “among the best German poetry” written in the 20 years after the Second World War. His was a poetry that, as he often said, arose out of nothing, the nothing that exists between words, the space between a word and a concept, the silence where language ceases to speak.

     Meister was born in 1911 in Haspe, near Hagen in Germany. He studied theology, philosophy and German, and published his first volume of poetry in 1932. During the war, he served in France and Italy, returning to his studies and to work in the family factory when it was over. He published no poems between 1932 and 1954, but, as he began to publish again, he also began to win literary prizes. Besides being a poet, Meister was also a painter whose work was shown in many exhibitions around this time. He died in 1979.

     His poetry is often regarded as philosophical, and critics have sometimes said they could not understand it. But it is not in fact difficult poetry or, if there is difficulty in it, it lies in the fact that it demands a great deal of work on the part of the reader. Full of religious imagery, his poetry plays with words and explores the way ambiguities in language give rise to alternative trains of thought.

     The three translations here are from my 2003 book Between Nothing and Nothing (Arc Publications), and I have chosen them because they illustrate the characteristic challenges of translating Meister fairly well. The first is typical of the succinct reflection on a natural phenomenon, which leads to a comparison with his own state and is a poem in which, as in many of Meister’s poems, layout is crucial. The second poem contains the line from which the title of the English collection is taken, and is, perhaps, an unusually optimistic poem, but typical of the incantatory repetition Meister often favoured. In the third poem a typical Meister word “aufgehoben” (which means both “undone, crossed-out” and “kept, preserved”) has no equivalent in English, and so in this version the line-layout is called into service in a way the poet uses elsewhere to assist in creating the ambiguity: here it is the ambiguity between “is and is not” and “is and is not held”.

     Meister’s poetry is both serious and playful. He deals with the big issues of life, love, and death, but he delights in catching the reader out. A particular trick was to hide his name, in anagrams, in his poems. His poetry is characterised, more than anything, by compression: he is sparing with language, leaving the greatest possible space for poetic effects on the mind of his reader.

That Flickering

That flickering, that
Self-recital
of light conjured
by a wind-moved leaf

Evening comes
and I –
weighted with being human –
walk up
and down.

Das Geflimmer

Das geflimmer, das
Sicherzählen
des Scheins dank
windbewegten Blattes.

Der Abend kommt,
wo ich,
am Menschen schleppend,
hin und
her geh.

Here

Here
bent double
between nothing and nothing
I say love.
Here, on the
roundabout chance
I say love.
Here, battered by
hollow heavens
holding fast
to blades of earth,
here, born of
sighs, conceived
of edge
upon edge
I say love.

Hier

Hier,
gekrümmt
zwischen zwei Nichtsen,
sage ich Liebe.
Hier, auf dem
Zufallskreisel
sage ich Liebe.
Hier, von den hohlen
Himmeln bedrängt,
an Halmen
des Erdreichs mich haltend,
hier, aus dem
Seufzer geboren,
von Abhang
und Abhang gezeugt,
sage ich Liebe.

To Be A Ghost

To Be A Ghost
or dust: all one
in the universe.

Nothing is there
in the void, to
touch its edge.

Which is not
there at all.
What is is

and is not
held in the wall-less vessel
of space.

Geist Zu Sein

Geist Zu Sein
oder Staub, es ist
dasselbe im All.

Nichts ist, um
an den Rand zu reichen
der Leere.

Überhaupt
gibt es ihn nicht.
Was ist, ist

und ist aufgehoben
im wandlosen Gefäβ
des Raums.