Porcelain: Poem on the Downfall of My City (The German List) - Hardcover

Grünbein, Durs

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0857427814 ISBN 13: 9780857427816

Publisher: Seagull Books, 2020

Synopsis

A book-length cycle of forty-nine poems written over the course of more than a decade that together serve as a lament for Durs Grünbein’s hometown, Dresden, which was destroyed in the Allied firebombing of February 1945. 

Porcelain is a book-length cycle of forty-nine poems written over the course of more than a decade that together serve as a lament for Durs Grünbein’s hometown, Dresden, which was destroyed in the Allied firebombing of February 1945. The book is at once a history and “declaration of love” to the famed “Venice on the Elbe,” so catastrophically razed by British bombs; a musical fusion of eyewitness accounts, family memories, and stories, of monuments and relics; the story of the city’s destiny as seen through a prism of biographical enigmas, its intimate relation to the “white gold” porcelain that made its fortune and reflections on the power and limits of poetry. Musical, fractured, ironic, and elegiac, Porcelain is controversial, too, in setting itself against what Grünbein calls the “myth” of the Germans as innocent victims of a war crime. At the same time, it never loses sight of the horror deliberately visited on an unwitting civilian population, nor the devastation that looms so large in the German memory. Published for the first time in English, on the seventy-fifth year anniversary of the firebombing, this edition contains new images, notes, Grünbein’s own reflections, and an additional canto—an extraordinary act of poetic kintsugi for the fractured remains of Dresden’s memory.
 

About this title

About the Authors

Durs Grünbein was born in Dresden in 1962, and he now lives in Berlin and Rome. He is professor of poetics and aesthetics at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. He has written more than twenty-five books, including, most recently, Porcelain, also published by Seagull Books.

Karen Leeder is a writer, translator, and academic, and teaches German at New College, Oxford, where she works on modern poetry. For Seagull Books, she has translated works by Durs Grünbein, Ulrike Almut Sandig, and Michael Krüger.

Edition details

• Publisher: Seagull Books
• Publication date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0857427814
• ISBN 13: 9780857427816
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 96