Darkness Spoken : The Collected Poems of Ingeborg Bachmann

Darkness Spoken is the most complete volume of Ingeborg Bachmann’s poetry in English and German. Considered one of the premiere poets of her generation, Bachmann’s various awards include the Georg Büchner Prize, the Berlin Critics Prize, the Bremen Award, and the Austrian State Prize for literature. Darkness Spoken collects her two celebrated books of poetry, as well as the early and late poems not collected in book form. First published by Zephyr Press in 2006, the volume also contains 129 poems released from Bachmann’s archives that had never been translated before. Twenty-five of them also appeared in German for the first time.

Continued research by Peter Fikins on Bachmann’s writing since 2006 as well as his current work on Bachmann’s biography (forthcoming in 2026 from Yale University Press), has drawn him even closer to Bachmann’s poems and deepened his understanding of their context and meaning. For this second revised edition, roughly a quarter of the poems have benefitted from revisions in word choice for the purposes of greater clarity, better syntax or rhythm, or in a few instances, corrections in punctuation and of interpretive errors. Eight poems from Bachmann's youth have also been added that did not appear in the first edition. A few lacunae in the German have also been corrected, allowing this volume to remain the most complete edition of Bachmann’s poetry.

Ingeborg Bachmann was born in 1926 in Klagenfurt, Austria. She studied philosophy at the universities of Innsbruck, Graz, and Vienna, where she wrote her dissertation on Martin Heidegger. In 1953 she re­ceived the poetry prize from Gruppe 47 for her first volume, Borrowed Time (Die gestundete Zeit), after which her second collection, Invocation of the Great Bear (Anrufung des großn Bären), appeared in 1956. Her var­ious awards include the Georg Büchner Prize, the Berlin Critics Prize, the Bremen Award, and the Austrian State Prize for literature. Writing and publishing essays, opera libretti, short stories, and novels as well, she divided her time between Munich, Zurich, Berlin, and Rome, where she died from burns suffered in a fire in her apartment in 1973.

Translator Peter Filkins has published five books of poetry and has translated Bachmann’s The Book of Franza and Requiem for Fanny Goldmann. He is the recipient of an Outstanding Translation Award from the American Literary Translators Association, a Berlin Prize from the American Academy in Berlin, fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, A Leon Levy Center for Biography Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. A graduate of Williams College and Columbia University, he has studied at the University of Vienna with the support of a Fulbright Fellowship and been a Fulbright Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Cultural Studies in Vienna. He teaches courses in translation at Bard College and serves as the Richard B. Fisher Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at Bard College at Simon’s Rock in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.