Gottfried Benn is one of the greatest poets in the German language. Benn published more than 350 poems, the great majority of which have remained untranslated. It is my goal with this website to remedy this situation by translating the entirety of Benn’s poetry into English.

 

“The Poems” section of this website contain the following chapter contents:

 

 I  Juvenilia (1910)

II  Morgue (1912)

III  Early Expressionism (1912-1914)

IV  Poems of Transcendence (1914-1917)

V  Late Expressionism (1917-1923)

VI  Schutt/Rubble trilogy (1924)

VII  Betäubung/Anathetics (1925)

VIII Spaltung/Division (1925)

IX  Final Years of Weimar Republic (1925-1933)

X  Das Unaufhörliche/The Never-Ending (1930)

XI  Third Reich (1933-1934)

XII  Inner Emigration (1934-1943)

XIII Twenty-Two Poems (1943)

XIV The Static Period (1943-1950)

XV  Fragmente/Fragments (1951)

XVI Distillationen/Distillations (1953)

XVII Aprèslude (1955)

XVIII Final and unpublished Poems

 

To provide the reader with a context and appropriate timeframe, I have divided the individual poems into groups, sometimes using the title of a relevant volume (such as Morgue and Other Poems), but at other times providing my own rubric, such as “The Poems of Early Expressionism”. I have introduced each group with general observations about the themes and style of the poems in that group, and attempted to give a sense of what Benn was trying to achieve at this particular stage of his work.

 

Martin Travers

December 2017