The Night Begins With a Question: XXV Austrian Poems, 1978-2002

Many of the poets who spring to mind when we think of German poetry in English translation are Austrians - at least 'by formation' (as the late Dame Muriel Spark spoke of her Scottishness). Mostly born in the post-war Second Republic, during the politically riven First Republic subsumed in 1938 into Nazi Greater Germany, or into the richly traditional, multi-cultural Austro-Hungarian Empire, dismembered in 1918, Rainer Maria Rilke, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Georg Trakl, Paul Celan, Rose Ausländer, Ingeborg Bachmann, Erich Fried, Ilse Aichinger, Ernst Jandl, Friederike Mayröcker, Raoul Schrott and Evelyn Schlag are poets whose names many readers of modern poetry will recognize.

The present anthology collects work by several of these, placing them - in new translations by Scottish poets - in the company of some of their Austrian contemporaries. When Franz-Josef Murau, hero of Thomas Bernhard's novel Die Auslöschung (Extinction), expresses his love for Ingeborg Bachmann's great poem 'Böhem liegt am Meer' (which opens this collection), he calls it 'so Austrian, but at the same time so permeated by the whole world, and by the world surrounding this world'. Something similar might be said of each of poems in this compact and vital selection.

This is the latest addition to the European Originals series which has previously showcased Scottish, Finnish and Hungarian poetry.