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When a critic or reviewer approaches work in translation from a language he doesn't know, he can only hope that the translator has performed his work well. Given the long history of Matthew and Ruth Mead's translations of Johannes Bobrowski's poetry, such a trust seems well-placed and one might, in fact, better serve the public by referring to the English versions as Bobrowski/Mead. But the locales and ideas, and apparently even the cadences, are Bobrowski's, and -- besides -- our tradition tends to dictate against granting a translator such status.
 The Meads' translations, collected first in Shadow Land (Donald Carroll, 1966; 2nd ed. 1967) and later in the much larger Shadowlands (New Directions, 1984) have certainly withstood the scrutiny of the decades, and it may in fact be Matthew Mead's destiny to be remembered only as translator and not as a poet in own right. (Something similar has occurred, so far anyway, with Edwin Muir and the translations of Kafka that he and his wife Willa prepared).
What is it about Bobrowski's work that still draws readers to it, almost four decades after his early death in 1965? First, to be sure, there is strangeness and novelty -- an insider's look at two cultures quite foreign to most of us: an earlier, northeastern European rural culture, which mixes Russian, German, Pole and Jew, and a later, Soviet-controlled East German culture, a culture now as consigned to the history books as the first. But there is also a tone, a matter of voice, an approach to the world which, as Gordon Lish noted privately, is not dissimilar to that of Jack Gilbert, a younger poet whose work Bobrowski almost certainly never saw (though the reverse need not be true): a tone which combines a stoic, stony-eyed look at the people around the poet and the events which envelop them with a Romantic, backward glance by which the poet, either through attachment to tradition (Bobrowski) or the operation of a disassociating personality (Gilbert), sees himself from the outside, as a character, who can be alternately ennobled or castigated by the poet, but who -- either way -- assumes a stance larger than the ordinary man: a stance and character worthy of memorialization. The operation of this Romanticism is perhaps less self-serving in Bobrowski's case -- owing, I think, to the power of his tradition, though the poet's personality may be just as decisive a factor -- which in some ways renders the poems more welcoming, even if Gilbert is arguably the greater poet.
Perhaps my favorite poem (I have only the smaller Carroll collection) is "Dead Language," a precise evocation of place balanced against a nebulous past, which is, perhaps, the "meaning" of the poem -- that what one has to hand can be known but not all of the story which led to it. Bobrowski can approach this sort of "theme" naturally, of course, instinctively, because he lived in a place in which the present was always housed in the relics of the past: old towns, old buildings, old fields, old associations. We Americans tend to confront such places and ideas nostalgically -- since we lack much in the way of a past -- while Bobrowski and his peers are, as it were, drowning in the water "Dead Language" summons up.
He with the beating wings
outside who brushes the door,
that is your brother, you hear him.
Laurio he says, water,
a bow, colourless, deep.
Is it an angel, then, who approaches? Or Hermes? Or perhaps just a bird, since this same brother is later described in purely natural terms -- otter, cricket, hornet, perhaps even water itself? Whoever, whatever he is, he speaks the dead language, though the poet too understands it. And why is any language dead? Because all those who spoke it are dead. It is not simply metaphor -- it is a death of hundreds, thousands, perhaps millions of people. A past.
But as even that elliptical first stanza makes clear, Bobrowski is not teaching lessons. He is creating a world. Notice how subtly, in moving from line 4 to 5, the water becomes a boat moving over the depths, recalling something as mundane as the importance of waterways to life in the ancient (and not so ancient) past as well as the nautical skills of the "Northmen" -- not simply the Vikings who terrorized much of medieval Europe but also the more anceint Angles and Saxons who sailed from "Germany" and "Denmark" to conquer England.
The dead are still present. "I dwell in your ear," the brother points out. And though Bobrowski offers advice -- "Tell him you do not / want to listen" -- it does no good; the brother cannot be shut out --
he comes, an otter, he comes
swarming like hornets, he cries,
a cricket, he grows with the marsh
under your house, he whispers
in the well. . . .
An almost phantasmagoric series of shifts, but all of which represent a kind of flow: river creature to swarming insect to unignorable insect song to invasion by water. The past, one practically has to read, is a natural power which cannot be impeded, and the language it speaks, far from being dead itself, brings death --
smordis you hear,
your black alder will wither,
and die at the fence tomorrow.
Bobrowski's power is such that he creates a series of linked images, all extraordinarily evocative of riverine culture and none conventionally tragic or dark, in order to force the reader to a notably desperate conclusion, an almost beatific invitation to despair. The beating wings of stanza one have become the angel of death.
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