Variations on No Theme

A psychic portrait of post-Wall Germany, from the most important German poet writing today.

Born in Dresden in 1962, Durs Grünbein is the most significant poet to emerge from the former East Germany. Though he is a poet who is not expressly political, his work emerges from a tumultuous Germany, one where the poet confronts time and history head-on and not only in the abstract.

The thirty-nine poems that make up Variations on No Theme were initially published in German in 1994. They are unsettling, wry, aggressive, sardonic, and deeply seductive. Not quite sonnets, and not quite recognizable in their formal structure, these poems offer, as Helen Vendler put it, a “model of disequilibrium." From the first words: “To digress . . . where to?,” the reader is met with a knowing yet searching intelligence, one that takes the form of a second-person address and brings to life the wrestlings of thought and material reality.

In a brilliant translation by Michael Hofmann, who also provides a new introduction, Variations on No Theme is a masterful, enduring psychic portrait of a mind in its time.