Variations on No Theme

Variations on No Theme was written in 1994, a few years after the reunification of Germany and shortly before Durs Grünbein won the Georg Büchner Prize, Germany's most prestigious literary award, at the age of thirty-three. These translations are by Michael Hofmann, who describes the poems as 'little essays, memories, a lexicon of modern life, autobiography in a solvent of metaphysics'. The sequence captures the dislocations and relocations of that historical moment as well as what it means, in any context, to experience abrupt discontinuity, a sudden loss of coherence and the arrival of possibilities not yet understood and demanding to be met.