1944 Diary by Hans Keilson
Author:Hans Keilson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Sonnets
Found among Hans Keilson’s papers after his death in 2011 was a typescript of the following forty-six sonnets, initially misidentified as translations but eventually recognized by Keilson’s editor Roland Spahr as the poems for Hanna Sanders. They were likely typed up while Keilson was still in Delft, but there is no evidence about the extent to which the order of poems in the manuscript matches the order in which they were written.
Keilson clearly intended them for publication at some point, but after the war he apparently did not try to publish them. Much later, he included three of the poems in his 1986 poetry collection Sprachwurzellos (a neologism that might be translated “Languagerootless” or “Uprooted/Unworded”), itself included in Keilson’s collected works in 2005. These were Sonnets XII and XXVI in full and XLIV, about speaking in the enemy’s German language, retitled “Fragment” and with lines 5–8 and 13–14 omitted, thus removing any reference to Hanna and her Dutch.
Given their autobiographical significance, the sonnets were published in the German edition of 1944 Diary. Included here, they are the first translations of Keilson’s poetry into English.
The poems are written in a clipped, tightly coiled German, making use of the language’s grammatical markers to create a wrought, elliptical, intense style that requires a certain care and attention to unpack. Keilson maintains a strict meter and rhyme scheme throughout—almost all the sonnets follow the Shakespearean or Petrarchan pattern—often by eliding word endings, bending the rules of German word order, and occasionally using Dutch words instead of German (for example, Heraut instead of the German Herold, “herald,” to rhyme with the German word Braut, “bride”).
These translations are meant to be poetry, not prose, and I rhymed where I could, but I did let the documentary value of the poems, as the record of Hans and Hanna’s relationship, take priority over alterations in content that might have better conveyed the form.
Download
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.
The Rules Do Not Apply by Ariel Levy(4530)
Bluets by Maggie Nelson(4270)
Too Much and Not the Mood by Durga Chew-Bose(4097)
Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade by Robert Cialdini(3983)
The Motorcycle Diaries by Ernesto Che Guevara(3790)
Walking by Henry David Thoreau(3685)
What If This Were Enough? by Heather Havrilesky(3200)
Schaum's Quick Guide to Writing Great Short Stories by Margaret Lucke(3197)
The Daily Stoic by Holiday Ryan & Hanselman Stephen(3112)
The Day I Stopped Drinking Milk by Sudha Murty(3107)
Why I Write by George Orwell(2780)
The Social Psychology of Inequality by Unknown(2771)
Letters From a Stoic by Seneca(2675)
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bryson Bill(2511)
Insomniac City by Bill Hayes(2402)
Feel Free by Zadie Smith(2380)
A Burst of Light by Audre Lorde(2350)
Upstream by Mary Oliver(2274)
Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst by Robert M. Sapolsky(2179)
