BETWEEN NOTHING AND NOTHING, translated by Jean Boase-Beier, and with an Introduction by John Hartley Williams (Todmorden: Arc Publications, 2003), brings together a selection of seventy-seven of Meister's poems in German with facing-page English translations. Conscious of their only real rival, Richard Dove's translation, entitled NOT ORPHEUS: SELECTED POEMS (Manchester: Carcanet, 1996), the editors have produced a volume that complements this earlier translation very well, reproducing only six poems that overlap with Dove's version.
In any case, Meister's poetry is not likely to be especially familiar to the English-reading public, and this new edition (number 10 in Arc's 'Visible Poets' series) is an excellent introduction to the strange, dark, unsettling voice of this German poet. Certainly one of the things the translation captures well is Meister's ability to freeze a mood in a very few lines, often beautifully, and yet without limiting the emotions present to anything wholly expected. Here is his poem 'After Plunging Thunder' in its entirety:
After plunging thunder/ ponds are smooth again,/ the letters of lightning/ sunk to the bottom/ and,/
as though the simple/ had learnt to think, now/ the waters, which were/ quite dark, dart/ with the silver of fishes.
These same techniques of observation apply to his more static pieces as well, such as these lines from 'Area':
Light/ of chamomile, smell/ of brownish weed,/ iris, a bouquet/ fermented/ among ashes.
More commonly though, Meister poses questions, or offers statements suspended between ideals of belief, and existential despair - a kind of deeply humane, even heroic longing for happiness which seems to be always a gamble against the odds. Typically, in this poem he both asks the question and provides the answer:
And would you leap/ over the well-named/ mountain,/ believing in the/ unknown (as they/ called it)?
With the seeing/ weakness of bones/ you grasp the self and same/ of the real,/ the all-over-everywhere/ uninterrupted.
Occasionally obscure, Meister's poetry embodies a complex of ideas and sensations that nevertheless retains its dignity through the poet's refusal to reduce or combine his materials into a simply-defined unity. He is plainly perplexed in the face of such contraries, and yet he is, one senses, experienced enough to know that to force coherence upon the enigma of his perceptions is to mistake something fundamental about them. Perhaps the best expression here of his curious mixture of life-affirmation and abiding sadness is his poem, 'And Up to the End'
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