Congratulations to Dr Tom Kuhn, Tutorial Fellow in German at St Hugh’s, on the nomination of his book, The Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht, co-edited with David Constantine, as a book of the year in the Times Literary Supplement.
Brecht is one of the great poets of German literature (a literature not short on poets) and one of the great European modernists. Although better known as a dramatist, his poetic oeuvre is considerable and covers every variety of genre and subject matter, from children’s rhymes to Communist marching songs, by way of love sonnets, narrative ballads, poems and songs of protest, and indeed poems on almost all that makes for a life worthy of a human being.
The new English Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht, translated and edited by Tom Kuhn and David Constantine (New York, W.W. Norton, 2018), was some seven years in the making. It contains over 1,200 poems and is by far the most comprehensive collection to date.
