ABSTRACT
There are moments in our experience of the world when the familiar becomes unfamiliar, when hard facts we thought we could perceive clearly and name accurately turn into omens or indecipherable signs. Attentiveness to these unsettling instants is one of the qualities admirably developed in the concise, sometimes cryptic, poetry of Peter Huchel (1903-1981), a major selection of which—The Garden of Theophrastus—has been translated, impeccably, by Michael Hamburger.
