ABSTRACT
Thomas Bernhard (1931-1989) is so much better known as a novelist and playwright that few readers will have suspected a poetic debut for the author of The Voice Imitator (1978), The Loser (1983), Woodcutters (1984), and Extinction (1986). In a lively and probing preface to his translation of the Austrian writer’s second and third volumes of poetry, James Reidel elucidates Bernhard’s almost exclusive focus on poetry throughout the 1950s, which culminated in the publication of Auf der Erde und in der Hölle (On Earth and in Hell) in 1957 and then, the next year, of both In Hora Mortis and Unter dem Eisen des Mondes. It is a pity that Princeton University Press did not have Reidel translate the first volume as well. Both volumes rendered here are sequences of untitled poems and, with the initial book, form a trilogy.
