Graham Foust and Samuel Frederick have embarked on the project of translating the German post-war poet Ernst Meister, bringing his work to an Anglophone audience for the first time. Foust visited the archives to research Meister in preparation for the translations from Wave. Included here are photos and notes from Foust’s archival discoveries that provide a glimpse of the paper trail left by Meister.
In Time’s Rift (Wave, 2012), Wallless Space (Wave, 2014) and Of Entirety Say the Sentence (Wave, 2015) are translations of Meister's informal final trilogy. Meister’s poetry is known for its engagement with existentialist thought and its terse yet difficult form. His poems are brief but dense, intense but playful, obsessed with mortality and the intersections of the everyday and the infinite.
A FEW NOTES FROM THE MEISTER WORKSPACE (Part 1)
The Ernst Meister Arbeitsstelle at RWTH Aachen University was established in 2001 by the late Axel Gellhaus, who assembled a team of 20 people to work on a critical edition of Meister’s published poems. Gedichte: Textkritische und kommentierte Ausgabe, published by Wallstein Verlag in 2011. The team’s next project is a critical edition of a selection of Meister’s best unpublished poems. Most of the materials here belong to an archive in Münster, but they are temporarily in Aachen so that the team can have easy access to them. Many thanks to Dr. Stephanie Jordans for her hospitality and her many hours of help with our translation project.
Meister and Paul Celan met at a conference on literature and criticism in October of 1957. In 1958, when Meister and his wife Else were passing through Paris, they met up with Celan, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, and Ingeborg Bachmann. Here’s a brief letter from Celan and a rough translation:
Wednesday 12 February 1958
Thank you for the snapshots that you took. I’m pleased with the pictures; it’s pleasant that you captured me like this.
Can you send the photos to the others as well? You can contact Ms. Bachmann through her publishing house in Munich; Enzensberger lives in Stranda, Norway.
My little speech in Bremen—I presume that you didn’t hear it. May I send a copy for your eyes?
Meister owned this dual-language anthology of young American poets, which featured English originals and German translations of poems by Ashbery, O’Hara, Eigner, Guest, Ginsberg, Wieners, and several others. The book was edited by Meister’s friend Walter Höllerer and Gregory Corso. Many of the poems are unmarked, but there are notes and underlining in numerous poems, including these from LeRoi Jones’ “Notes from the Underground”:
The underlined lines in English are: “A wave of terror on a pistachio horse,” “HISTORY BOOKS, he shouts” and “HOLY INCANDESCENT CRUELTIES OF BOREDOM he shouts.”
It seems he also dug Robert Creeley’s “The Dishonest Mailmen”:
The lines in English: “The poem supreme, addressed to / emptiness—this is the courage / necessary. This is something / quite different.”
A draft of a poem and a note to Martin Heidegger:
