Translator's note by Rosmarie Waldrop

Elke Erb shares with her generation of GDR poets an emphasis on the concrete, but her way of presenting it is unlike anybody else's, East or West. As she has said, she has her "eye fixed on the molecule" because "truth is always concrete and stands in a fruitful working tension to logic and its formulae. But like the latter, it requires strict precision and clarity."

In the poems from the GDR years, the complex syntax gave the lie to official simplicities, and the close observation of everyday occurrences or social structures leaped off the page into the unexpected and surreal.

The more recent poems presented here come with the subtitle: "Poems and other Journal Entries," which points us toward their more relaxed, more open structure. But Erb's formulations always have an intense precision, while at the same time allowing the full range and richness of overtones in the language (somewhat lost in translation!).

Elke Erb lives in what used to be East Berlin. She has published ten volumes of poetry, most recently Mensch sein, nicht [To be human, not], from which our poems are taken. Also a book of essays and many translations from the Russian (Zvetaeva, Achmatova, Chlebnikov, Essenin, Pushkin, etc.). Her many honors include the "F. C. Weisskopf" prize of the Academy of the Arts in Berlin (1999).

A selection of poems in English, Mountains in Berlin, was published in 1995 by Burning Deck Press (my translation).

In March 2000 she will read in Providence and other US cities. (If interested, contact J�gen Keil, Dir., Goethe Institute, 170 Beacon St., Boston, MA 02116. E-mail: 100627.1010@compuserve.com).