150

Shorter Reviews

traditional apparatus such as biographical details would also have been welcome. Nevertheless, a fine edition from California’s Omnidawn.

A.N. Stencl, All My Young Years: Yiddish Poetry from Weimar Germany, translated by Haike Beruriah Wiegand & Stephen Watts, with an introduction by Heather Valencia, Five Leaves Publications, 120pp, paperback, £7.99, ISBN 978-1-90551223-2 Like Guéémar, Stencl is hardly a household name but this is still an important book, celebrating a lost culture, a lost time when Berlin was the centre of Yiddish culture, as well as a lost poet. Born in Poland, Stencl arrived in Berlin in 1921 where he became part of a group of Yiddish artists and writers centred on the Romanische Caféé and soon gained a considerable reputation, admired by Thomas Mann and Arnold Zweig, amongst others. In 1936, he fled Berlin for London’s Whitechapel, where he died in 1983, editing the Yiddish literary journal Loshn un lebn (Language and Life) until the end. All My Young Years concentrates on the expressionist and pastoral poetry he wrote in Berlin, with an excellent biographical essay from Heather Valencia, translators’ notes and memoirs of the poet collected from those who knew him (‘I loved [Germany] and I walked and talked with philosophers and poets of all faith. Then came Hitler with his storm and hatred . . .’). Five Leaves are to be congratulated on a compelling volume.

Georg Trakl, Poems , translated by Margitt Lehbert, Anvil, 192pp, paperback, £9.95, ISBN 978-0-85646-285-6 Following in the wake of Will Stone’s 2005 translations for Arc, Anvil now publish Margitt Lehbert’s complete new versions of Austrian poet Georg Trakl’s expressionist poems, his ‘footsteps through a fog of blood’. A haunting collection, beautifully produced by Anvil.