Translator's Introduction to The Drugs, The Words — Web Exclusive
By Peter Filkins
Ingeborg Bachmann was born in 1926 in Klagenfirt, Austria. The author of poems, short stories, radio plays, opera libretti, and novels, she remains one of the preeminent writers in postwar German letters. In late 1962, after her breakup with the Swiss writer Max Frisch, Bachmann sufered a breakdown that forced her to be hospitalized. Though it wouLd take until 1964 for Bachmann to fully return to public life, throughout this period she wrote some 175 poems that were later collected by her heirs in a volume titled Ich weiss keine bessere Welt [I Know of No Better World], which was published in 2000. In this body of work, Bachmann links private suffering and the ills of society that cause them, a critical insight that would later inform Malina and The Book of Franza, the first entries in the cycle of novels titled Todesarten [Ways of Dying], which she was working to complete before her death in Rome in 1973.
The poem included here testifies to the intensity of Bachmann's suffering and to her urge to make meaning out of it in the context of the wider world. Because the original poem is a handwritten manuscript, there are places where the heirs have had to guess at the precise wording and punctuation. In this translation, I have chosen to make firm choices in the vocabulary and punctuation of the English, while allowing the original to remain in its more speculative state, hoping to create a translation that is convincing in and of itself, but also remains attached to the fissures in the original work.
The connection of Bachmann's poem to the theme of "Bodies" is overt, given its shap focus on the poet's sense of pain and entrapment within her own body, experience, memory, and rage.
Peter Filkins is a poet, translator, and critic. His translation of the complete poems of Ingeborg Bachmann, Songs in Flight, was selected as an outstanding translation by the American Literary Translators Association. He has also translated two novel fragments by Bachmann and an expanded edition of her poems, Darkness Spoken. His books of poetry include After Homer and What She Knew. He is the recipient of Stover Prize in Poetry (2007), Austrian Translation Award (2007), Berlin Prize (2005), and fellowships to Yaddo, Millay, and MacDowell colonies.