Darkness Spoken: The Collected Poems of Ingeborg Bachmann

“…we must be immensely grateful that Peter Filkins has now given us the fullest and the best translations we have in English of this magnificent poet.”

— Charles Simic

“Ingeborg Bachmann is regarded as one of the half-dozen most important German-language writers of the second half of the twentieth century. And in the acclaim for her passionate and varied body of work, a supreme place is usually granted to her poetry. English-language readers still don’t have enough Bachmann to read, but this volume of eloquent translations (and an excellent essay and notes by the translator) is the best of all possible beginnings.”

— Susan Sontag

Ingeborg Bachmann was born in 1926 in Klagenfurt, Austria. She studied philosophy at the universities of Innsbruck, Graz, and Vienna, where she wrote her dissertation on Martin Heidegger. In 1953, she received the poetry prize from Gruppe 47 for her first volume, Borrowed Time (Die gestundete Zeit), after which her second collection, Invocation of the Great Bear (Anrufung des großn Bären), appeared in 1956. Her various awards include the Georg Büchner Prize, the Berlin Critics Prize, the Bremen Award, and the Austrian State Prize for literature. Writing and publishing essays, opera libretti, short stories, and novels as well, she divided her time between Munich, Zurich, Berlin, and Rome, where she died from burns suffered in a fire in her apartment in 1973.

Translator Peter Filkins has published five books of poetry and has translated Bachmann’s The Book of Franza and Requiem for Fanny Goldmann. He is the recipient of an Outstanding Translation Award from the American Literary Translators Association, a Berlin Prize from the American Academy in Berlin, fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a Leon Levy Center for Biography Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. A graduate of Williams College and Columbia University, he has studied at the University of Vienna with the support of a Fulbright Fellowship and been a Fulbright Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Cultural Studies in Vienna. He teaches courses in translation at Bard College and serves as the Richard B. Fisher Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at Bard College at Simon’s Rock in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.

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