Darkness Spoken: The Collected Poems of Ingeborg Bachmann

Darkness Spoken is the most complete volume of Ingeborg Bachmann’s poetry in English and German. Considered one of the premiere poets of her generation, Bachmann’s various awards include the Georg Büchner Prize, the Berlin Critics Prize, the Bremen Award, and the Austrian State Prize for literature. Darkness Spoken collects her two celebrated books of poetry, as well as the early and late poems not collected in book form. First published by Zephyr Press in 2006, the volume also contains 129 poems released from Bachmann’s archives that had never been translated before. Twenty-five of them also appeared in German for the first time.

 

Continued research by Peter Fikins on BachmannÂ’s writing since 2006 as well as his current work on BachmannÂ’s biography (forthcoming in 2026 from Yale University Press), has drawn him even closer to BachmannÂ’s poems and deepened his understanding of their context and meaning. For this second revised edition, roughly a quarter of the poems have benefitted from revisions in word choice for the purposes of greater clarity, better syntax or rhythm, or in a few instances, corrections in punctuation and of interpretive errors. Eight poems from Bachmann''s youth have also been added that did not appear in the first edition. A few lacunae in the German have also been corrected, allowing this volume to remain the most complete edition of BachmannÂ’s poetry.

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