My Blue Piano by Else Lasker-Schüler and translated by Brooks Haxton

This is poetry from Germany.

My Blue Piano by Else Lasker-Schüler translated by Brooks Haxton is published by Syracuse University Press. This is a Book originally written in German. This was published in 2015.0 and has the ISBN of 9.780815610564E12.

My Blue Piano, by Else Lasker-Schüler and translated by Brooks Haxton from German, brings German poetry into English through Else Lasker-Schüler’s blue piano, exile, music, and the flamboyant grief of a voice making its own kingdom. The metadata gives the reader a doorway, but the real value is what happens once the poem begins making its own weather. I would read it for blue, piano, exile, and the music of self-invention under loss, not as a fixed lesson about a nation, period, or school. The best entry point is still the poem itself: the line that catches, the image that refuses to explain itself, the feeling that arrives before paraphrase. My Blue Piano belongs in the translated poetry library because it gives German expressionism one of its most dazzling and vulnerable presences.

If you’d like to see international poetry continue and gain traction, consider requesting this work from your local library, or purchasing it from places like Open Books (a poetry only bookstore), Asterism Books (an independent press distributor), or bookshop.org to connect you with your local bookstores.

Check out more of the always in-progress translated poetry index here.