Selected Poetry

Constantine goes for an “equivalence of spirit” in a more familiar idiom. This is at once a bold and humble undertaking, and has produced poetry of a remarkable luminosity and intensity, written in rhythms and cadences which recreate, both in their extremities of grief and their urgent hope, the immediacy of the original. – Karen Leeder * Oxford Poetry *

Friedrich Hlderlin (1770-1843) was one of Europe’s greatest poets, and is notable not only for his own idiosyncratic poetry but also for his translations into German of the works of the ancient Greek poet and dramatist Sophocles. David Constantine is one of Britain’s leading poets and translators. He lectured in German at Durham from 1969 to 1981 and at Oxford from 1981 to 2000, and was co-editor of Modern Poetry in Translation from 2004 to 2013. His other translations include Goethe’s Faust for Penguin Classics, and co-translations of Brecht for Norton and Enzensberger for Bloodaxe. His own Collected Poems and two later collections Nine Fathom Deep and Elder are published by Bloodaxe. He lives in Oxford.

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