Porcelain

Porcelain is a book-length cycle of forty-nine poems written over the course of more than a decade that together serve as a lament for Durs Grünbein’s hometown, Dresden, which was destroyed in the Allied firebombing of February 1945. The book is at once a history and “declaration of love” to the famed “Venice on the Elbe,” so catastrophically razed by British bombs; a musical fusion of eyewitness accounts, family memories, and stories, of monuments and relics; the story of the city’s destiny as seen through a prism of biographical enigmas, its intimate relation to the “white gold” porcelain that made its fortune and reflections on the power and limits of poetry. Musical, fractured, ironic, and elegiac, Porcelain is controversial, too, in setting itself against what Grünbein calls the “myth” of the Germans as innocent victims of a war crime. At the same time, it never loses sight of the horror deliberately visited on an unwitting civilian population, nor the devastation that looms so large in the German memory. Published for the first time in English, on the seventy-fifth year anniversary of the firebombing, this edition contains new images, notes, Grünbein’s own reflections and an additional canto—an extraordinary act of poetic kintsugi for the fractured remains of Dresden’s memory.
 

Portelanul este un ciclu de lungime de carte de patruzeci si noua de poezii scrise de-a lungul mai mult de un deceniu, care impreuna servesc drept lament pentru orasul natal al lui Durs Grünbein, Dresda, care a fost distrus in bombardamentul cu focuri aliate din februarie 1945. Cartea este deodata o istorie si o „declaratie de dragoste” faimoasei „Venetia pe Elba”, distrusa atat de catastrofal de bombele britanice; o fuziune muzicala de relatari ale martorilor oculari, amintiri de familie si povesti, de monumente si relicve; povestea destinului orasului, vazuta printr-o prisma de enigme biografice, relatia sa intima cu portelanul „aur alb” care si-a facut avere si reflectii asupra puterii si limitelor poeziei.