Wolfgang Hilbig’s debut collection of prose writing, first published in 1982, evokes an oozing, fecund yet decrepit industrial East Germany. The book helped establish Hilbig’s unmistakable lyrical voice, which revels in grime and decay.
Hilbig was a working-class titan of German literature but remained relatively unknown among English-speaking readers through his early death in 2007. Berlin-based translator Isabel Fargo Cole and Two Lines Press are thankfully changing that, with Under the Neomoon their latest Hilbig translation.
In Cole’s skilled rendering, many of the lines are stunning, evocative – and menacing. “In the evening, in the summer twilight, with a southwest breeze blowing, all the town’s streets fill with the cloying, unendurable smell of cadavers,” he writes of an industrial town saturated with the smell of a nearby soap factory. Residents escape the miasma by guzzling beer in a filthy bar, while “from every opening, every sucking, protruding orifice, every hose-end, the unconsumed dregs flow back.”
Many of the pieces are light on narrative and some occasionally bog down, but his prose is frequently radiant with a sweat-soaked brilliance.
- Available now from Two Lines Press