Some of these translations first appeared in the anthology Twentieth Century German Poetry (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006) and in the journals Common Knowledge, Kenyon Review, the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books, Poetry (Chicago), and Threepenny Review to whose editors—where appropriate—grateful acknowledgment is made. Further thanks are owing to Petra Hardt, of the Suhrkamp Verlag, for her support of the project, and to my onetime Tischnachbar and later friend (we were introduced over drunken fish before we were scattered to opposite coasts of the Empire—there’s a Chinese poem to be written there), Nicholas Jenkins, who gave them the thumbs-up.
M. H.