Catastrophe

Claude Rawson

• The Sinking of the Titanic by Hans Magnus Enzensberger
  Carcanet, 98 pp, £3.95, April 1981, ISBN 0 85635 372 8
• Paul Clean: Poems translated by Michael Hamburger
  Carcanet, 307 pp, £7.95, September 1980, ISBN 0 85635 313 2
• Talk about the Last Poet by Charles Johnston
  Bodley Head, 78 pp, £4.50, July 1981, ISBN 0 370 30434 9

Hans Magnus Enzensberger wrote The Sinking of the Titanic in German. From information supplied in the poem, which in its present form is much preoccupied with the process of its composition, he began writing it in Havana in 1969, and completed it in Berlin in 1977: the poem is thus a close contemporary of Doctorow’s Ragtime, with which it shares several features of its subject-matter, including the historical period. In between those dates, he mailed a first version of the poem from Cuba (where there was no carbon-paper), but it never arrived. So he wrote the present version, which includes glimpses of himself writing both versions, as well as other autobiographical details of his life in Havana and Berlin. This version was then translated into English by the author, and the translation is remarkable for its ease and fluency, its narrative energy, its versatile and allusive play with a variety of verse-forms and literary styles, and its command of a language foreign to the author.