Darkness and a Little Light

Book excerpt: A P.O.W. in Russia after WWII, Bobrowski (1917-1965) returned to his forever-changed native province, former East Prussia, in 1949. His lost homeland - which he called by the region's ancient name of Sarmartia - haunts all his work. Full of longing and an astonishing poetic beauty, his stories are visionary elegies to vanished ways of life. Some of the stories, set in the nineteenth century or in the darkness of WWII, are directly elegiac. But tales relating the dreary, oversynthesized reality of East German life in the '50s and '60s are also shot through with piercing traces of an older, more richly atmospheric world of nature and memory. Complex, melancholic, and dreamlike, the stories of Darkness and a Little Light have never before been available in English. In the hands of distinguished translator Leila Vennewitz they attain their full measure of beauty and mystery.