Bertolt Brecht was one of the most celebrated playwrights of the 20th cen-tury. Baal, The Threepenny Opera, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahogany, Saint Joan of the Stockyards, The Life of Galileo, Mother Courage and Her Children, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui and dozens of other plays have made a hugely powerful impact on the development of drama in the modern era. The weight of these profoundly influential plays have tended to bury the significance of Bertolt Brecht’s poetry. For a long time, certainly in the English-speaking world, his poems were hardly noticed and considered absolutely peripheral to his work in drama. He himself scarcely bothered to publish his poems – no more than 170 of the 1,000 poems that have subsequently been discovered were printed in his lifetime (he died in 1956). More than any other great writer, except Franz Kafka, Brecht was quite content that a substantial part of his achievement should remain unknown during his lifetime.
In recent years more and more of his poems have come to light and have been published and translated. Gradually his stature as one of the greatest poets of the century has come to be recognized.
Here is a poem which Brecht wrote in 1935. As so often in Brecht’s plays and poems, the ordinary, unsung man or woman finds a voice:
Question From A Worker Who Reads
Who built Thebes of the seven gates?
In the books you will find the names of kings.
Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock?
And Babylon, many times demolished,
Who raised it up so many times? In what houses
Of gold-glittering Lima did the builders live?
Where, the evening that the Wall of China was finished,
Did the masons go? Great Rome
Is full of triumphal arches. Who erected them? Over whom
Did the Caesars triumph? Had Byzantium, much praised in
song,
Only palaces for its inhabitants? Even in fabled Atlantis
The night the ocean engulfed it
The drowning still bawled for their slaves.
The young Alexander conquered India.
Was he alone?
Caesar beat the Gauls.
Did he not have even a cook with him?
Philip of Spain wept when his armada
went down. Was he the only one to weep?
Frederick the Second won the Seven Year’s War.
Who else won it?
Who mined the gold around Cleopatra’s throat?
Every page a victory.
Who cooked the feast for the victors?
Every ten years a great man.
Who paid the bill?
So many reports.
So many questions.
In the libraries of heroes
So much unrecorded.
I read this poem and the looming fate of the workers and farmers at Wales sadly crossed my mind.
I sometimes spend long weekends up the Essequibo. Storms of rain intersperse with sunbursts and sweet weather. It is a good time for savouring the changing, extraordinary beauty of the great river and the green-dark forest and the sky which always seems more immense there than anywhere else. And it is a good time to read endlessly.
I found the Brecht poem in a commonplace book full of extracts from writers I will never have the time to read no matter how many long Essequibo weekends I have left. Just after the poem there was a quotation from the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk’s book The White Castle – about life and about books:
“You cannot embark on life, that one-off coach-ride, once again when it is over, but if you have a book in your hand, no matter how difficult or complex to understand that book may be, when you have finished it, you can, if you wish, go back to the beginning, read it again, and thus understand that which is difficult and, with it, understand life as well.”
