Nicolas Born

Nicolas Born Poems

Nicolas Born Biography

Nicolas Born was a German poet. His two novels Die erdabgewandte Seite der Geschichte and Die Fälschung have been translated into more than a dozen languages and count among the most important works of German literature of the 1970s. Nicolas Born grew up in a lower middle-class family in the Ruhrgebiet. He worked making printing accessories in a chemical process for a large printing company in Essen until he was able - with the help of a first literary prize, the Förderpreis Nordrhein-Westfalen, for his first novel "Der Zweite Tag", to go to Berlin and live from writing. He was an autodidact, and with his poems and novel scripts soon gathered enough attention from known writers and critics like Ernst Meister, Johannes Bobrowski, Günter Grass and Hans Bender to get a scholarship for the renowned Berliner Literarisches Colloquium in Berlin in 1963/1964, where he met other young writers like Hans Christoph Buch, Hermann Peter Piwitt, Hubert Fichte, Peter Bichsel and others, and was taught by Günter Grass, Uwe Johnson, Peter Rühmkorf, Peter Weiss and others. In preparation for his stay at the Iowa International Writers Workshop in Iowa City in 1969/1970 Born read more and more contemporary American poets. In Iowa he met Charles Bukowski, Anselm Hollo, Ted Berrigan, and many others, was friends with John Batki, Allen Ginsberg, Eric Torgersen, Tom Raworth and others. In the renowned "red frame"-series "Das neue Buch" Born published in 1972 his third collection of poems "Das Auge des Entdeckers" (The eye of the explorer), largely influenced by contemporary American poetry, utopian literature and a more relaxed perspective on political effectiveness of literature than was commonly known among the politically left-oriented colleagues of his generation. The book was a great success, selling very well for a poetry-collection, and made Born together with Rolf Dieter Brinkmann one of the most important and innovative poets of his generation in Germany. Back in Germany, Born started translating the poems of Kenneth Koch for Rowohlt Verlag, which was published only in 1973 in the same Rowohlt-series "Das neue Buch". His novels "Die erdabgewandte Seite der Geschichte" (1976, Rowohlt Verlag, translated in more than a dozen languages) and even more "Die Fälschung" (1979, "The deception"), which was published shortly before his early death in 1979 from cancer, were even bigger successes and made him one of the most important and well known left wing intellectuals of his time. His political engagements against nuclear power and what he called the "mad-system of reality" and the "world of the machine" were not only published in magazines but largely discussed in television shows of the time. His 1979 novel Die Fälschung was posthumously filmed as Die Fälschung (1981); directed by Volker Schloendorff, it starred Bruno Ganz, Hanna Schygulla and Jerzy Skolimowski. Together with Peter Handke and Michael Krüger he was a jury member of the European literary Petrarca-Preis from when the award was founded in 1975 and onto his death.)

The Best Poem Of Nicolas Born

Parting For Life And Parting For Death

How dead serious this coming and going
up ladders stairways
when someone turns away and actually
leaves with just a word
how empty the street is then
how left the one left is
how breathless and scared I follow
the flight and the chase over rooftops
beyond all feeling
and how I admire from a distance people
who part with a joke
and hug each other, terrified
yet then goodbye is just
a hand
a tear on the platform
a spot of oil in the parking lot
and there really are people who go on living
somewhere else
and people of no return
goodbyes like rumpled beds
and goodbyes like forgotten toothbrushes
goodbyes out into the air
goodbyes for travel
and your soft goodbye to me
and my hoarse goodbye to you.
But a wave from the train station
is neither soft nor hoarse
and hearty handshakes mean
longer travels.
Everything behind your eyes is foreign to me
because you're a Colombian (but that's not the reason).
I give my father this hand
no one wants to tell him any more
he's the spitting image of me
(I'm telling him here)
you hear me father!
where are your strong arms
have they grown far away from you
or have you just forgotten them in all
the resumes you had to write?
Goodbye!
And goodbye Uncle Heinrich
brother of my father
who was always just getting right up
from his crowded brown desk
goodbye old willow out my window in 1960
about which I made my first poem
because it brushed wearily on the windowpane
and always reminded me of something . . .
Here I get dizzy
because I'm almost alone already
with this pencil that's gone crazy
I stole it at Luchterhands
to get back at Roehler
who said my poem was larmoyant.
Poor dear Roehler
you can't even be larmoyant
goodbye then until the next pencil
and goodbye to Piwitt in Rome
who's burying the wrung dry
geniuses of sacred painting
one more time
and Buch who is one of the few you can
lend money to and to whom
being overweight is no big deal
goodbye Mother in the years after the war
who with her good hands switched pricetags
goodbye Günter Grass who works like a dog
but otherwise doesn't really do much
(maybe he has to because we all want it that way)
goodbye first wife
good morning second wife
goodbye old poet in me
always making pronouncements like
ONLY SOCIALISM WILL BRING
INDIVIDUALITY
which would be kind of late for my legs
which can't break out of this trot
goodbye Anna Karin Marianne Gisela
Barbara Margret Peter
goodbyes are still dead serious
and it's still not certain that goodbyes
are needed at all
it would be nicer to just go away
and just come back
and I would be happy if
when seen again this poem
from the middle on maybe
would be a little bit cheerful
which in fact it even is.

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