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From “Phantasus” [My springtime, a sobbing hunger,]

Arno Holz

1863 –

1929

^{translated from the German by}^{Babette Deutsch}^and^{Avrahm Yarmolinsky}

My springtime, a sobbing hunger,
   my summer, a hot struggle—
                      what
          will my autumn be?

A tardy golden sheaf?

a lake of mist?

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on April 25, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.

Arno Holz was born on April 26, 1863, in Rastenburg, East Prussia (now Kętrzyn, Poland). A German poet and playwright, he authored many works, including Phantasus. He was nominated nine times for the Nobel Prize in Literature and died on October 26, 1929, in Berlin.

Themes

About this Poem

The first edition of Arno Holz’s poem-cycle Phantasus, published in German by Johann Sassenbach in 1898, closes with the excerpt [My springtime, a sobbing hunger,]. This particular excerpt was one of several chosen to be translated into English by Babette Deutsch and her husband, Avrahm Yarmolinsky, in their collaboration Contemporary German Poetry: An Anthology (John Lane the Bodley Head Ltd., 1923). About Phantasus, C. D. Godwin, a translator and scholar, writes in the introduction to his own self-published translation of the work (2020), “Holz returns again and again to certain themes and motifs: lake-mirrors, secluded gardens, forgotten castles, larks and sunshine, childhood memories, flights of fancy … The common thread is the capturing of a moment in just as many words as are needed (but no more) to imprint an image and a mood on the reader. The urban environment of Berlin—heaving with new immigrants and a rising urban middle class—is caught in deft strokes.”

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From “Phantasus”

^{translated by Babette Deutsch and Avrahm Yarmolinsky}

On a mountain of sugar-candy,
under a blossoming almond-tree,
twinkles my gingerbread house.
Its little windows are of gold-foil, out of its chimney steams wadding.

Arno Holz

1922

Poems

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From “Phantasus” [My springtime, a sobbing hunger,]

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