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.”