Representing the Second World War

Abstract

So much attention is given to the poetry of the First World War that I thought it important to remember poetry from the Second World War or about it.¹ Although in the chapter on war and violence from Homer and the Bible onward I have paused to foreground translation, and its violence and trauma of loss and gain, here, partly for the sake of space and for the flow of this chapter, I will largely set aside the question of translation. The violence of the twentieth century, in war and revolution, was such that the sum of brutality is hard to reckon. Here, only a few voices will represent war and the kind of otherness, estrangement, and alienation it inflicts on humans, on individuals, and communities. The shock of war and the after-shock of war stay with them who were there as witnesses and continue to shape our psyches and world.