Leaves of Grass

SELECTED POEMS by Gunter Grass, translated by Michael Hamburger and Christopher Middleton. 63 pages. Harcourt. Brace & World. $3.95.

Giinter Grass looks like a slightly sinister Santa Claus and comes loaded with gifts. Renowned as Germany's most powerful postwar novelist (The Tin Drum, Dog Years), this husky son of a Danzig grocer is also a playwright (The Wicked Cooks), a sometime speechwriter (for West Berlin's Mayor Willy

Brandt), a painter and sculptor who exhibits from Berlin to Boston. Further more, as these capable translations prove, Grass is not least of all a poet of aggressive imagination and an ironic torque of temperament.

The irony is Brechtian, without political reference; Grass is more concerned with moral character than social institutions. At one extreme his irony is angry, grotesque, a mingling of Bosch and bosh--as when he writes of a museum where:

Our aborted children, pale, serious embryos

sit there in plain glass jars

and worry about their parents' future. At another extreme his world view is cosmic, inferentially religious:

We live in the egg

We have covered the inside wall of the shell with dirty drawings

and the Christian names of our enemies.

We are being hatched . . .

And what if we are not being hatched?

If this shell will never break?

If our horizon is only that

of our scribbles, and always will be?

There remains the fear that someone

outside our shell will feel hungry

and crack us into the frying pan with

a pinch of salt. What shall we do then, my brethren

inside the egg?

In these poems, as in Grass's novels, irony comes tinged with terror, and terror reflects a tenderness for all things that live enshelled in illusion, controlled by forces they cannot control. At times he intones a still sad music of aimless modernity:

How sad these changes are. People unscrew the nameplates from

the doors, take the saucepan of cabbage and heat it up again, in a different place.

What sort of furniture is this

that advertises departure?

People take up their folding chairs

and emigrate.

Ships laden with homesickness and

the urge to vomit

carry patented seating contraptions and their unpatented owners to and fro.

Now on both sides of the great ocean there are folding chairs; how sad these changes are.

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