Gottfried Benn was born in 1886 in the village of Mansfield, between
Berlin and Hamburg. He grew up in another village, Sellin in Neumark,
in what was then East Prussia, part of present-day Poland. He died in
1956 in Berlin. He was the oldest son, grandson, and
great-grandson of German Protestant ministers. His mother, however, was
of French Swiss birth. During the course of his life, he made much of
the fact of this mixed parentage, and attributed his intellectual
tensions to what he once called his “half-breed melancholy.”

Benn wanted a career in medicine, but his father, who could not
afford to send him
to medical school, persuaded him to study theology
and German philology instead. Benn complied for two years, first at Marburg,
and then in Berlin. He nonetheless found a way into the career of his choice,
enrolling, in 1905, at the Kaiser Wilhelm Academy of Army Medicine.
After serving
as a military doctor in World War I, he set
up a
private practice
in Berlin as a doctor of skin and venereal diseases
(commonly combined as a medical specialization in Germany). He
closed his practice and re-entered the military in 1935, shortly
before he was blacklisted by the Nazis.

Benn’s first book was a small collection of poems entitled Morgue
(1912), a succès de scandale in the Expressionist mode. These
poems, which draw on
his experiences as an intern working with
terminally ill patients
and dissecting cadavers, are characterized by explicit,
naturalistic detail. “Labor Room” (“Saal der Kreissenden Frauen”)
dates from this collection. Although he never altogether
abandoned his origins,
after about 1919 Benn turned away from the more extreme aspects of
his early Expressionism. “Jena,” published in 1926, illustrates a
very different style that appeared in his poetry during his middle
and late periods, a style which, to some, has barely seemed to avoid
sentimentalism. “Mountain Ash” (“Ebereschen”) is a late poem,
published in 1954, just two years before his death.

In addition to poetry, Benn wrote plays and, more important,
prose—memoirs, essays, and published talks, short stories and novellas.
He was an early
experimenter in and a master of that hybrid genre, the story-essay.

While he wrote both in free verse and in traditional forms, the
metrical intricacies of all Benn’s poems reflect his thorough
education in the Greek and Roman classics. “Jena” is written in the
octet stanza with alternating lines of masculine and feminine rhymes
that Benn is best known for. I have tried to make English poems that
approximate the rhythms of the German originals, without being an
exact metrical match. And since English is less rich in rhyme than
other European languages, I have frequently allowed the half- and
slant-rhymes common
in English formal verse today.