Under the Neomoon

An electric collection that evokes the works of Andrei Tarkovsky and Ingeborg Bachmann, Under the Neomoon is a neon-bright reminder of humanity’s violent folly and the importance of storytelling from down below, from the wage worker’s hovel.

An abandoned construction site. Glowering pits and furnaces. A lone man in a bungalow. Widely considered to be one of the great German writers of the twentieth century, Wolfgang Hilbig’s dark visions have long held readers aloft with their musical language and uncompromising vision of the modern world. In Under the Neomoon, his debut short story collection originally published in East Germany in 1982, Hilbig’s persistent fixations—factory pits, rampant nature, and split identities—are at their most visceral and brilliant. Rendered into English by Hilbig’s longtime translator Isabel Fargo Cole, these short tales apply fluorescent language (“garlands of cast-iron flowers,” “tall dark-green water grasses”) to lives and spaces of foreclosed dreams.

Wolfgang Hilbig was born in 1941 in the coal-mining region of Meuselwitz, Saxony; his father fell in the battle of Stalingrad. Hilbig worked as a stoker in East Germany’s industrial wasteland, and his densely poetic texts literally emerged from the boiler-room. But he was too independent and his work too dark to fit in with the new breed of working-class poets fostered by the German Democratic Republic. An autodidact, he read voraciously, and was influenced by German Romantics such as E. T. A. Hoffmann and Ludwig Tieck, as well as Edgar Allan Poe, Samuel Beckett, and Bob Dylan. In 1985, Hilbig moved to West Germany, but remained a profoundly East German writer, addressing the conflicts of his Eastern-Western existence with an intensity that made him one of Germany’s most important postwar writers. In 2002 Hilbig was awarded the Büchner Prize, Germany’s most prestigious literary award, for his life’s work. He died in 2007 after a long struggle with cancer, leaving a substantial oeuvre of poetry, short prose, novellas, and novels. (Photo credit: 3:AM Magazine)

Isabel Fargo Cole is a U.S.-born, Berlin-based writer and translator. Her translations include five books of Wolfgang Hilbig’s, including Old Rendering Plant, for which she received the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize. She has also been the recipient of a prestigious PEN/Heim Translation Grant, and her novel Die grüne Grenze was a finalist for the 2018 Preis der Leipziger Buchmesse.