Now for the Literary Grass

I prefer his shorter works (My Century, Cat and Mouse, Headbirths: Or the Germans Are Dying Out,...) to the longer ones (Tin Drum, Dog Years, The Flounder, The Rat,...), but did you know that Gunter also writes poetry? What will this guy do next?

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Too bad Grass and Handke (another fave) can't get along:

http://www.faz.net/artikel/C30712/debatte-handke-grass-eine-schande-fuer-das-schriftstellertum-30011871.html

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There's lots of good stuff in My Century (e.g., the meeting between Celan and Heidegger), but I'll settle for the last chapter (1999) in which a loving son (Gunter) resurrects his mother:

He didn't force me into it, he talked me into it, the rascal. He was always good at that. I always said yes in the end. So now he's brought me back to life supposedly: I'm over a hundred and in decent health because he wills it. 

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Oh, yes, the poetry. Lesser known, for sure, but still some good stuff here.  Here's a short one:

Stadium at Night

Slowly the football rose in the sky.
Now one could see that the stands were packed.
Alone the poet stood at the goal
but the referee whistled: Off-side.

(translation by Michael Hamburger)

Which certainly must've been behind a long-ago and never-published piece of mine:

Soccer Field in the Afternoon

From green through blue to yellow nest

sailed the oblong ball

Yawping parents dotted

the sidelines

Behind the goal a duple Danzig

headbirthing in the Grass

(untranslatable)