Bold Prose From a Brilliant Poet : THREE PATHS TO THE LAKE Stories <i> by Ingeborg Bachmann translated by Mary Fran Gilbert introduction by Mark Anderson (Modern German Voices Series) (Holmes & Meier: $24.50; 212 pp.;) </i>

In his introduction to “Three Paths to the Lake,” Mark Anderson says that German-language critics labeled Ingeborg Bachmann’s stories Frauengeschichten. The label was derogatory: just women’s stories, the critics meant; women’s stories, and no more.

The critics were disappointed. They knew Bachmann as a brilliant poet, one “who had written a doctoral dissertation on Heidegger, inaugurated a series of influential lectures on modern European literature at the University of Frankfurt, and whose sophisticated verse had won for her--at an enviably early age--all the major German and Austrian Literary prizes.”

John Wain, professor of poetry at Oxford, wrote that people expect poets to have “some power of perception, as well as of expression, beyond the ordinary human range.” Ingeborg Bachmann had that power.

But Bachmann shifted to prose. The stories of “The Thirtieth Year” were published in 1961. The novel “Malina” appeared in 1971. “Three Paths to the Lake” with its five stories was published in 1972, and an unfinished novel cycle called “Death Styles” appeared posthumously in 1973.

The women of “Three Paths to the Lake” all have some connection to Vienna and to one another, and all are victims, if only of themselves. To people who read the poetry with strict attention, but who skimmed the prose, it seemed of another and lower order. The women were neurotic; their stories were banal.

To these admirers of the poetry, says Anderson, the prose work had “no apparent narrative energy, focus or significance.” That, of course, was precisely Bachmann’s point: Modern life as these women lived it lacked significance.

The erstwhile admirers, Anderson writes, found the very language of the fiction alien to “the bitingly laconic modernism” of Bachmann’s poems.

But whose language was it? An author is not necessarily the narrator or any character in his or her work of action. The words on the page are meant to be the words of fictive creatures. True, the writer has written the words, but written them in an act of ascription, to attribute qualities. Landscape, mood and tone all must accord with the nature of the work. So too must style, that mysterious trace of an author’s character that marks a fiction as the grain marks wood.

Bachmann’s voice was muted for the fiction’s sake. Her talent was not failing but growing.

Once a poet, always a poet: Why did the critics not see it? Bachmann’s prose is a fine tissue made of narrative; of dialogue within and without quotation marks; of written but unspoken thought.

Characters reappear, references recur, systems of metaphor imprint their coded messages. In the long story called “Word for Word,” words, phrases and shards of conversation are untranslated from their several languages.

The writing is bold, experimental, even subversive. It requires prior general knowledge, and it requires that a reader work.

It would help to know one’s way in Bachmann’s culture. Even without a cultural map, the stories are rich and stunning, but one is grateful to Mark Anderson for showing the way, for generous helpings of background information and erudition, and for his translation of short passages from languages other than the German.

The translation of the text itself, by Mary Fran Gilbert, climbs without hesitation to moments of climax and revelation, which are the test of a translator’s skill and nerve.

In the story “Eyes to Wonder,” the heroine refuses to wear glasses. Of course she cannot cope with contact lenses. With her glasses, “Miranda can see into hell.” Life is grotesque. Miranda might see things she won’t be able to forget.

Miranda means full of wonder . Its Latin roots are twined. Mirare means to look; Mirari , to wonder. Together they connote amazement at what one sees.

“Do you have your glasses?” asks her fiance. Miranda gropes in her purse. They must be at home. Or lost. Or broken--all three pairs. Miranda’s life is deliberately blurred; she will not see.

The story is dedicated to the memory of Georg Groddeck, whom Anderson calls “the father of ‘psychosomatic analysis.’ ” Groddeck believed that people choose their illnesses--even to not seeing what they do not wish to see.

For this extraordinary intellectual exercise, Bachmann had to invent a character to epitomize psychosomatic theory; to create an interesting story that was also a tenable case history.

Beyond even this virtuosity, “Eyes to Wonder” has a reversed, through-the-looking-glass version in another story in the collection. In “Problems Problems,” a young woman named Beatrix lives only to sleep and to visit the beauty parlor, where the walls mirror her image. “So that’s me,” she says to her reflection. Like Miranda, Beatrix finds the world unbearable. The mirrors that reflect Beatrix happen to be so called from the same Latin root words as the name Miranda.

Nadja, the heroine of the dazzling story “Word for Word,” is a simultaneous translator. She is “a strange mechanism,” a filter for others’ words and thoughts. A stranger even in her own country, she is an international drifter without the traditional comforts of family and home. Nadja cannot even cry. Perhaps she has “unlearned crying from traveling around in all those languages and places.” Her faith has reverted to the pagan, and sometimes words fail her.

The cover of “Three Paths to the Lake” has been designed to look like an international airmail letter. The envelope is watermarked with the usual thin blue lines, but here they are the whorls of a topographic map. The stamps are printed with the silhouette of a jet with the name of the publisher, Holmes & Meier, and of the series of which this book is but one part, Modern German Voices.

Despite the jet, it has taken a long time for this work to come to us in English. Bachmann’s voice is rare and strong--strong enough to transport us to a new domain of fiction.