FICTION

DARKNESS AND A LITTLE LIGHT by Johannes Bobrowski, translated by Leila Vennewitz (New Directions: $19.95; 111 pp.). Johannes Bobrowski, a German-Polish-Lithuanian poet who died in 1965, as a prose writer is more fabulist than tale-teller. Most of the stories in this collection are only a few pages long, some just a few paragraphs, and they operate by metaphor rather than plot: the Lithuanian beggar who throws coins into a river hoping to flood the house of a Tsarist general; the Jewish shopkeeper in Poland wondering aloud whether it’s the world that changes or the viewer, his meditation interrupted by the arrival of a teen-age German soldier; the mother who receives a letter from her emigre son saying he’s doing well in America and will not return, going on to note that “you’ve written, Mother, that you can’t come here because somebody has to say there, because all of us have left.” Bobrowski’s fables are shot through with melancholy and resignation, but there’s much life in them nonetheless, one rooted in quotidian hopes and memories and sensations. From the book’s final page, the conclusion of the seven-paragraph vignette “The Little Owl”: “A rutted sandy road. With no ditches. How wide is it, can you tell? It blends into the meadow. Or the meadow leaves off. Or blends into a road. How exactly? There is no borderline. The road doesn’t end, and the meadow doesn’t begin. It cannot be put into words. And it is the place where we live.”