Jürgen Becker was born in Köln, Germany, in 1932. He is the author of over thirty books—including drama, fiction, and poetry—all published by Suhrkamp, Germany's premier publisher. He has won numerous prizes, including the Heinrich Böll Prize, the Uwe Johnson Prize, the Hermann Lenz Prize, and the Georg Büchner Prize, the highest honor a German-language author can receive.

Okla Elliott is an assistant professor of creative writing and world literature at Misericordia University. He holds a PhD in comparative literature from the University of Illinois and an MFA in creative writing from Ohio State University. His nonfiction, poetry, short fiction, and translations have appeared in Another Chicago Magazine, Harvard Review, Indiana Review, The Literary Review, The Los Angeles Review, New York Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, A Public Space, and Subtropics, among others. He is the author of From the Crooked Timber (short fiction), The Cartographer's Ink (poetry), and The Doors You Mark Are Your Own (a novel co-authored with Raul Clement).

Books by Jürgen Becker:

Other poems on the web by Jürgen Becker:
Three poems
Six poems
Three poems
Four poems
Three poems
Two poems
Four poems

Jürgen Becker According to Wikipedia.

About Blackbirds in September:

"Jürgen Becker was born in 1932. His childhood, therefore, was the Second World War—a disease from which he has been recovering ever since the fighting stopped. His poems do not presume to address the horrors directly, but with great courage he casts sidelong glances at things he remembers or the things that prompt such memories. These are important poems, not just about the war but about any unbearable catastrophe the scars of which last forever. Okla Elliott's scrupulous translations are faithful to the poems' nervous hurt: their appearance in English is a major event."
—David R. Slavitt