In the Garden of Eden Adam’s first task was to give everything a name. Whenever God created a new animal or plant, he showed it to Adam and, according to the Book of Genesis, “whatever he called each living creature, that was its name.” In the variant version of the Koran, God “taught Adam all the names.” The biblical Adam is the original poet, capturing the essence of a thing in words. His Koranic counterpart is more of a decipherer, discerning the secret nature of things through the word hidden inside them. In both instances, the conferral of names is a human prerogative; a thing remains unknowable until a human voice sounds out its distinctive moniker. Even God needs Adam to give names the breath of life.

Until recently that Edenic innocence still existed between things and their names. In the ninth “Duino Elegy,” Rainer Maria Rilke could ask:

Are we, perhaps, here just for saying: House,
Bridge, Fountain, Gate, Jug, Fruit tree, Window—
possibly: Pillar, Tower?

Of course for Rilke this isn’t just mouthing names but involves “such saying as never the things themselves / hoped so intensely to be.” In his view, things, when invoked, if not conjured, become more fully themselves. This is a magical notion, and a deeply appealing one, but can anyone still believe in it?

The lines above come from a translation by J.B. Leishman and Stephen Spender included in “Twentieth-Century German Poetry: an Anthology” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 539 pages, $40), edited by the English poet and translator Michael Hofmann.

This fascinating, if quirky, anthology contains selections from 53 poets in translations by a score of different hands, with the German texts on facing pages. In his brief introduction, Mr. Hofmann states that he has aimed to be “readable, objective, and unfair.” In all three aims he has succeeded splendidly.

The translations, many by unknown names, are consistently readable and some are brilliant. Here, for example, is a stanza from Robert Lowell’s version of Franz Werfel’s “The Fat Man in the Mirror,” a rollicking and grotesque ballad:

The bullies wrestled on the royal bowling green;
Hammers and sickles on their hoods of black sateen…
Sulking on my swing
The tobacco King
Sliced apples with a pen-knife for the Queen.

These lines suggest the anarchic note that pervades German poetry after World War I — there’s a sense of some primal disarray at the heart of things. At first, the apocalypse has its comic side. In Jakob Van Hoddis’s “End of the World,” beautifully rendered by the poet Christopher Middleton, catastrophe rubs shoulders with pratfalls:

The storm is here, crushed dams no longer hold,
the savage seas come inland with a hop.
The greater part of people have a cold.
Off bridges everywhere the railroads drop.

The humor ends quickly, of course. As if in reply to Rilke, Bertolt Brecht will ask the terrible question, in John Willett’s version of “To Those Born Later:”

What kind of times are they, when
A talk about trees is almost a crime
Because it implies silence about so many horrors?

“Twentieth-Century Germany Poetry” is a rich anthology and yet, Mr. Hofmann is right about being unfair. Rilke, Brecht, and Gottfried Benn are well represented, and rightly so. But why not a single poem by Hugo von Hofmannsthal or Stefan George, both major poets of Rilke’s generation? Nelly Sachs and Paul Celan appear in superb translations, again rightly so, but why has Mr. Hofmann not seen fit to include Gertrud Kolmar, a great poet murdered at Auschwitz, who is easily their equal? It seems excessive, if not downright perverse, to devote more than 50 pages to the work of Hans Magnus Enzensberger, a versatile but somewhat dated writer, while ignoring that of Franz Baermann Steiner, a wonderfully original Czech-born poet who died in exile in London. And the list could be extended.

There’s something a bit impish about Mr. Hofmann’s approach, including his own translations. These are often accomplished and yet, by a strange sleight of hand, they tend to alter the tone of the originals. In his introduction, Mr. Hofmann quotes with approval the maxim Brecht kept pinned to his study wall “Truth is always concrete.” But where the original German is plain, and even brutally so, Mr. Hofmann often resorts to Latinisms. One of Gottfried Benn’s poems has the lines “Questions, questions! Recollections on a summer night / blinked off and swept away.” Mr. Hofmann renders this as “Questions, questions! Scribbled nictitations / on a summer night.” This is clever but opaque, and tonally at odds with Benn’s words. When Brecht writes “Towards morning in the gray dawn the pine-trees piss,” Mr. Hofmann translates it as “the pine trees micturate.” He sacrifices the blunt vigor of the original for archness of effect.

Mr. Hofmann notes how closely German poetry of the last century was “bound up with Germany’s villainous history.” To follow Rilke nowadays and say such words as “house” with one’s whole being is to conjure up what lies beneath the house. When a language loses its innocence, all its associations seem tainted. Maybe this is what Hans Magnus Enzensberger meant in his poem “Autumn 1944,” when he wrote, “those corpses in the cellar are still there.”

eormsby@nysun.com