I'm back to thinking about Durs Grünbein again. I'll be attending a conference at Marbach in a couple of weeks' time, where I'll be speaking on Grünbein's "antique dispositions." Grünbein uses this phrase as the title of a book of essays, where it functions both as an allusion to Shakespeare's Hamlet ('antic disposition') and a reference to Grünbein's own interests in classical antiquity. In the mid-1990s, motifs from classical antiquity appear repeatedly in his poems, alongside translations from Seneca and Aeschylus. What sources did he draw on? How well does he know classical languages? And why has this new interest--in contrast to his earlier interest in brain science-- been so sustained?