Prizes, Nominations!

So many prizes! Here's a little catch-up.

First off, the Gutekunst Prize for Young Translators (from German to English) has gone to Sophie Duvernoy, a New York writer, editor and translator. Congratulations on getting that "wow factor" down!

Then there's the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize, sort of a grown-up version for actually published books translated out of German, and that will be awarded to Catherine Schelbert for her rendering of Swiss writer Hugo Ball's "rollicking, zany, melancholy story of about the rise and fall of a troupe of performers in the louche world of cafés, taverns, nightclubs, and vaudeville theaters in a Switzerland where the Great War is only a distant rumble," Flametti, or The Dandyism of the Poor. Congratulations go to Schelbert in Switzerland!

And then we have the nominations for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize, an award for literary translations from any living European language into English. The eight nominated translators include two from German: Susan Bernofsky for Jenny Erpenbeck's novel The End of Days and Anne Stokes for Sarah Kirsch's poetry collection Ice Roses. I'm pleased for them because this is one of those prizes where everyone's a winner, celebrated all together at Oxford Translation Day.

I have a feeling I may have forgotten something.

German Poets and Prizes

The dam has broken and prizes are going to poets! Following Jan Wagner's surprising receipt of the Prize of the Leipzig Book Fair after everyone thought even nominating a poet was an act of iconoclastic tokenism, they've gone and done it again. This time it's the Kleist Prize for Monika Rinck. Rinck has published mainly poetry and essays but also some rather odd other things, and you can find quite a lot of her poems in Nicolas Grindell's English translations at no man's land if you click on the first link above.

The Kleist Prize is an interesting one because it's awarded by a different individual every year, to all kinds of writers for their entire work. I kind of like the idea because it means there are no compromises. This year it was the president of the German Academy of Language and Literature, Heinrich Detering, who chose to bestow a big fat €20,000 on Rinck. Hooray!

And then – perhaps less surprisingly – there's another German poet on the poetry shortlist for the Best Translated Book Award: Farhad Showghi for End of the City Map, tr. Rosmarie Waldrop. The winners are announced on 27 May.

Incidentally, Jan Wagner's Regentonnenvariationen made it to number 5 on the Spiegel bestseller list after he won the Leipzig prize and spent several weeks in the charts. That hasn't happened to a poet before; not even Tranströmer after he won the Nobel.

Leipzig Book Fair Prize to Poet Jan Wagner

Well, there you are. What a funny day. They've gone and given the "literature" category of the Prize of the Leipzig Book Fair to Jan Wagner for his poetry collection Regentonnenvariationen. You can read one of Iain Galbraith's also award-winning translations of his work here, or wait for the book Self-Portrait with a Swarm of Bees to come out next month.

Unwisely, perhaps, the taz just ran a piece about how a few other poets got a bit antsy (geddit) about Wagner's nomination. I think Wagner is a delightfully accessible poet with lovely skin, who's worked hard to get to this position – the first poet to win Germany's second-biggest prize for a single title, which usually goes to either a novel or a short story collection. And it's not like he nominated himself. He gave a sweet little speech, all shocked and overwhelmed and his nice skin all flushed.

The Love German Books Incredibly Short Seasonal Poetry Book List

A commenter pointed out that I hadn't recommended anything for poetry lovers. I know next to nothing about poetry, but here is a tiny list of books of poetry translated from German to English and published in 2014:

Rainer Brambach: Collected Poems (trans. Esther Kinsky)

Volker Braun: Rubble Flora (trans. David Constantine and Karen Leeder)

Bertolt Brecht: Love Poems (trans. David Constantine and Tom Kuhn)

Ernst Meister: Wallless Space (trans. Graham Foust and Samuel Frederick)

Farhad Showghi: End of the City Map (trans. Rosemarie Waldrop)

During the summer I saw an amazing performance of some of the Brecht poems, and some of Margarete Steffin's poems to him. You can watch the video at Modern Poetry in Translation. I cried. In fact I was still rather sniffly for the following hour or so. They're good translations.

Stephen Spender Prize to Iain Galbraith, Jan Wagner

The Stephen Spender Prize honours poetry translations, which anyone can submit with a brief commentary. There are three age categories, with this year's 14-and-under going to Alexia Sloane and the 18-and-under to Sam Norman. In the "open" category – for adults, in other words – this year's first prize has gone to my friend and teacher Iain Galbraith for a gorgeous rendering of Jan Wagner's poem Quittenpastete/Quince Jelly. Iain also has two poems in the "commended" section, another Wagner one and one by the Austrian poet Peter Waterhouse. German contemporary poetry did very well this year in general, with a Michael Krüger poem translated by Hans-Christian Oeser also commended. Plus one by Rilke, translated by last year's Schlegel-Tieck Prize winner Ian Crockatt.

I'm embarrassed to admit that I have problems with some German contemporary poetry. Read aloud, which is the main way I consume it, it often seems so cryptic to me – filtered through my language issues, perhaps – that I wonder what's the point of publishing it, if no one else in the world has the vaguest chance of understanding anything. The work of Jan Wagner (and indeed Peter Waterhouse and Michael Krüger) is different: when I hear it, or read it, I understand something of what it's about, to me at least. In fact with Wagner there's a lot of other stuff going on, playful trickery with metre and sound and authorship, but that doesn't stop me from appreciating it at first hearing, or first glance. And Iain's versions give a wonderful impression of that initial accessibility with complexity hiding underneath – the winning poem is written in Sapphic stanzas, for goodness' sake, but you still get a moment out of someone else's life and an appreciation of nature's bounty. Tangy. I assume that takes a very long time to get right.

I once stood very close to Jan Wagner at a crowded event – I don't know him personally – and admired his lovely skin. Next year Arc Publications will be publishing a collection of his poems in Iain Galbraith's translation, Self-portrait with a Swarm of Bees.

A Lovely, Lovely Poetry Translation Film

I would have thought it might be impossible to make a film about something as intangible as poetry, and it might be boring to watch a film about something as desk-bound as translation. Luckily, Juliane Heinrich has proved me wrong and made a film of a poetry translation. It features the poets Odile Kennel and Anna Crowe, and me as supporting translator. And I've watched it about three times and it still makes me laugh. Such a pleasure!

How I Smuggled Verse

So I was booked as an "interpreter" at the VERSSchmuggel workshop. I thought I was supposed to explain things they didn't understand and just shut up the rest of the time. Only I was working with two delightful poets, Anna Crowe from Scotland and Odile Kennel from Berlin, both of whom also translate poetry from French into their respective languages. So in the end we all muddled in together and translated as a trio.

This is what happened: I had previously done what we call interlinear translations of Odile's poems into English, for Anna to use because she doesn't understand German. And someone else had done the same the other way around to give Odile a basic understanding of Anna's words. These interlinear versions are very stark, just plain translations of the words with footnotes to explain nuances. The creative work comes later, because as you know translation is about more than rendering the words.

And then the three of us sat down and read each poem out loud and talked about it – how it came about, what it sounds like, some of the stories it contains, which words are special, that kind of thing. And then we'd work our way through line by line, starting out with the bare interlinear versions as a prompt. It was my job to type, which left the poets' hands free to gesticulate, and seeing as I had the computer I was also looking things up in dictionaries, looking for pictures of things as seemingly random as knots and underwater creatures, finding recordings of sounds and songs, and generally being the internet in person. So when we were translating one of Odile's poems, Anna would dictate the English lines and Odile and I would throw in suggestions for words, and we'd look back over them at the end, read them out, laugh and sing and clap and generally rejoice.

Some of the translations stayed close to the originals, and some were weird and wacky and free. One of Odile's poems, "Fragen zu Tieren", works around animal names, which are often very different between German and English, and often comical even to German ears (handy flow chart in case you're the remaining person on the planet who hasn't seen it yet). So we had oodles of laughs finding amusing animals that fit together well in English too. Some of them aren't actual animals. The English is called "Bestial Questions". It's the kind of poem that can take a silly title. 

If you translate, imagine sharing what's usually a very private process with two people who are really talented wordsmiths, people with amazing vocabularies on demand who know how to build a mean sentence. So you get to have all those conversations you usually have in your head, only out loud. I wonder if this word would work here? Does that sound too silly? Oh, that phrase reminds me of that rhyme my grandad used to say, can I build that in somewhere? I'll just look up that song/film/picture to make sure, oh wow, this is so good, it has to go in there, how can I manage that? That was what it was like. At some point we all wished life was like that all the time – we got things done really quickly because we had the combined power of three very different brains at our disposal. It was paradise, really, air-conditioned at the British Council.

We all got on swimmingly and I hope we'll be friends forever. There'll be a podcast at some point with Anna and Odile by Ryan Van Winkle for the Scottish Poetry Library, about that bestial translation, and a film about one of Odile's poems at some point by Juliane Henrich for the Literaturwerkstatt. And there'll be a book containing all the Scottish and German poems that got translated by various people at the workshop. Nobody will mention Robert Frost.

Multiple Uljana Wolf Whammy

O! The new issue of Asymptote is online! It is full of things, but may I draw your attention in particular to some of the laciest poems ever by Uljana Wolf, translated by Shane Anderson, and an essay by Uljana Wolf, translated by me. If you like that kind of thing they have links to the originals.

Mini-making-of: An Asymptote editor and I attended a rather odd event at which Uljana Wolf and Christian Hawkey talked about erasure and their joint book in front of a bunch of students, and then the students asked the kind of questions I personally don't think writers ought to be asked. They had their baby with them and she was a bit wriggly and wanted to be held all the time, which made matters difficult, so I offered my baby-holding services. Uljana read the very essay you too can enjoy at Asymptote, and said editor and I went a bit gooey-eyed (on top of my baby-induced gooey-eyedness). He said could they put it in Asymptote, and I said could I translate it, and that was that.

(Whispering) I took a few little liberties. It was a great pleasure to translate. The essay is about erasure and snow and the Monkees and how Rilke was a bad translator and very possibly an arsehole to boot. And about Elizabeth Barrett Browning and this lovely book.

The One Thing I Actually Did in Leipzig

I seem to know a lot of lovely translators who maintain blogs nowadays. Another friend, Jamie Lee Searle, writes at translatingbetweenthelines.wordpress.com. And she brightened up my short stay in Leipzig and has written much more about it than I managed, which you ought to read.

Anyway, her post has prompted me to say a little something after all about one of the events we attended together, a discussion on the future of the book. Yes, I am a sucker for punishment. I'd been drawing a tactful veil of silence over it to be honest. But now I think, why not just let it all out in one big therapeutic rant. Jamie's given it the polite treatment, so now I can vent.

First of all, the format. An hour and a half! With seven people on the panel! And one of them was a famous American who attracted an adoring audience, which meant they had to cart along extra chairs and there were still people standing at the back. And then despite the event having a rather cute title - The Perfect Reading Machine - all that happened was that two people defended print books to the hilt, two people defended ebooks with a little less enthusiasm, and two people sat on the fence. What made me want to vomit the most was the way the reactionaries got peals of applause every time they mentioned workmanship, binding methods or typefaces. What made me want to vomit second-most was that almost everyone on the panel assumed that everybody who reads books is equipped with unlimited wealth and space for building up enormous libraries.

There was one golden moment, when poetry publishing empress Daniela Seel questioned the whole notion of reading for understanding - we'd been told that students reading on computers were distracted and therefore comprehended less - by asking: What is understanding in the first place? But nobody picked up her thread to crochet a more imaginative future for readers. And nor did the genuine argument that seemed to be brewing between Seel and the reactionaries ever break out into full-blown mud wrestling. Jamie and I started shuffling in our seats after an hour or so and I encouraged her to join me in walking out extra specially loudly in our clacky analogue high heeled boots. I felt like Nancy Sinatra. It was good.

Of course, having mouthed off loudly outside about paper fetishists, I did blow a hole in my budget the next day on a 1966 edition of Ernst Jandl poems on deckle-edged handmade paper. I shall add it to my infinite library as a reminder not to go to any more discussions on the future of the book, unless they involve real mud.

Shortlists

After the obligatory one-day sulk - and because it's the school holidays - here is the news:

Inka Parei's Shadow-Boxing Woman didn't make the Best Translated Book Award fiction shortlist, and nor did any other German titles. One of the ten is by a woman (but then the longlist was similarly skewed). But two books of translated German poetry are on the poetry shortlist (see link above), to wit: engulf – enkindle by Anja Utler, translated by Kurt Beals (who I just met, he's staying in Berlin for a while), and False Friends by Uljana Wolf, translated by Susan Bernofsky.

So congratulations ladies and gent and know that my fingers are crossed for you all.

On the prose front, the shortlist for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize has also been announced, and includes Alice by Judith Hermann, translated from the German by Margot Bettauer Dembo. Hooray!

Translation Competitions

Hooray! There are three different competitions for British translators to enter (or UK residents). First off, if you're very quick indeed, is the New Books in German Emerging Translators Programme. You have to be a "translator of German into English who has not yet published (or
been contracted to publish) a book-length literary translation, and who has not yet taken part in
the NBG Emerging Translators Programme". And you have to download and translate an extract by tomorrow.

This is such a fantastic initiative, as the winners attend a translation workshop with "leading translator Shaun Whiteside". They work on samples from new books for German publishers, so that it's not only them who reap the benefit but also the publishing world at large. If you can't make the deadline you can always enter next time around in the autumn.

Next up is the German Embassy Award for Translators. Again, you download an extract and translate it, in this case by 31 January. I'm so pleased they're running this competition again, because any UK citizen or resident (of three years) can enter and the prize is humongous - a month's residency at the Literarisches Colloquium Berlin and a trip to the Leipzig Book Fair and €1000.

Lastly for now is the Stephen Spender Prize for poetry translation. Again, it's British residents or citizens only, but you can translate any poem from any language into English. There are cash prizes and a publication and the deadline allows for plenty of time to tinker: 1 June 2012.

Update: Ruth Martin kindly pointed out in the comments section that I'd forgotten one! The British Centre for Literary Translation's John Dryden Translation Competition is open to anyone at all, for any literary text at all (as long as your translation is unpublished) and the deadline is 15 February.

Maintenant

3:AM magazine has a poetry section, I have just discovered. Called Maintenant, it covers a large range of European poets featuring interviews and translations of their work. The interviews I've read by SJ Fowler are well-informed and interesting (although proofreading might have done some of them good). I approve.

Check out the interviews with Ulf Stolterfoht, Anatol Knotek, Daniele Pantano and Ann Cotten from the German-speaking world. Unfortunately you'll have to search through of your own accord because there I can't find long links. One piece is also available at Poetry International, a fascinating interview with Jan Wagner - which, however, doesn't stand alone too well as it seems to locate him at the top of some imaginary pyramid of Young German Poets without the context of the other interviews. And although I personally find Jan Wagner one of the most accessible of Young German Poets, he isn't really quite the lone star he comes across as in Fowler's questions here.

Well worth reading.

Tim Parks in Sensible Comment Shock!

Regular readers will know I'm not a great admirer of Tim Parks' theories on how the fact books get translated is making literature dull and globalised. I summed up my objections here. The man himself has been in Germany recently and even took part in an event about his ideas in Berlin, which I sadly couldn't attend. Or maybe not sadly, because I'm sure it would have made me all angry and incoherent and given me wrinkles. He also gave an interview to Deutschlandradio Kultur, reiterating his ideas and giving one single example (Peter Stamm).

So imagine my surprise when I read Parks' latest missive in the New York Review of Books - and actually found myself nodding in agreement. Here, Parks writes about the translation of poetry and how it really helps to have an excellent knowledge of the original language. In many cases poetry is translated by poets, who often don't understand the source language at all or have only a rudimentary grasp. They do so with what we call an interlinear translation - an absolutely literal translation done by a non-poet.

I'm not going to make myself many friends by saying this, but that's a bit of a roundabout way of doing things. What I often find comes out of the procedure is more a new poem than a classic translation. (Oh, by the way, I'm reading David Bellos' Is That a Fish in Your Ear? so when I use the words "classic translation" you'll just have to think up your own idea about what that might mean, because of course there's no such thing. But more on that some other time - let's just assume we have reached an agreement about what a translation is, and it is a close approximation of the original text in another language.) Now there's nothing wrong with writing a new poem based upon one written in a language that's foreign to you and your audience. The book Buch der Sehnsüchte, for example, is a collection of Leonard Cohen translations by various German writers, some of them rather a long way from the originals. And there's a similar anthology of translations by German poets out there that I shall add in this spot as soon as I can remember the title. In fact, I've been told (by a translating poet) that only poets can translate poetry.

I disagree, and so does Tim Parks. He writes:

(W)hat often frees the student to offer better translations is a deeper knowledge of the language he is working from: a better grasp of the original allows the translator to detach from formal structures and find a new expression for the tone he is learning to feel: in this case, however, every departure from strict transposition is inspired by an intimate and direct experience of the original.
All this to arrive at the obvious conclusion that while expression and creativity in one’s own language is crucial, a long experience in the language we are working from can only improve the translations we make.

Interpreting is a key aspect of translation, and I feel a good translation has to be based on the translator's personal interpretation of the text. We have to feel the implications and hints, the flavour and allusions, we have to hear when a poem is leaning towards an advertising jingle or a Christmas carol just as when it's playing on a previous work. And while there are of course annotated editions of poetry that has entered the canon, most poems just have to stand on their own to be interpreted freely. To capture all those nuances calls for intimate knowledge of the original language and to re-render it, great skill in the target language.

The ideal translator for the purpose of rendering a close approximation of poetry, then, might be a poet or might not be, but would be a voracious reader of poetry in both languages.

Stay in Sweden, Support Poetry Publisher

Publishing poetry is not likely to get anyone rich. So how to finance it? Already slightly unusual, the Sweden-based German poetry imprint Edition Rugerup has come up with a novel way to subsidise its books, which are mainly international poetry translated into German.

As trade mag Börsenblatt reports, you can now book a stay in the small village of Rugerup itself, in the home of the publisher (and translator) Margitt Lehbert. They say:

The house, built in 1866, has a large library but also German TV and – for those who like that kind of thing – a Spiegel subscription. There's an Internet connection to keep you in touch with the world. The household includes two lively children, aged 13 and 11,  sheepdog Laika and two cats.

Photos on the Rugerup Facebook page.

Confessions of a Poetry Pooper

The lovely Wiebke Porombka writes about poetry in Germany in today’s FAZ. Apparently it’s going through a boom in terms of productivity. Only nobody seems to be noticing apart from the usual suspects.

I have to admit I feel rather akin to the classic anecdotal poetry pooper Porombka cites in her article. German poet Gottfried Benn talked about a journalist who told him she didn’t care for poems – and certainly not for verse. Fortunately, the anecdote works better in German, which has a nice show-offy synonym for poetry: the liltingly pretentious term Lyrik.

Anyway, to get back to me, German poetry is not my strong point. I did try for some years to like it, but have rather given up now and resigned myself to a life of lowbrow literary philistinism. I will attend events at which poetry and prose are offered up alongside one another, but a pure poetry evening is now out of the question. Sorry.

This is terribly embarrassing and inconvenient, as I do now know the odd poet. Suffice to say, if you see me at a German poetry reading I either owe the poet a huge favour or I really, really like them as a person. And there’s a reason for that. Despite what Porombka claims, I don’t find that my uncertainty towards German poetry usually vanishes into thin air as soon as I hear poets reading their texts or talking about them. And nor do I find that most German poets manage to present their work in an unpretentious and readily understood way.

In fact I often find poetry – in either German or English – absolutely unsuited to the medium of the public reading. Many of the poets I’ve seen live here are the very opposite of good performers, mumbling their way through the show and then descending upon a beer to relieve the pressure. Please note, however, that I don’t mean this as a criticism as such.

By its very nature, as Porombka points out, poetry takes longer to read than your average prose. My mind, schooled as it is in spontaneous interpreting, is nevertheless incapable of processing poetry when it is read to me. I am easily distracted at the best of times, but put me in a room with a number of vaguely attractive peers and get someone to read poems out loud at the front, and my eyes and mind will wander almost instantly. Which is not an unpleasant activity, but it does make me feel a bit like a tone-deaf groupie. If I must, I will read poems at home. To myself.

But there’s a drawback to this inherent paper-boundness, and that’s down to the way the German literary business works. Its flourishing culture of literary events means writers can often earn a meagre living from their readings. Yes – they actually get paid to do it, once they reach a certain prominence level. There are writers who don’t have a literary agent but do have an events agent, and German writers are often taken aback when asked to read abroad for no fee.

So imagine you’re a struggling poet, living in a garret and applying for winter residencies on remote islands to save on heating costs. As the FAZ article points out, book sales are hardly going to see you through – if you’re even earning anything from them in the first place. You too would be tempted to venture into the public eye for €250, I’m sure. Only to look out at the audience and see a freckled lady quite obviously busy with other activities.

It’s a dilemma. Poetry is never going to make money. In fact much of the literature I admire is never going to be a profitable enterprise. That’s a good thing in one way, because an art form shouldn’t have to be a viable commodity. I hope poetry and literary prose will always find a way to survive, either in small presses run by self-exploitative individuals, supported by state arts funding, or subsidised by more commercial books as in the traditional German publishing model.

But what we have now is a culture of precarious poetic existences, in which a small handful of privileged – I won’t call them successful – poets can scrape by seemingly without taking on a full-time day job. And these are the poets who are forced to thrust themselves in our faces, commodifying if not necessarily their poetry, then at least their readings of it. Of the “young talents” Porombka lists, I’ve seen all but two of them reading their poems – and sometimes the exact same poems – several times over. And remember, I don’t even like poetry.

I sometimes think we might be better off if all German poets had to go out and get a proper job, much like the expat poetry scene in Berlin, whose work I find much more accessible. Of course I’d never say it out loud for fear of sounding like Norman Tebbit. Is it wrong to assume that poets whose existence revolves around poetry itself become self-indulgent and lose contact with everyone else’s reality over the years? Are self-indulgence and a lack of contact with what the rest of us call reality bad things? But as I listen for the fifth time to the same poem about water surfaces or personal insecurities or very possibly both, I do long for a more down-to-earth approach.

Lars Arvid Brischke, for instance, is an environmental scientist by day and writes his poetry in his spare time, and it doesn’t seem to suffer for it. Not knowing a great deal about poetry, I can’t come up with any more examples. But no doubt there are many and no doubt they have a different kind of input and possibly a different kind of output. Certainly I’d like to see more of them, see the part-time poets paid more attention in the press.

I like to hope I’m in the minority. I like to hope nobody else in the room is mentally criticising the poet’s hairdo or keeping tally of pseudy comments, let alone choosing which individual at the reading to procreate with, should the immanent end of the world be hailed by a surprise alien invasion. Perhaps the rest of the audience, utterly untroubled by linguistic issues, are communing with the verse and interpreting each word as it’s spoken. Because if that’s the case, perhaps poetry might even catch on.

Berliners, Unite in Poetry!

The German verb dichten is rather tricky to translate in a pithy way. It means "to write poetry" but it also has a slight ring of plumbing about it, meaning "to seal" as well. Dictionaries will also offer you "versify" but it's not quite that pretentious, or at least it doesn't feel that way to me.

So it's hard to tell you the name of this exciting project being run by the Literaturwerkstatt Berlin: Berliner, dichtet Berlin! Celebrating twenty years of the institution, they've launched a great big jamboree of everyman versifying. Here's what they say:

Berlin, a city of many towns, is giving itself the gift of a poem. Written by the people for the people, a poetic saunter through the boroughs, from the margins all the way to the centre. The Literaturwerkstatt Berlin invites interested Berliners of any age and origin to take part in this project in their own borough. The participants have the opportunity to work on the poem with an experienced poet in a writing workshop. The focus should be on the borough itself, its history and unique characteristics.
The finished texts will be linked into one long poem at the end of June, with 100 lines per borough, twelve equal parts making up a single entity in many voices.

Now doesn't that sound fantastic? I was inspired to knock out a personal ode to my borough. No need to take it terribly seriously.

Mitte Mark II, three uncomfortable bedfellows.
One nondescript and drab,
What people call authentic.
One full of bling and arabesque,
Round the back grubby pubs and shoes five euro a pair.
One sprouting unsightly boils in the shape of private schools,
caused by fear and loathing of the other two.

Links Roundup

My little Jiminy Cricket is shrieking at me for not posting anything all week. Boring work and personal issues, sorry.

So here's a brief list of links to people who did bother to bring you content.

English PEN promotes books in translation and has now brought out an "anthology containing extracts from the 36 books that the programme has supported since its inception. Making the World Legible contains a dazzling array of fiction, non-fiction and poetry from some of the best international writers of our time; distinct and powerful voices from every corner of the globe." Download it for free via English PEN for extracts from German-language writers Emine Sevgi Özdamar (trans. Martin Chalmers), Roger Willemsen (trans. Stefan Tobler), Senait Mehari (t. Christine Lo), Saša Stanišić (t. Anthea Bell), Ruth Maier (t. Jamie Bulloch) - and loads of other stuff. (Via Three Percent)

Tubuk is a platform for German-language books from independent publishers (I wrote about them in 2008), and they've started a blog. Over the summer they're featuring original pieces by some of their (and oddly enough, my) favourite writers. Worth checking out.

Which takes me link-hopping over to the Mairisch Verlag blog, where you really need to scroll down to about May for a German's eye view of the book world in and around San Francisco. Or go straight to the pieces about City Lights, Microcosm Publishing, McSweeney's, and loads more that I can't be bothered to link to. Tags would be nice, guys.

Los Superdemokraticos is "a blog running from June to October 2010, remembering 200 years of independency of Latin American countries. 20 German- and Spanish-speaking writers from Argentina, Bolivia, Brasil, Cuba, Germany, Guatemala, Israel, Mexiko, Peru, Uruguay, USA and Venezuela)" write about their daily lives in international political contexts. Apparently there'll be five texts translated into English every month but they're not up there yet. The German writers are young and dynamic and good.

It'll be raining poems in Berlin on 28 August, trade mag Börsenblatt tells us. A helicopter will scatter 100,000 bookmarks printed with poetry by German and Chilean writers over the Museum Island. Don't forget your umbrella.

Stephen Spender Deadline

The Times Stephen Spender Prize is just the thing for all those many, many British residents or citizens with a love of translating poetry. All you have to do is send them a poem you've translated with a short commentary and a cheque for three pounds by 28 May, and if you win they'll give you a big fat envelope full of cash and put your name up in lights on Trafalgar Square.*

Go on, you know you want to.

*Subject to weather conditions.

Peter Huchel Prize to Friederike Mayröcker

The €10,000 Peter Huchel Prize for an outstanding work of poetry from the past year goes to the Austrian poet Friederike Mayröcker for dieses Jäckchen (nämlich) des Vogel Greif. Mayröcker has been publishing poems since 1946 and has a long list of awards to her name.

Burning Deck Press published her Heiligenanstalt: "four fictions 'around' the composers Chopin, Bruckner, Schubert, and the trio of Brahms, Clara and Robert Schumann. All presided over by Beethoven whose 'Heiligenstadt Testament' is evoked by the title (literally: 'Saints' Asylum': a reference to Robert Schumann's years of insanity)." The translator is Rosemarie Waldrop.

You can also read a good handful of her poems online in Richard Dove's translation at Green Integer. Apparently they're lined up for publication by Carcanet Press - no sign as yet though.

Seven Poets from Berlin

The winter 2010 issue of Chicago Review contains poems from Daniel Falb, Monika Rinck, Hendrik Jackson, Uljana Wolf, Steffen Popp, Sabine Scho and Ron Winkler.

The translations are by Christian Hawkey (who also edited and introduces), Nicholas Grindell, Nicholas Perrin, Catherine Hales, Susan Bernofsky, J.D. Schneider and Andrea Scott.

You have to buy a proper paper copy though.