NER German Poetry in Translation

Crossing Through the Present: German Poetry in Translation is a special section in the current issue of Middlebury College’s New England Review (v37 n3). “The selection of writing from Germany assembled here,” writes Carolyn Kuebler, “came about as the result of both intention and accident—NER ’s ongoing intention to offer an inspiring, provocative range of literary voices, and the happy accident of our own Ellen Hinsey’s living for a time in Berlin. While there, Ellen read a particularly intriguing essay about poetry, notebook-keeping, and Hannah Arendt, and she suggested it would be worth translating for NER. . . She also met the essay’s author, the writer Marie Luise Knott, who offered to share her familiarity with the scene to help us choose a selection of new German poetry. Add to that a call for submissions, a series of meetings in Berlin cafés, and several time-zone-jumping phone calls, and the result is that this issue contains not only a multitude of voices from the English-speaking world, as always, but also a multitude of voices from the German-speaking world. They meet here in our pages.”

Two works, “Zakid’s Delicatessen, Bremen” by Peter Waterhouse (trans. Iain Galbraith) and “on classification in language, a feeble reader” by Uljana Wolf (trans. Sophie Seita), are available to read on the NER website along with Kuebler’s Editor’s Note for this issue.