Translations from German

Published 2022. Paperback, 228pp, 9 x 6ins, £14.95 / $25.

ISBN 9781848617858 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

Ulrike Draesner is recognised as one of Germany’s most important living poets, as well as being an original and daring writer of fiction. Her poetic language, recorded where breath and script meet, can unsettle conventional reading modalities: its orthography refuses to capitalise; its punctuation – if the stops and starts may be called that – is rarely executed by comma or period; its sequentialities, shunning the comfort of bespoke narrative, undermining the reliability of marching lines and subaltern clauses, are born at the intersection of worldly impulse and bodily pulse, vulnerable to the loops of memory. Her writing favours an exchange with the reader that explores unfamiliar modes of encountering the world to form the sociable space of a poem. Her work is charged with a delicious, inquisitive restlessness. Visually acute, her poems are keen to discover, reflect on and body forth complex blendings of thought, sound, smell and image, delivering a revealing diffraction to the reader’s ear.

Published 2012. Paperback, 206pp, 9x6ins, £14.95 / $23

ISBN 9781848612143 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

A new translation of one of the greatest monuments of German literature. This is the famous first part (Faust. Der Tragödie erster Teil), and does not include the extraordinary (and virtually unstageable) Part 2, completed many years later. First published in 1808, and then in a revised edition in 1829, the story — a variant of the old Faustus legend—concerns the scientist (or perhaps, better, natural philosopher), Dr Heinrich Faust, whose scientific quests, and their lack of success, lead him into a state of great frustration. Parallel to this, Mephistopheles (the Devil) lays a wager with God that he can subvert God's favoured human (for this is Faust).… (read more on the book page)

Published 2019. Paperback, 132pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848616608 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.].

“With Brecht, Benn, Bobrowski and Celan, Peter Huchel is one of a handful of essential post-war poets in the German language. A precise observer of natural pheno-mena, Huchel is above all a realist whose metaphors take us deep into the social and historical landscape, into zones of devastation and despair, the zero-hour of isolation. His world is devoid of illusion or sentimentality; there is no redemption, at most an exactitude that is itself a confirmation of what is human and real. Lifted out of the schismatic currents of the Cold War era by Martyn Crucefix’s supple and arrestingly sensual translations, Huchel surprises us as a fresh and startling voice for our own numbered days.” —Iain Galbraith

Published 2010. Paperback, 104pp, 9x6ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848610965 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

Berlin Fresco is the first volume in English by the German poet, translator, editor, and publisher, Norbert Hummelt. Born in the Rhineland in 1962, he has been a freelance writer since 1991, and editor of the literary-critical journal Text+Kritik. He has taught at the Deutsche Literaturinstitut (German Literature Institute) in Leipzig and at the Universität der Künste (University of the Arts) in Berlin. He has translated the poetry of W.B. Yeats, Wordsworth and Inger Christensen, as well as Eliot's Four Quartets and The Waste Land.

Published 2018. Paperback, 142pp, 8 x 8ins, £16.95 / $30

Published 2018. Hardcover, 142pp, 8 x 8ins, £35 / $49.95

ISBN 9781848616066 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

Klänge (Sounds) was Kandinsky’s only poetry publication—a collection of prose poems, accompanied by 56 of his own inimitable woodcuts, 12 of them in colour. It appeared in late 1912, or early 1913 (the exact date is uncertain) from the Munich publishing house, Piper, and thus came at a crucial time in Kandinsky’s artistic life: just after he had made the great breakthrough into abstraction, and likewise just after the publication of his seminal text, Über das Geistige in der Kunst (On the Spiritual in Art). These were not the only poems that he wrote—others are preserved in the artist’s papers—but these are the ones he chose to publish, and in a lavish edition. 

Published 2019. Paperback, 188pp, 9 x 6ins, £14.95 / $24

ISBN 9781848616561 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]  

Thomas Kling (1957-2005) was born in Bingen am Rhein, near Frankfurt, grew up in Hilden, and went to school in Düsseldorf. He later lived in Vienna, Finland and Cologne, and finally settled down as a freelance writer near Neuss, living in a house on a decommissioned NATO missile station in Hombroich. As well as numerous collections of poems he also published translations of Catullus and was editor of the anthology Sprachspeicher. 200 Gedichte auf deutsch vom achten bis zum zwanzigsten Jahrhundert (Language Storage. 200 Poems in German from the 8th to the 20th Century, 2001). Thomas Kling died on 1 April 2005 at the age of 47, a victim of lung cancer, by then recognised as one of the most important German-language poets of his time. He had come to wide recognition in the 1980s, gaining renown for performances of his work (which he referred to as “speech-installations”, rather than as readings) and was one of the main forces behind the renovation of contemporary German poetry that occurred at that time, for which he reached back to the expressionist era and also to the post-war Viennese avant-garde, which had previously gained little traction in Germany. He was awarded the Else Lasker-Schüler Prize, the Peter Huchel Prize, and the Ernst Jandl Prize. His Collected Poems (Gesammelte Gedichte 1981–2005) was published in 2006. This is the first volume of his work to be published in English.

Published 2007. Paperback, 100pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18.

ISBN 9781905700301

The first English-language survey of Austrian poet Alfred Kolleritsch's work. Kolleritsch is the doyen of the Graz literary scene, and editor of the indispensable magazine manuskripte, for decades one of the major German-language literary/poetic journals.

Published 2012. Paperback, 96pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18.

ISBN 9781848611986 [Download a sample PDF from this book here (English texts only).]

Welten (Worlds) is a cycle of poems written in the second half of 1937 by Gertrud Kolmar, who was to perish six years later in Auschwitz. The manuscript was passed in 1947 by her brother-in-law to Peter Suhrkamp, publisher at Suhrkamp Verlag—now Germany's premier literary press—and was one of the first books to appear from Suhrkamp after the war.

Published 2005. Paperback, 100pp, 8 x 5ins, £10.95 / $18.

ISBN 9780907562771

A Farewell to Everything is a translation of the author's 1997 German collection Ein Strich durch alles (Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt-am-Main): ninety nine-line poems written over a one-year period. The book is made available thanks to a translation grant from Pro Helvetia, the Swiss Culture Foundation. Ilma Rakusa was born in 1946 in Rimavská Sobota, Slovakia, to a Hungarian mother and a Slovenian father, and spent her childhood in Budapest, Ljubljana and Trieste. She lives in Zürich.

Published 2004. Paperback, 8.5x5.5ins. 108pp. £10.95 / $18.

ISBN 9780907562528

In the 2002, poet Tessa Ransford and artist Joyce Gunn-Cairns travelled to Leipzig as part of a Scottish Arts Council travel award. While there, Tessa investigated the local poetry scene and translated 5 poets based in Saxony: one in Weimar, one near Dresden and three from Leipzig itself. Joyce sketched portarits of each of the writers and made the portrait photographs that grace the cover of the book. The poets included are Wulf Kirsten, Uta Mauersberger, Andreas Reimann, Thomas Rosenlöcher, Elmar Schenkel and Tessa Ransford herself.

Published 2018. Paperback, 228pp, 9x6ins, £14.95 / $22. ISBN 9781848616028

[Download a sample PDF from this book here (English texts only).]

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) is recognized as one of the great poets of 20th century European modernism. From 1921-1926, he lived in southern Switzerland, in a region called the Valais. Following the completion of the Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus, Rilke began to work in both French and German. A collection of French poems addressed to the landscape of Valais, Quatrains Valaisans, was published in 1926. In May of that same year, Rilke sent his publishers an arrangement of German language poems as a possible manuscript; the bulk of these date to 1924, but the collection included both material culled from a recently recovered 1906 daybook and a final set of poems written over the last two years of his life. Rilke sent the last of these in August 1926; he would die of complications from leukaemia just four months later.

      This volume is the first English translation of these poems in the arrangement Rilke had set down in 1926. The arrangement translated here has only appeared in German as Aus Taschen-Büchern und Merk-Blättern (Insel-Verlag, 1950).

Published in Australia, 2005, by Giramondo Publishing, Sydney; distributed in the UK by Shearsman Books.)

Paperback, 93pp, 6.7x5.9ins. £8.00 / $A20 in Australia.

ISBN 9781920882112

The first book-length colection of Lutz Seiler's work in English translation, In the year one contains poems drawn from his second and third German collections: pech & blende (2000) and vierzig kilometer nacht (2003).