Translations from German

Translated from German by Catherine Hales. English only.

Published 2010. Paperback, 104pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20

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 .

WINNER, English PEN Award.  Translated from German by various hands. Introduced by Nicola Thomas.

Published 2025. Paperback, 204pp, 9 x 6ins, £16.95 / $25

ISBN 9781848619074

This is the first major anthology of contemporary German-language poetry in English for more than 40 years. Authors featured are: Yevgeniy Breyger, Sonja vom Brocke, Alexandru Bulucz, Carolin Callies, Ann Cotten, Ulrike Draesner, Oswald Egger, Elke Erb, Daniel Falb, Christian Filips, Dinçer Güçyeter, Martina Hefter, Jayne-Ann Igel, Hendrik Jackson, Thomas Kling, Dagmara Kraus, Birgit Kreipe, Nadja Küchenmeister, Jan Kuhlbrodt, Georg Leß, Friederike Mayröcker, Christoph Meckel, Steffen Popp, Kerstin Preiwuß, Monika Rinck, Ulrike Almut Sandig, Sabine Scho, Daniela Seel, Verena Stauffer, Ulf Stolterfoht, Sebastian Unger, Anja Utler, Peter Waterhouse, and Uljana Wolf.

Translators are: Shane Anderson, Kurt Beals, Paul-Henri Campbell, Aimee Chor, Brian Currid, Andrew Duncan, Joshua Daniel Edwin, Christopher Fenwick, Gerald Fiebig, Iain Galbraith, Robert Gillett, Nicholas Grindell, Catherine Hales, Christian Hawkey, Jayashree Hari Joshi, Alexander Kappe, Karen Leeder, Grace Nissan, Caroline Wilcox Reul, Bradley Schmidt, Jake Schneider, Joel Scott, Sophie Seita, Donna Stonecipher, Nicola Thomas, Amy Visram and Jana Maria Weiß.

Translated from German by Iain Galbraith. English only.

Published 2007. Paperback, 100pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £12.95 / $20

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.

Translated from German by philip kuhn & ruth von zimmermann. Bilingual edition.  

With an introductory essay by philip kuhn and a foreword by Regina Nörtemann.

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.

Translated from German by Andrew Shields & Andrew Winnard. English only.

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.

Translated from German.

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.

Translated from German by David Need. Bilingual edition.

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 recognised 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).

Translated from German by Nicholas Grindell.
Published 2025. Paperback, 84pp, 8 x 8ins, £12.95 / $20.

ISBN 9781848619630

Among many other things, Honey Protocols can be approached as a dictionary (offering peculiar and extravagant definitions of creatures and concepts alike), as a routine documenting its own abolition (48 of its 66 poems open with the same phrase, escaping this compulsion towards the end), or as a book of tall tales (in one, two men sail a three-masted trampoline out onto a lake, the trampoline capsizes, they sink, the lake spits them back out onto the promenade). The collection might also be read as a dreamlike visit to the battlefield where the kind of stories we like to tell ourselves cross swords with the kind of stories that are constantly told to us (and sold to us) by the massed forces of mockery (with tech support from the Delphic engineers).

Translated from German by Tony Frazer.

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).

Translated from German by Jake Schneider. English only.

Published 2016. Paperback, 84pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848615045 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



Born in 1973, Ron Winkler is one of the leading poets of his generation in Germany.

“In his poetry he demonstrates in a sometimes hilarious, sometimes unsettling way how an ever greater part of what in the previous century we used to call ‘reality’ for the sake of convenience, has been expanded and shrunk to a virtual universe in which the tactile and audible are constantly zapped, sampled, filtered and twittered. The consequence is that “on a word level, our thought collapses into fragmented, labyrinthine and ridiculously large-scale concepts”. —Ard Posthuma