Goethe-Institut New York | Current Writing Blog

Considered Germany's most prestigious literary honor, the Georg-Büchner-Preis, awarded by the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung, goes this year to novelist Felicitas Hoppe.

This year's jury stated about their choice: "Felicitas Hoppe began her multivoiced work in 1996, with Picknick der Friseure. Since that time she has explored, in her novels, stories, and essays, the world of adverturers and con men, of explorers and ne'er-do-wells. In laconic, lyrical, highly original and unpretentious prose she has created a narrative universe in which she explores fundamental questions of postmodern existence with an imagination that is limitless and liberating."

Hoppe was born in 1970 in Hamelin and lives in Berlin. Her most recent work is the fictious biography, Hoppe (S. Fischer Verlag, 2012).

The Georg-Büchner Prize, along with a €50,000 cash award, will be presented in Darmstadt on October 27.

Reading
05/24/2012
6:30pm
Deutsches Haus NYU
42 Washington Mews
New York, NY 10003
Tel.: +1 (212) 998-8660
German and English
Free, please RSVP for event

Deutsches Haus writer-in-residence Peter Schneider gives a reading from Der Mauerspringer (The Walljumper), the first of a triliogy of novels about the city of Berlin that he has published over the last 30 years. The trilogy is completed by Paarungen (Couplings) and Eduards Heimkehr (Eduard’s Homecoming). The author will also talk about the highlights of living and writing in what, as of 1999, is again the German capital city.

Novelist, screenwriter, and cultural-political journalist Peter Schneider was a central figure in the 1968 student protest movement in Berlin. A number of his over 20 works have been translated into English, including the Berlin Trilogy presented here. His essays have appeared in Der Spiegel, Die Zeit, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and The New York Times, among others.

Burton Pike becomes the 16th translator from German to English to win the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize. His translation of Gerhard Meier's Toteninsel, Isle of the Dead, was published by Dalkey Archive Press.

Burton Pike is Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature and German at the CUNY Graduate Center. Among his translations are Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther and Rilke's The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. Pike edited and co-translated Robert Musil's The Man without Qualities and a book of Musil's essays, Precision and Soul. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Medaille für Verdienste um Robert Musil from the City of Klagenfurt, Pike lives in New York City.

The jury for this year's Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize, funded by the German government and awarded by the Goethe-Institut Chicago, was comprised of two former Wolff Prize winners, David Dollenmayer and Krishna Winston, who were joined by Karen Noelle, Michael Ritterson, and Annie Wedekind. Onno Hückmann, German Consul General in Chicago, will present the prize at a private ceremony in Chicago in June. Along with a $10,000 cash prize, Wolff Translator's Prize recipients have the opportunity to enjoy a residency at the Literarisches Colloquium Berlin.

The American Academy of Arts and Letters yesterday honored poets and translators Michael Hofmann and Christopher Middleton with its Thornton Wilder Prize for Translation and its Arts and Letters Award in Literature, respectively.

The prolific Michael Hofmann has translated roughly five dozen titles from the German, among them works by Franz Kafka, Wolfgang Koeppen, and Durs Grünbein, and is largely responsible for familiarizing English-language readers with the work of Joseph Roth. Every Man Dies Alone, by Hans Fallada, proved so popular in the US that it occasioned new interest in Fallada's work in Germany. Hofmann's anthology, Twentieth-Century German Poetry, was published in 2006.

Christopher Middleton, who first introduced Robert Walser to American readers, has translated classic works of German literature by Goethe, Hölderlin, and Nietzsche. Middleton is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Schlegel-Tieck Translation Prize. Interestingly, both men have translated works by novelist Gert Hofmann, Michael Hofmann's father.

Discussion
05/22/2012
7:30 PM
Greenlight Bookstore
686 Fulton Street
Brooklyn, NY 11217
Free admission
Tel.: + 1 (212) 246-0200

Greenlight, one of Brooklyn's most active bookstores, offers a number of events and book groups, among them their Young Readers Book Group for readers 8 to 14 years of age. On May 22 the group will discuss The Neverending Story by German author Michael Ende, translated by Ralph Manheim. This modern classic is the tale of a boy named Bastian, who, fascinated by an old book called The Neverending Story and its magical world of Fantastica, discovers that he himself has become a character in the story. When Fantastica's existence is threatened, will Bastian be able to save it?

The discussion is led by Greenlight bookseller and former teacher Brette. Parents are welcome but not required to attend, and pizza is served for everyone.

Staged Reading
05/21/12
7:30pm
Goethe-Institut Wyoming Building
5 East 3rd Street/Bowery
New York, NY 10003
In English
Free admission
Tel.: +1 (212) 439-8700

Theater director Daniel Brunet brings young German playwright Dea Loher’s Bluebeard - Hope of Women to Wyoming Building for a staged reading on Monday, May 21. Brunet is more than familiar with Loher’s work, having been awarded a 2010 PEN Translation Grant for his translation of The Last Fire, and also having translated Innocence (Unschuld), which was given a staged reading last year at the Goethe-Institut New York.

Dea Lohers Blaubart - Hoffnung der Frauen uses the classic tale of the man who murders the women he loves to comment ironically on modern women's concept of "total" love. The cast features Christen Clifford*, Melissa Hurst*, Sheila Joon*, Johanna McKeon, Julia Moss*, Rebecca Nelson*, Diana Ruppe* and Jesse Paul Wilson (*Actors' Equity Association members).

Award-winning playwright Dea Loher, born in Bavaria in 1964, is one of Germany’s most widely produced contemporary playwrights. Her nearly 20 plays have been awarded virtually every major award in the German-speaking theater world and have been translated into 28 different languages. Loher lives in Berlin.

Performance
05/17/12 - 05/27/12
Th – Su 8:00pm
Sat 8:00pm & 10:00pm
Access Theater
380 Broadway at White St.
New York, NY 10013
Tel.: +1 (212) 966-1047
Tickets

Georg Büchner 's classic, ever-modern drama, Woyzeck, receives a new production by Aporia Theater, founded by Columbia University alumni in 2007. Aporia devotes itself to compelling original work and Woyzeck is presented here in a new translation by Artistic Director Sarah Wansley, with original music by David Marenberg. The play previews on May 17, opening on May 18.

Translator/director Wansley has stated: “With this new translation, I created a Woyzeck that is accessible to a contemporary American audience, yet remains grounded in the circumstances of its original time and place. To this end, we are using an English text with songs in both English and German...I want the audience to experience the strangeness of the original German text.” The cast features Lydia Blaisdell, Ugo Chukwu, Alexander Cook, Greg Engbrecht, Eloïse Eonnet, Graham Halstead, Grant Harrison, Rosa Gilmore, Miles Jacoby and Joseph Rende.

Reading
05/15/12
6:30-9:00pm
Library of Congress
Montpelier Rm, 6th Flr, James Madison Bldg.
101 Independence Ave. SE
Washington, DC, 20540
English and German
Free and open to the public
tel.: +1 (202) 289-1200

Herta Müller continues her US tour with a stop at the Library of Congess in DC, for an evening introduced by James H. Billington, Librarian of Congress. Accompanying her is Philip Boehm, whose translations of her work include, most recently, The Hunger Angel. This latest novel is the English-language version of Atemschaukel, which appeared a few months before Müller was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize for Literature. Müller and Boehm will read from the novel, followed by a discussion moderated by Peter C. Pfeiffer, Chair of the Department of German at Georgetown University. The event, organized by the Goethe-Institut Washington DC and the LOC, will be co-hosted by the European Division and the Poetry and Literature Center of the Library of Congress.

In connection with Herta Müller's visit to Washington, Die letzten Tage der Ceausescus, a film on Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, whose regime is featured largely in Müller's work, will be screened on May 14. Details may be found on the Goethe-Institut Washington site.