Jan Wagner, Self-Portrait with a Swarm of Bees, translated by Iain Glabraith shortlisted for Popescu European Poetry Compeition 2015
See the shortlist for the Popescu Prize of the Poetry Society here
From the judges: Jan Wagner’s poems are ‘not only elaborate, cunning, and worldly, but genuinely entertaining’ (Iain Galbraith). His playful adventures in form surprise into view the hidden structures of life and language, while celebrating poetry’s ‘bond with our steaming, glowing, odorous, noisy world’ (JW/IG). Galbraith converts every challenge (formal, lexical, metrical….) into an opportunity, matching Wagner’s ingenuity and investment at every step, having internalized the ‘primal syntax’ so completely that everything he writes hits the mark. The result is a perfect sufficiency: a set of poems in English that somehow inhabit the same skin as the German, with their own autonomous heart and lungs. They appear in yet another wonderful bilingual edition from Arc’s Visible Poets Series, with an illuminating introduction by Galbraith that reveals the living beauty and efficiency of his translation’s inner workings.
Fingers crossed for Iain Galbraith and Jan Wagner who gave the first Poetry and translation Masterclass here in Oxfordthe first of the Mediating Modern Poetry events back in January 2014
And hear iain reading a poem form the collection for the Poetry Society here