Mediating Modern Poetry is very pleased to welcome Ulrike Draesner as Visiting Fellow at New Coillege, Oxford, and TORCH for the academic year 2015-16. Oxford's first German writer in residence
Ulrike will be working in Oxford, and has been active in seminars, workshops, readings and visits to local schools.
See also the symposium Leaping from the Edge of the World at New College Oxford on Draesner's work
The symposium was also the i'nspiration for a small exhibition in the Taylor Institution on translations of Shakespeare Shall I compare thee? Shakespeare in Translation, up to and including Ulrike Draesner's 'radical translations of Shakespeare's sonnets Twin Spin. See Henrike Lähnemann's blog on the exhibition
Shakespeare's Sonnets have captured the imagination of German poetry translators for centuries, each of them interpreting them anew. None of these poems have been accessible in English until now. Ulrike Draesner's "radical translation", ‘Twin Spin’, entwines the languages of poetic reproduction and cloning. Tom Cheesman’s back-translation, 'Thymine', back-translates her work into English, completing a cycle of re-interpretationThe two versions are combined with reproductions of the first edition of the sonnets in the Bodleian's copy of 'Shake-speares sonnets Neuer before Imprinted' from 1609 in the 1905 facsimile version by Lee. Together, these three versions of the sonnets, spun through languages and centuries, are published in pamphlet form on a triple occasion: the Ulrike Draesner Symposium 9-11 April 2016, the 'Shall I compare thee?' exhibition of sonnet translations in the Taylor Institution Library and the #sonnet2016 project of the Bodleian Library. The text also contains a catalogue of the exhibition. More information can be found under http://blogs.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/taylorian/. Order the volume here
