Book at Lunchtime: Porcelain - Poem on the Downfall of my City

TORCH Book at Lunchtime webinar on Porcelain: Poem on the Downfall
of my City by Durs Grünbein, translated by Professor Karen Leeder.
Book at Lunchtime is a series of bite-sized book discussions held
weekly during term-time, with commentators from a range of
disciplines. The events are free to attend and open to all. About
the book: Porcelain is a book-length cycle of forty-nine poems
written over the course of more than a decade that together serve
as a lament for Durs Grünbein’s hometown, Dresden, which was
destroyed in the Allied firebombing of February 1945. The book is
at once a history and “declaration of love” to the famed “Venice on
the Elbe,” so catastrophically razed by British bombs; a musical
fusion of eyewitness accounts, family memories, and stories, of
monuments and relics; the story of the city’s destiny as seen
through a prism of biographical enigmas, its intimate relation to
the “white gold” porcelain that made its fortune and reflections on
the power and limits of poetry. Published in English for the first
time, this translation by Professor Karen Leeder marks the
seventy-fifth year anniversary of the firebombing. Panel includes:
Professor Karen Leeder is a Professor of Modern Languages at Oxford
University and a Fellow of New College, Oxford. She has published
widely on modern German culture and is a prize-winning translator
of contemporary German literature, most recently winning the
English PEN award and an American PEN/Heim award for her
translation of Ulrike Almut Sandig. She was a TORCH Knowledge
Exchange Fellow with the Southbank Centre from 2014-15 and she
currently works with MPT, Poet in the City, and The Poetry Society
on her project Mediating Modern Poetry. Durs Grünbein was born on 9
October 1962 in Dresden. He is one of the most important and
internationally powerful German poets and essayists. After the
opening of the Iron Curtain, he traveled through Europe, Southeast
Asia, and the United States. He was a guest of the German
Department of New York University and The Villa Aurora in Los
Angeles. He has received numerous awards for his work, including
the Georg Büchner Prize, the Friedrich Nietzsche Prize, the
Friedrich Hölderlin Prize and the Polish Zbigniew Herbert
International Literary Award. His books have been translated into
several languages. He lives in Berlin and Rome. Edmund de Waal is
an internationally acclaimed artist and writer, best known for his
large-scale installations of porcelain vessels, often created in
response to collections and archives or the history of a particular
place. His interventions have been made for diverse spaces and
museums worldwide, including The British Museum, London; The Frick
Collection, New York; Ateneo Veneto, Venice; Schindler House, Los
Angeles; Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna and V&A Museum,
London. De Waal is also renowned for his bestselling family memoir,
The Hare with Amber Eyes (2010), and The White Road (2015). His new
book, Letters to Camondo, a series of haunting letters written
during lockdown was published in April 2021. He was made an OBE for
his services to art in 2011 and awarded the Windham-Campbell Prize
for non-fiction by Yale University in 2015. Born 1964 Nottingham.
He lives and works in London. Professor Patrick Major is Professor
of History at the University of Reading, where he is also an
associate of the East German Studies Archive. His research
interests are primarily the political, social and cultural history
of divided Germany in the Cold War. He has published on the rise
and fall of the Berlin Wall and Hollywood's depictions of 'bad
Nazis' and 'good Germans', and is currently researching the bombing
of Berlin in the Second World War.