Live Event: Voices from the Wings: Poetry, Performance and Translation on and off the page

TORCH Goes Digital! presents a series of weekly live events Big
Tent - Live Events! Translation Week Part of the Humanities
Cultural Programme, one of the founding stones for the future
Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities. This event
presents a conversation between academic, translator and writer
Karen Leeder and poet, performer and novelist Ulrike Almut Sandig
who have been collaborating for the last eight years. Karen and
Ulrike were due to appear together with Sandig’s poetry band
LANDSCHAFT (with Grigory Semenchuk) at the Big Tent! in May 2020.
Ulrike Sandig is that rare thing: a writer who is as much at home
on the stage as the page. She began as a guerrilla poet, pasting
poems to lampposts, and today often collaborates with sound
artists, musicians and filmmakers to take her poetry to the
audiences that poetry doesn’t usually reach. Translation is a vital
part of all this, not only at the most fundamental level of turning
a feeling, image, or an idea into a poem on the page, but also
carrying over that impetus into performance, the screen, a
classical orchestra or an electronic hip hop band. She also works
at translating older texts for contemporary times as with her Grimm
cycle (published in English in 2018) which reanimates the dark side
of the Household Tales of the Brothers Grimm for our own age. A
further level comes with translation into English, which itself has
become part of new collaborations - for example, in the animated
poetry films by Beate Kunath & Eléonore Roedel that have taken
their work to new audiences all over the world through the medium
of English. In this event, Karen and Ulrike will perform recent
work, and discuss the creative transformations poetry can undergo,
with emples from Ulrike’s work for page, stage, film and gig, along
with their own creative process and the way poetry, that voice from
the wings, can become part of an inclusive political project.
Biographies: Professor Karen J. Leeder Karen Leeder started her
academic life researching the samizdat poetry, art and music scene
that existed in East Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall.
She has continued her interest in the GDR and has published widely
on modern German culture, especially of the post-1945 and
contemporary periods. She is a prize-winning translator of
contemporary German literature and has been awarded residences in
UK and Berlin. Most recently she won the John Frederick Nims
Memorial Prize for her translation of Durs Grünbein. Her
translation of Ulrike Almut Sandig’s Thick of it (Seagull Books,
2018) won an English PEN award and an American PEN/Heim award, and
was runner up for the Schlegel-Tieck Prize (2019). Grimm appeared
in a special limited edition with Hurst Street Books in 2018. Their
new collaboration, due in Summer 2020, I am a field full of
rapeseed give cover to deer and shine like thirteen oil paintings
laid one on top of the other is ‘hotly anticipated’ by the New York
Times. She was TORCH Knowledge Exchange Fellow with the Southbank
Centre, London (2014-2015) and keeps up work especially with MPT,
Poet in the City, and The Poetry Society on her project Mediating
Modern Poetry: http://www.mmp.mml.ox.ac.uk/. Ulrike Almut Sandig
(Poet) Born in rural Großenhain in former East Germany in 1979,
Ulrike Almut Sandig started life as a kind of guerrilla poet,
pasting poems onto lamp posts on the streets of Leipzig with
friends and handing them out on flyers and free postcards. Two
books of stories and four volumes of her poetry have been published
to date, including, most recently, Ich bin ein Feld voller Raps
verstecke die Rehe und leuchte wie dreizehn Ölgemälde
übereinandergelegt. Her first novel will appear this Autumn.
Performance is a key part of Sandig’s work. She frequently
collaborates with filmmakers, sound artists and musicians and her
first CD with her poetry band LANDSCHAFT (with Grigory Semenchuk)
appeared in 2018. Sandig has often appeared in the UK including at
The Edinburgh Festival, Hay Festival, and StAnza and won many
prizes, including the Leonce and Lena Prize (2009), the Literary
Prize of the Federation of German Industries (2017), the Wilhelm
Lehmann Prize (2018) and the Horst-Bingel Prize (2018). She lives
in Berlin with her family.