Gobshite Quarterly presents An Evening of Translation
Friday, Sept. 19th, 7 p.m.
Free and open to the public
Douglas Spangle, winner of Oregon Literary Arts’ Stewart H. Holbrook Literary Legacy Award, will read his translations of German poets, ranging from “Bread and Wine”, from the now forgotten but immensely influential Friedrich Holderlin, thence to a short poem by Victorian-era C.F. Meyer, a Swiss poet perhaps best compared to Hardy, and proceed to The Flaying of Marsyas, by contemporary Swiss poet, Florian Vetsch.
Michael Shay will read work by Georg Trakl.
BIOS:
Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843) is not especially well-known in English, though few writers in German are untouched by his influence – Nietzsche (Also Sprach Zaratustra), Rilke, Trakl, Heidegger, Celan, Hesse... His work has been interpreted by Finnish Death Metal musicians.
Georg Trakl (1887-1914) qualified as a pharmacist. In 1908, Ludwig von Ficker became his patron. Trakl's first volume of poems was published in 1913. Caught in the German Army in 1914, overstrained at stewarding the recovery of of 90 wounded soldiers, Trakl died at the age of 27.
Florian Vetsch (1960- ) worked with Boris Kerensky for more than ten years on the publication of the anthology "Tangier Telegram: Journey through the literatures of a legendary Moroccan city". He has documented and translated the Beat generation – Ira Cohen, Paul Bowles, Allen Ginsberg, and others, into German, and, living in St. Gallen, Switzerland, continues to produce cross-cultural work and regularly mount cross-cultural literary festivals.
Douglas Spangle (1951- ) was born in Roanoke, Virginia, spent his childhood in various western states before his family moved overseas. He finished high school in Ankara, Turkey, attended University of Maryland's Munich Campus & spent the next four years as a stagehand at the theatre where Brecht directed his plays.
Michael Shay was born in Germany and grew up in Chicago. Chosen to attend the summer session of the Iowa Writers Workshop in poetry, he studied with Marvin Bell.