Tomorrow evening, Tuesday, May 21st, 6-8 PM PST, I’ll be taking part in a discussion about criticism, translation, and the Gothic with my Sublunary Editions press-mate A.V. Marraccini, hosted by the UW Bothell’s Creative Writing and Poetics MFA program. If you’re in the Seattle area, the event is free and open to the public. Come on by. It takes place at the UW Bothell Campus, building UW2-122. For those who’d like to attend via Zoom, a link to the event is available here.
My portion of the discussion concerns Wolfgang Hilbig and how he adapted elements of the Gothic to evoke the traumas of the 20th century. I’ll be going over his childhood during the Second World War, his work as a stoker in the coal country of Thuringia, and his emigration to West Germany in the early 1980s. I’ll be reading portions from Territories of the Soul/On Intonation, my forthcoming translation collection of Hilbig’s poetry and prose, which comes next month through Sublunary. For a preview of the discussion, you can read a previous post on Hilbig and his engagement with the poetry of Bertolt Brecht here.