Word for Word Exchange: German

Students in Germany

Columbia University School of the Arts & Deutsches Literaturinstitut Leipzig, 2012-2013

In October 2012, four SOA graduate students (three from the Writing Program and one from the Theatre Program) traveled to the DLL in Leipzig to meet their German partners and join them in an intensive translation workshop led by the distinguished German poet and translator Uljana Wolf. Their translation collaborations continued remotely through the Fall semester, with faculty support provided for the students by their respective institutions. In April 2013, the second Word for Word anthology, including facing-page translations of all eight students’ work, was published by Ugly Duckling Presse.

In the first week of April, the German students came to New York City to join the Columbia students in public presentations of their work, and to participate in a final review workshop with Professor Susan Bernofsky, Director of the Writing Program’s Literary Translation program (LTAC). The first event was a reading and panel discussion at Columbia University’s Deutsches Haus on the evening of Monday, April 1, followed by a reception to celebrate the publication of Word for Word II. On Tuesday, April 2, the Writing Program and the Theatre Program presented a dramatic reading of the collaborative work of two student playwrights.

Columbia University School of the Arts Participants:

KEVIN MAGRUDER was raised in San Diego, California and studied creative writing in San Francisco for five years before moving to New York City in 2010. Since coming to New York he has worked as an editorial intern in the fiction department at The New Yorker and was the recipient of a Hertog literary research fellowship in the spring of 2012. He was also awarded a teaching fellowship at Columbia for the spring of 2013. He recently finished a rough draft of a novel.

MICHAEL MAKOWSKI lives and works in New York City as a multimedia artist who has performed and shown in many venues. He has been published in the Heat City Review and Soundings East. He is a graduate of the MFA Writing Program in Fiction at Columbia University.

BRYAN QUICK is a New York-based playwright and director. Most recently Blue Moon was performed at Columbia University. Other works include: King Sisyphus (Reading; The Flea Theater), The Man Who Wasn’t There (Dixon Place; Edmonton International Fringe Festival), Hotel Valhala (Norwegian Theatre Academy; Robert Wilson’s Watermill Center), Apology for Survivors (Schapiro Theater), A Dream... (Dixon Place), The True Story of the Boogeyman (La Mama etc), Battle of the Bowery (Peculiar Works Project), and Vengeance! (Goodwin Theater). He received his MFA in Playwriting at Columbia University, and holds a BA in Theater & Dance from Trinity College.

RACHEL SUR is a writer based in New York and Tel Aviv. She received her MFA in Nonfiction Writing from Columbia University. She is interested in the relationship between art and politics; in how the shifting global balance of power is shaping culture, ideologies and aesthetics; and in the recent political transitions in the Middle East and South Asia. She has taught calculus at Tel Aviv University and edited the academic manuscripts of its most acclaimed sociologists. She was a recipient of the Hertog research fellowship in 2012. She thinks German sentences are mystical.

DLL Participants:

DAVID FRÜHAUF was born 1987 in Braunau/Inn, Austria. He studied German Studies and Creative Writing in Vienna and Leipzig. Since 2011 he has been editorial assistant of the literary magazine Edit and coeditor of the anthology Tippgemeinschaft 2012 of the Deutsche Literaturinstitut Leipzig. Reviews on fixpoetry.com.

URSULA KIRCHENMAYER was born in 1984 in Lugoj (Romania) and grew up in Nuremberg. Currently she lives in Berlin. She pursued a master’s degree in German and Hispanic Literature at Potsdam University and studied two semesters abroad at San Marcos University in Lima (Peru). In 2010, she joined the Creative Writing Program in Leipzig. In 2012, she received the second prize in the 17th MDR literary competition for one of her short stories. Her fiction was published in numerous magazines and anthologies, such as BELLA triste, Tippgemeinschaft and poet.
 
JULIANE STADELMANN was born and raised in Salzwedel, in the “wild wild east” of Germany, she was an exchange student at Colégio Objetivo in Santa Maria, Brazil in 2002-2003, a surf teacher in France and Hawaii, then in 2007, came back to Germany. From 2008-2011, she was in drama school in Berlin. Shortly after graduating drama school in 2011, she applied at the Deutsches Literaturinstitut Leipzig. She was coeditor of Tippgemeinschaft 2013, the annual anthology of the Deutsches Literaturinstitut Leipzig. You can read more about her work at Drama Forum.
 
ELLEN WESEMÜLLER was born 1980 in Hanover. She studied Political Studies, History and Social Psychology in Hanover and Cape Town (Master of Arts). She was an associate lecturer in Sociology and History at the University of Hanover. She was educated at the Berlin School of Journalism, including an internship with the ZDF - German Television in NYC. She works as a freelance journalist for daily and weekly newspapers, including Die Zeit. She enrolled in the DLL in 2010, and is writing her first novel. Her poems and short stories have appeared in Tippgemeinschaft and Edit. She participated in the workshop for literary writing in Klagenfurt 2012 and won the Alfred Döblin Scholarship of the Academy of Arts, Berlin.

Institutional Partners:

The DEUTSCHES LITERATURINSTITUT LEIPZIG is a central institution at the Universität Leipzig, providing the only degree course for writers in the making in Germany since 1995. Alongside the three-year BA in Creative Writing, focusing on poetry, prose, and drama, an MA in Creative Writing has also been offered since winter of 2009. This is a two-year degree designed as a novel workshop. The aim of the program is to provide students with highly professional writing skills and creative competence, along with a knowledge of literary history and theory.

Columbia University and the DLL gratefully acknowledge the support provided by the U.S. CONSULATE GENERAL LEIPZIG for the workshops held in Leipzig in October, 2012, as well as additional support from the AUSTRIAN CULTURAL FORUM.

Workshop Instructors:

ULJANA WOLF (Leipzig) was born in East Berlin. Her poems have been published in journals and anthologies worldwide, such as Das Gedicht, manuskripte, kursywa, Poetry Ireland Review, Lyrik von Jetzt (Dumont, 2003), New European Poetry (Graywolf, 2008), Dichten No. 10: 16 New German Poets (Burning Deck, 2008), the Chicago Review,Harper’s Bazaar, Luces Intermitentes. Nueve poetas recientes de Alemania (Guadalajara, Mexico) and Telephone Journal. Wolf published two books of poetry, kochanie ich habe brot gekauft (kookbooks 2005) and falsche freunde (kookbooks 2009), as well as the essay "BOX OFFICE" about the prose poem (Lyrikkabinett München, 2009). For her work, Wolf has been awarded several prizes and grants, such as the Peter-Huchel-Preis and the Dresdner Lyrikpreis (both 2006), the RAI Medienpreis at Lyrikpreis Meran (2008) and a grant from the Deutsche Literaturfonds. She translates numerous poets into German, mostly from English, among them Matthea Harvey, Christian Hawkey, Erín Moure, and Cole Swensen, and was the co-editor of the 2009 Jahrbuch der Lyrik (Fischer Verlag). A selection of her work in Spanish, Fronteras del languaje, translated by Vladimir Garcia Morales, was published by La Bella Varsovia/Cosmopoética (Córdoba 2011).

SUSAN BERNOFSKY (New York) has translated seven works of fiction by the great Swiss-German modernist author Robert Walser, as well as novels and poetry by Jenny Erpenbeck, Yoko Tawada, Gregor von Rezzori, Uljana Wolf and others. She chairs the PEN Translation Committee and is co-editor (with Esther Allen) of the 2013 Columbia University Press anthology In Translation: Translators on Their Work and What It Means. A 2014 Guggenheim Fellow, she received the 2006 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translation Prize and the 2012 Calw Hermann Hesse Translation Prize as well as awards and fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the PEN Translation Fund, the NEA, the NEH, the Leon Levy Center for Biography and the Lannan Foundation. In May 2014 she collaborated on a production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute (new libretto translation) with Isaac Mizrahi and John Heginbotham for the Opera Theatre of St. Louis. Her translation of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis appeared with Norton in January 2014, and her translation of Jenny Erpenbeck's The End of Days in November 2014. She blogs about translation at Translationista.

Read more about the exchange and events on Words Without Borders.