Bachmann - Celan - Bachmann

The 2020 Biennial Ingeborg Bachmann Centre Lecture

Speaker: Peter Filkins (Bard College, USA)

Correspondents, lovers, muses for each other's work, Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan were the two premier poets of the post-war era in German language poetry. Though Celan's poetry has become ascendant in recent decades, Bachmann's fiction is now better known and appreciated than in her lifetime. The centennial year of Celan's birth marks a fitting time to reconsider their creative relation, as well as to assess their divergent legacies.

Peter Filkins is a poet, scholar and translator. Darkness Spoken, his translation of Ingeborg Bachmann’s collected poems received a Distinguished Translation Award from the Austrian Ministry for Education, Art and Culture in 2007. In addition to her poems, Peter Filkins has also translated The Book of Franza & Requiem for Fanny Goldmann, the two lesser known and fragmentary volumes of Bachmann’s Death Styles trilogy, which begins with Malina.

Peter Filkins is also a leading authority on the work of H.G. Adler. He has translated Adler’s trilogy of novels, and his biography H.G. Adler: A Life in Many Worlds was published by OUP in March 2019. Peter Filkins is the Richard B. Fisher Professor of Literature at Bard College at Simon’s Rock, where he also teaches translation.

Attendance free, but advance online registration required