“Wickerwork: An Evening with Richard Sieburth and Rosanne Warren”

© Archipelago Books

Deutsches Haus at NYU presents a reading and conversation between literary luminaries Richard Sieburth and Rosanne Warren to celebrate the book launch of Christian Lehnert’s poetry collection “Wickerwork” (Archipelago Books, translated from the German by Richard Sieburth).

About “Wickerwork”:

Wickerwork traffics in details that might have otherwise gone unnoticed: the far sides of fishes, red jellyfish fraying on a tide, the way a hazel tree learns from the falling of snow how to scatter her pollen. This bilingual edition is the first comprehensive collection of Christian Lehnert’s work to appear in English, translated by the celebrated translator and scholar, Richard Sieburth. Readers can dive down into the depths of Lehnert and Sieburth’s primordial works: where slime, dirt, membranes, clay, and clouds give way to stretching summer shadows under beech trees, the clatter of a bird lifting into sky. Ever attentive to the rattle of a rhythm passing through language, Lehnert sees in the nimble scurrying of a salamander “tiny bolts of lightning driven through the dark.” He writes with singular grace of a sycamore’s sap, “the blood scabbing the wounds of its roots.”
With its intense, philosophical relationship to the physical world, Wickerwork will open readers’s eyes to their own natural environment. Lehnert notes that certain trees have the power to remind us that the growth and protean spirit of things is never in doubt. Here, growth feels possible, necessary, a fact as simple as it is divine.

About the speakers:

Richard Sieburth is a translator from French and German, essayist, editor, and literary scholar. He has gained recognition for his translations of Friedrich Hölderlin, Gershom Scholem, Charles Baudelaire, Henri Michaux, and Walter Benjamin, among others. Sieburth is the editor of multiple volumes of Ezra Pound’s writings and translations.
Rosanna Warren is a poet, translator, and scholar. She has taught poetry in several prisons in Massachusetts, publishing pamphlets of poems by incarcerated writers. She has also taught at Vanderbilt, Boston University, and, since 2012, at the University of Chicago. Warren’s poetry collections include Departure (2003), Ghost in a Red Hat (2011), and So Forth (2020). She co-translated Euripides’ The Suppliant Women and edited The Art of Translation: Voices from the Field. A former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, she has received honors from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Academy of American Poets, and more.

About the author:

Christian Lehnert was born in Dresden in 1969. Since 1995 he has published poetry with Suhrkamp Verlag, and in literary journals, including German Academy of Arts’ Sinn und Form. In 2010, Lehnert’s libretto for Hans Werner Henze’s opera Phaedra was performed at the Barbican. Lehnert’s work has been awarded several prizes including the Eichendorff Prize in 2016, and the German Prize for Nature Writing in 2018. He is the head of the Liturgical Studies department at the University of Leipzig

Attendance:

While NYU has ended COVID-19 related restrictions and policies, we continue to remind and recommend to members of the NYU community that they stay up-to-date on their boosters and stay home if they feel sick. Masks are always welcome.

Special thanks to Archipelago Books and Jill Schoolman, publisher of Archipelago Books, for their support of this event.

Host or Publisher Deutsches Haus at NYU