Poetry Reading | An Evening Dedicated to German Poet Friedrich Hölderlin

Ross Benjamin and Richard Sieburth, both renowned translators of Hölderlin, will join Austrian writer Alfred Goubran in a conversation with bread, wine, poetry, and music.

Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843) is widely regarded as one of the greatest German lyric poets. In addition to his poetry and Hyperion, his only novel, he began work on a tragedy, The Death of Empedocles, which he never completed. The creative period of his life was cut short by a mental breakdown that confined him to a tower in Tübingen from 1807 until his death in 1843. His work had a profound influence on Hegel, Nietzsche, Rilke, Heidegger, and Celan.

Ross Benjamin is a translator of German literature and a writer living in New York. His translations include Friedrich Hölderlin’s Hyperion (Archipelago Books, 2008), Kevin Vennemann's Close to Jedenew (Melville House, 2008), Joseph Roth's Job (Archipelago, 2010) and Thomas Pletzinger's Funeral for a Dog (W.W. Norton & Company, 2011). He was awarded the 2010 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize for his rendering of Michael Maar's Speak, Nabokov (Verso Books, 2009). He is currently at work on a novel about the Harlem Renaissance.

Alfred Goubran was born in 1964 in Graz and grew up in Klagenfurt, both medium-sized Austrian cities. He is a well-known writer, critic, translator, editor, and former publisher of the edition selene, an important series of contemporary literature. As a writer, he published various collections of short stories, including Tor (2008) and ORT (2010). At the end of last year, his first novel AUS., was published and immediately compared to the oeuvre of Thomas Bernhard, one of Austria’s most well-known writers, who died in 1989. Goubran is currently the Max Kade writer-in residence at Deutsches Haus at NYU.

Richard Sieburth's translations include Georg Büchner's Lenz, Friedrich Hölderlin's Hymns and Fragments, Walter Benjamin's Moscow Diary, Henri Michaux's Emergencies/Resurgences and Stroke by Stroke, Michel Leiris's Nights as Day, Days as Night, Gershom Scholem's The Fullness of Time: Poems, and Nerval's The Salt Smugglers and Selected Writings, which won the 2000 PEN/Book-of-the-Month-Club Translation Prize. His recent translation of Maurice Scève's Emblems of Desire was a finalist for the PEN Translation and the Weidenfeld Prize.