The Woodberry Poetry Room is delighted to partner with Zephyr Press on a celebration of Ingeborg Bachmann. Peter Filkins, editor and translator of Darkness Spoken: The Collected Poems of Ingeborg Bachmann, will intersperse readings of his translations with the playback of a rare Poetry Room recording of Bachmann, made during her time in the Harvard International Seminar in 1955.

 

Filkins will explore the relationship between the poems that Bachmann chose to record and the second book of poems she was madly finishing while in Boston. In addition, he will share a series of recent discoveries he has made while researching Bachmann’s archives in Austria. The event will be introduced by poet, editor, and translator Cris Mattison.


In-Person Event: Woodberry Poetry Room, Lamont Library, Room 330. Free and open to the public.
 

Please note: this event was originally publicized as occuring on Dec. 4th. The date has been changed to December 5th.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
 

Ingeborg Bachmann was born in 1926 in Klagenfurt, Austria. She studied philosophy at the universities of Innsbruck, Graz, and Vienna, where she wrote her dissertation on Martin Heidegger. In 1953, she re­ceived the poetry prize from Gruppe 47 for her first volume, Borrowed Time (Die gestundete Zeit), after which her second collection, Invocation of the Great Bear (Anrufung des großen Bären), appeared in 1956. Her var­ious awards include the Georg Büchner Prize, the Berlin Critics Prize, the Bremen Award, and the Austrian State Prize for literature. Writing and publishing essays, opera libretti, short stories, and novels as well, she divided her time between Munich, Zurich, Berlin, and Rome, where she died from burns suffered in a fire in her apartment in 1973.
 

Besides Darkness Spoken, Peter Filkins has also translated two novel fragments by Bachmann, The Book of Franza and Requiem for Fanny Goldmann. He is currently at work on the first English biography of Bachmann, which will be published by Yale University Press. The recipient of a Guggenheim and Fulbright Fellowship, and an NEH Public Scholars Award, he teaches writing and literature at Bard College at Simon’s Rock and courses in translation at the main campus of Bard College.