Suhrkamp Insel

Nelly Sachs

Works. Commented Edition in Four Volumes

Sachs’ volumes of poetry, greatly influenced by the experience of the Shoah, have received profound reception throughout the world, In the Habitations of Death, Flight and Metamorphosis, Journey into a Dustless Realm, and Sternverdunklung first and foremost. Her close personal and artistic relationship with Paul Celan deeply influenced both authors’ poetry. But Nelly Sachs’ association with Swedish authors, most of all Selma Lageröf, have contributed to the fact that her work has been translated into more than 40 languages. She maintained a lively exchange with Siegfried Unseld and Hans Magnus Enzensberger, whom she named trustee of her estate, as evidenced by the exhaustive correspondences.

Nelly Sachs

Works. Commented Edition in Four Volumes

Sachs’ volumes of poetry, greatly influenced by the experience of the Shoah, have received profound reception throughout the world, In the Habitations of Death, Flight and Metamorphosis, Journey into a Dustless Realm, and Sternverdunklung first and foremost. Her close personal and artistic relationship with Paul Celan deeply influenced both authors’ poetry. But Nelly Sachs’ association with Swedish authors, most of all Selma Lageröf, have contributed to the fact that her work has been translated into more than 40 languages. She maintained a lively exchange with Siegfried Unseld and Hans Magnus Enzensberger, whom she named trustee of her estate, as evidenced by the exhaustive correspondences.

Nelly Sachs

Works. Commented Edition in Four Volumes

Sachs’ volumes of poetry, greatly influenced by the experience of the Shoah, have received profound reception throughout the world, In the Habitations of Death, Flight and Metamorphosis, Journey into a Dustless Realm, and Sternverdunklung first and foremost. Her close personal and artistic relationship with Paul Celan deeply influenced both authors’ poetry. But Nelly Sachs’ association with Swedish authors, most of all Selma Lageröf, have contributed to the fact that her work has been translated into more than 40 languages. She maintained a lively exchange with Siegfried Unseld and Hans Magnus Enzensberger, whom she named trustee of her estate, as evidenced by the exhaustive correspondences.

Hg.: Barbara Schwepcke, Bill Swainson

A New Divan

A New Divan is a Gingko project that will celebrate the 200th anniversary of Goethe’s West-Eastern Divan (1819). This ambitious anthology brings together new poems by twenty-four leading poets – 12 from the ›East‹ and 12 from the ›West‹ – in a truly international poetic dialogue inspired by the culture of the Other. The poets come from across the East (from Morocco to Turkey, Syria to Afghanistan) and from across the West (from Germany to Mexico, Estonia to Brazil).

Lutz Seiler

in field latin

in field latin or in other words: to exist in a field of language, and at the same time explore a landscape’s legends, how they come to one’s ears, in walks, in whispers, in silence. Lutz Seiler’s new poems, written between 2004 and 2010, set off on expeditions into the borderlands surrounding Berlin, into the middle of the »syntax of this region«, marked by time’s relentless change.

Lutz Seiler

pech & blende

Lutz Seiler‘s poems are hardened constructs beyond any trends. They invoke the dark sides of existence, dig deep into the past, expose its layers. In an extremely concise linguistic style the author is looking for the essential, for the traces of our origins. For years, the author born in Gera/Thuringia was considered an insider's tip, Michael Braun, for instance, called him a »unique talent«. »This contemporaneity appears with archaic force. Once will have to get used to it,« writes Helmut Böttiger after pech & blende was published. And in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Lothar Müller wrote: »This thin, fantastic book is like a seashell: a piece of Germany is enclosed in it and soughs.«

Lutz Seiler

Sundays I Thought About God

In »Homelands«, for example, Seiler talks about his native East-Thuringian village and its appearance in poems: origin story as poetology (and vice versa). And almost in passing he voids a term that is iridescent, yet has become problematic, in the plural. Or he flips once more through the pages of his »Dictionary of Vague existence«, compiled to determine the »substances of writing« in a quasi lexicological manner. While searching for the circumstances of the creation of a poem, Seiler moves through contemporary Los Angeles; in the title essay he remembers the conceptions of God of a secularised childhood. In his essays Seiler deals with the conditions of writing, with »the all-encompassing and un-paraphrase-able connection between text and life in the existence of the author«.

Lutz Seiler

forty kilometres of night

Lutz Seiler‘s poems, created between 2000 and 2003, undertake a journey through forty kilometres of night, they lead out of the native landscape, destroyed by uranium mining, depicted in pech & blende along »German canopy roads« and »behind garage-lines« – and into the historical layering of the Middle German and Brandenburg region.

Clemens J. Setz

The Ostrich Trumpet

Why did young women in the nineteenth century like to stick sharp needles in their mouths in the dark? What is it that prevents someone from being a great lover? And what do childless parrots do?

Hans-Ulrich Treichel

Der einzi­ge Gast