How do you respond as a writer to racially motivated violence? Esther Dischereit discusses this with her translator Iain Galbraith.
Esther Dischereit’s
‘Klagelieder’ (lamentations) and opera libretto
Flowers for Otello (originally published in 2014 and recently translated into English by Iain Galbraith) respond to the series of right-wing killings in Germany, perpetrated by the National Socialist Underground between 1998-2007.
The victims included eight citizens of Turkish origin, a Greek citizen, and a German policewoman. Not until 2011 did the German public learn that the police had ignored signs pointing to the real perpetrators, a neo-Nazi group called the National Socialist Underground, and that important files, possibly containing evidence implicating state agencies, had disappeared from the archives of Federal Police and intelligence organisations.
Esther Dischereit, one of the preeminent German-Jewish voices of the post-Holocaust generation, will read from her book and discuss with Iain Galbraith the practices, politics and limits of translation and solidarity in responding to racially motivated violence. The evening will also include an introduction to the history of the
Flowers for Otello project and a performance by DJ İpek İpekçioğlu, translating Dischereit’s work into sound and movement.
Tickets: Register for this event via Eventbrite
This event takes place in the context of the conference “Postmigrant Reconfigurations: New Approaches to Contemporary German-language Jewish Cultural Production” and is supported by the Institute for Languages, Cultures, and Societies / Keith Spalding Trust, and King’s College London.
Esther Dischereit
© Esther Dischereit
In her work, Esther Dischereit addresses the effects of National Socialism and the post-war era in the form of trauma and other crisis-ridden social conditions. She is present as a writer for radio and theatre as well as other artistic media. From 2012 to 2017, she was Professor of Language Arts at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. She was a Fellow at the Moses Mendelssohn Centre for European-Jewish Studies in Potsdam and DAAD Chair for Contemporary Poetics at New York University in 2019. In Austria, she received the prestigious Erich Fried Prize for her complete works in 2009.
Most recently, Esther Dischereit published her poetry collection
Sometimes a Single Leaf introduced and translated by Iain Galbraith, in 2020. Her prose-drama-lyric work
Flowers for Otello. On the Crimes of Jena was published in English in 2022, and as a radio play the piece was nominated for the ARD Media Prize. In 2021 she edited the volume
Hab keine Angst, erzähl alles. The Halle Assassination and the Voices of the Survivors.
Iain Galbraith
© Iain Galbraith
Iain Galbraith's recent work includes a volume of poems, The True Height of the Ear (2018), also translations into English of Esther Kinsky's River (2018), Reinhard Jirgl's The Unfinished (2020), Esther Dischereit's Sometimes a Single Leaf (2020) and Flowers for Otello (2022) and Ulrike Draesner's this porous fabric (2022), as well as translations into German of Alice Oswald’s 46 Minuten im Leben der Dämmerung (together with Melanie Walz, 2018) and John Burnside’s Im Namen der Biene (2022). He has received several prizes, including the Popescu Prize for European Poetry Translation, the Stephen Spender Prize and the Schlegel-Tieck Prize.
Back
