Haus für Poesie

Ricardo Aleixo

Wed. 6 June 6.30 pm 
Akademie der Künste, Hanseatenweg, Clubraum, Admission € 5 / 3

With Ricardo Aleixo writer, Brazil Dirceu Villa writer, Brazil Érica Zíngano writer, Brazil Moderated by Timo Berger translator and writer, Berlin, co-founder of the Latin American poetry festival Latinale

"We are a country condemned to be modern", wrote Mário Pedrosa about Brazil. That is especially true of poetry. Sincw the 1950s, more different discourses and practices have arisen in Brazilian poetry than ever before in the history of Brazil. The range extends from Concrete Poetry, linking with the joy in experimentation of literary Modernism and the avant-garde, to poets who revive the legacy of Iberian poetry. Three powerful voices from the country will be presented, Érica Zínganos, who cheekily interrogates the literary tradition from Camões to Madame Bovary to the Guinness Book of Records, Dirceu Villa, who is distinguished by his radical plurality, and Ricardo Aleixo, who turns his poems upside down with multi-media and makes them sing. Three writers taking very different routes to merge in a diversity of styles. But there is one thing they have in common - language as an art form.

Sponsored by: German Foreign Office
With the kind support of: the German-Brazilian Society
Project leader: Aurélie Maurin

Ann Cotten

Wed. 6 June 8 pm 
Akademie der Künste, Hanseatenweg, Kleines Parkett, Admission € 6 / 4 

With Horácio Costa Brazil / Gerhard Falkner Germany; Marcos Siscar Brazil / Jan Wagner Germany; Érica Zíngano Brazil / Ann Cotten Germany  Hosted by Aurélie Maurin literary translator, Berlin and Thomas Wohlfahrt Director of the Literaturwerkstatt Berlin

The second reading of the German Brazilian translation workshop. 
The results of the VERSschmuggel workshops and readings will be published in time for the 2012 Frankfurt Book Fair in a bilingual anthology with a CD, jointly between the Verlag Das Wunderhorn (Heidelberg) and 7Letras (Rio de Janeiro).
Horácio Costa (born 1954 in São Paulo) writes texts somewhere between poetry and prose and replies ironically to the question of genre. A professor of literature and translator of Octavio Paz, he sees the Portuguese language as a particularly refined instrument for his poetic writing. In 2004 an anthology of his poems was published by Haroldo de Campos. Gerhard Falkner (born in 1951 in Schwabach) is indisputably one of the most important and influential poets of the present. He is a poet, dramatist, essayist and translator and lives in Berlin and Bavaria. In their citation awarding him the 2009 Peter Huchel Prize for his collection Hölderlin Reparatur, the jury praised Falkner's "possibilities for sublime speech in an age of damaged language worlds."
Marcos Siscar (born in 1964 in Borborema, São Paulo) has dedicated himself as a poet essayist and literary scholar to the French tradition from Baudelaire to Derrida. In his poems he traces the transitions between the concrete and the reflective, banal reference and lyricism, reportage and metaphysical questioning. A great narrator in the small form, Jan Wagner (born in Hamburg in 1971) combines with virtuosity the everyday with the mythic, classical forms with free improvisation. A poet, critic, editor and translator (of, among others, Matthew Sweeney and Simon Armitage), he lives in Berlin. 
Érica Zíngano (born in 1980 in Fortaleza) reflects in the library, at home and on the street on her own poetic creation, but with humour. Her poems and video works underlie the everyday with a strong rhythm. She uses apparently banal images to reveal tensions within the language. When Ann Cotten's (born in Iowa, USA, in 1982) Fremdwörterbuchsonette [Foreign Dictionary Sonnets] were published by Suhrkamp in 2007, she was hailed as a wunderkind and the boldest voice of the new generation in German-language poetry, as the "grandiose Austrian-American bumpkin from Iowa". Her Florida Räume [Florida Rooms] (Suhrkamp 2010) involves nothing less than an "industrial revolution in literature, freed from the idea of the artistic."

Sponsored by: German Foreign Office
With the kind support of: the German-Brazilian Society
Project leader: Aurélie Maurin, Assistant: Isabel von Holt