Michael Hofmann writes: “What Ullmann has to say to us is somehow exemplary, uncomfortable, difficult, long-buried; it is from our midst, but also slightly from above, and also from below. It refuses distance, and in its designs on us doesn’t mind changing angle, direction, and even plane. […] We come away from her, as she dazzlingly puts it (and she is absolutely right!), ‘greatly enriched but slightly diminished.” The New York Review of Books
Author: KB
Out this month (Jan. 2015)!
My translation of Regina Ullmann, The Country Road, from New Directions.
Recipient of a 2014 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant.
(For some reason this WordPress format doesn’t display links in blog posts — weird, right? — so click on the title to see the post with links.)
Read the story “Strawberries” and my introduction on the PEN website.
Read the story “The Mouse” and my introduction in Two Lines Online (2010).
Read the story “The Christmas Visit” in Little Star Weekly (subscription required)
Publishers Weekly review of Regina Ullmann translation
“German-language literature, from Rilke to Thomas Mann, has often merged psychological landscapes with the natural world, but women have been underrepresented—or undertranslated. Enter Swiss protomodernist Ullmann, whose unclassifiable and deeply original 1921 collection has undergone a triumphant translation (the first in English) by Beals.” Read the whole review here.
PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant
My translation of Regina Ullmann’s short story collection The Country Road (due out in January from New Directions) has been selected for a PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant!
GSA Conference Paper
I’ll be presenting a paper about my research on Dada social networks at the German Studies Association’s annual conference. My paper is titled “Dada Analysis: Networking with the Avant-Garde,” and it’s part of the panel “German Studies and Digital Humanities,” Friday, September 19 at 4:15pm.
Article Published in Dada/Surrealism
My article “Text and the City: George Grosz, Neue Jugend, and the Political Power of Popular Media” just came out in the new issue of Dada/Surrealism, in its new all-online, open-access format.
GBO Translation Prize
The news is out! I won the first-ever German Book Office Translation Prize!
New Anja Utler translation
My translation of an excerpt from Anja Utler’s first prose book, carried out. A Course Correction, is now online at Anomalous Press. The online version includes a recording of a bilingual reading, and text animation — click on the German marginal texts to display the English translations.
New poetry translations from G13
I recently translated a selection of poems by several young Berlin-based poets from the group G13. One set of poems (by Max Czollek, Paula Glamann, Maria Natt, Can Pestanli, Friederike Scheffler, Linus Westheuser, and Ilja Winther) has been published in Transom, along with a brief interview with me. Four more poems by G13 poets (Tristan Marquardt, Lea Schneider, Rebecca Ciesielski, and Tabea Xenia Magyar) are now online in No Man’s Land, issue 7.
Anja Utler translation reviewed in The Kenyon Review
Here’s an excerpt from the latest review of engulf – enkindle:
“Beals deserves serious laurels for his work. engulf — enkindle is a book of surfaces—its significance is rooted in the relationships between words, between sounds—and Beals has rendered those relationships with compelling richness and enviable potency.“
— Dan Rosenberg, The Kenyon Review
Kurt Beals 