Translations

I began translating German poetry while in graduate school at Cornell University. My first published translation was of Georg Trakl’s poem “Ein Winterabend,” (“A Winter Evening”), which appeared in Pearl River Review. My MFA thesis included a number of translations from Trakl, Goethe, Hölderlin, Rilke, and Celan.

In 2003, while an Artist-in-Residence at the Pädagogische Hochschule in Karlsruhe, Germany, a colleague introduced me to the work of contemporary poet, essayist and translator Durs Grünbein. I read everything of his I could get my hands on, and then, after returning to the States and taking up the position of Editor of Cold Mountain Review, I invited Mr. Grünbein to contribute some new poems to a special issue I wanted to put together on “New International Poetry.” To my no small astonishment, he responded immediately with a letter and a thick sheaf of poems for me to translate. We have continued to collaborate on translation projects, including an essay of his on Rilke, “Ein kleines blaues Mädchen” (“A Blue Little Girl”), which Mr. Grünbein delivered as a lecture in Chicago in February, 2007, and which appeared, along with several other translations, in The Bars of Atlantis, a collection of his essays edited by Michael Eskin. The book appeared in 2010 with Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

The year before, in 2009, I produced a number of short translations of technical material on the history of synthetic speech for the journalist David Tompkins, whose book How to Wreak a Nice Beach: the Vocoder From WWII to Hip-Hop, appeared in 2011 with Stop Smiling Books.

I have also produced a variety of translations of libretti on commission for the contemporary American composer Ming Tsao, including Friedrich Wilhelm Gotter's libretto Die Geisterinsel ("The Island of Spirits") (2014); Vincenz Hundhausen’s 1926 adaptation of the 13th century work The Western Chamber: A Chinese Musical Comedy, by Wang She-Fu and Guan Han-Ching (2018); Vincenz Hundhausen’s 1937 adaptation of The Return of the Soul: A Romantic Drama, by Tang Hsiän Dsu (2016); and Ferdinand Lion’s The Fan: An Opera-Capriccio in Three Acts, (2020)

My translation work for Ming Tsao has also included a number of theoretical and critical essays, lectures and interviews by the 20th-Century German composer Helmut Lachenmann.

Chief among my scholarly translations thus far is Disputed Messiahs: Jewish and Christian Messianism in the Ashkenazic World during the Reformation, by Rebekka Voß, which appeared with Wayne State University Press in 2021. That same year, my translation of “The Fire in the Mountain”: An Interview with Danièle Huillet, appeared in: Tell it to the Stones: Encounters with the Films of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub, edited by Annett Busch and Tobias Hering for Sternberg Press.

For several years running, I have translated philosopher Eva-Maria Engelen’s introductory essays to the multiple volumes of Kurt Gödel's Philosophical Notebooks, which she is editing for Princeton University Press. This project is ongoing.

In connection with my own academic work in Foreign Language Didactics, I’ve translated various articles, including “Lehr-Lern-Labore/Teaching and Learning Labs in EFL Teacher Education: Performativity and Reflection in Focus,” by Michaela Sambanis and Christiane Klempin, which appeared in the volume The Arts in Language Teaching. International Perspectives: Performative – Aesthetic – Transversal, edited by Micha Fleiner and Olivier Mentz for LIT Verlag in 2018; and “The Diversity of Theaterädagogik in the German Schools: Theater and theatrical training in the context of teacher education, as a method of instruction, and as an artistic/aesthetic school subject,” by Florian Vaßen, which appeared in the volume Performatives Lehren Lernen Forschen – Performative Teaching Learning Research, edited by Susanne Even and Manfred Schewe for Schibri-Verlag in 2016.