as if all the letters had suddenly
floated free of a paper
and formed a swarm in the air;

they form a swarm in the air,
of all that bad news telling us
nothing, those skimpy muses, wispy

pegasuses, only abuzz with the hum
of themselves, made from the last twist
of smoke as the candle is snuffed,

so light you can hardly say: they are –
looking more like shadows, umbrae
jettisoned by another world

to enter our own, they dance, their legs
finer than anything pencil can draw,
with their miniscule sphinx-like bodies;

the rosetta stone, without the stone.

by Jan Wagner, translated by Iain Galbraith

There are two exciting Poetry Centre events this week: on Wednesday we host a spoken word/open mic evening, with a featured performances by Maddie Godfrey (Finalist in the Australian National Poetry Slam, 2015), andlive music by Steph Masucci. You can find more details on our Facebook page.

Then on Thursday we launch our occasional lunchtime poetry reading, Eat My Words, with Emma Jones and Harry Man. All are very welcome. The reading will be from 12.15-1pm in T.300 (Tonge Conservatory), Gipsy Lane, Oxford Brookes. Contact us for more details.

‘an essay on midges’ is copyright © Jan Wagner, 2015. It is reprinted from Self-Portrait with a Swarm of Bees (Arc Publications, 2015) by permission of Arc Publications.

Over the next few weeks, we will be featuring poems from collections shortlisted for The Poetry Society’s Popescu European Poetry Translation Prize 2015, judged by Olivia McCannon and Clare Pollard, and supported in 2015 by the British Council. We begin with the winner of the competition, which was announced this evening. You can find out more about the competition and all the shortlisted books on the Poetry Society website.

Iain Galbraith‘s poems have appeared in Poetry Review, PN Review, Edinburgh Review, Times Literary Supplement, Irish Pages, New Writing and many other journals and books. He is the editor of five poetry anthologies and translates poetry, fiction and drama. A winner of the John Dryden Translation Prize and the Stephen Spender Prize for Poetry Translation, his recent translated books include W.G. Sebald’s poetry and John Burnside’s selected poems in German. He is an occasional lecturer, and in 2014-15 taught Poetics of Translation at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. He was born and grew up in the west of Scotland and now lives in Wiesbaden, Germany.

Of the winning collection, the judges said: ‘Galbraith converts every challenge (formal, lexical, metrical) into an opportunity, matching Wagner’s ingenuity and investment at every step, having internalized the “primal syntax” so completely that everything he writes hits the mark. The result is a perfect sufficiency: a set of poems in English that somehow inhabit the same skin as the German, with their own autonomous heart and lungs.’

Jan Wagner studied English in Hamburg, Dublin and Berlin, where he has lived since 1995. A poet, essayist and translator of British and American poetry by Charles Simic, Simon Armitage, Matthew Sweeney, and Robin Robertson, he was also, until 2003, co-publisher of The Outside of the Element, a boxed loose-leaf periodical based on an idea by Marcel Duchamp. He has published six volumes of poetry and has received numerous awards, including the Mondsee Poetry Award (2004), the Ernst Meister Prize for Poetry (2005), the Wilhelm Lehmann Prize (2009) and the Friedrich Hölderlin Prize (2011).

Since it was founded in 1969, Arc Publications has adhered to its fundamental principles – to introduce the best of new talent to a UK readership, including voices from overseas that would otherwise remain unheard in this country, and to remain at the cutting edge of contemporary poetry. Arc also has a music imprint, Arc Music, for the publication of books about music and musicians. As well as its page on Facebook, you can find Arc on Twitter. Visit Arc’s website to join the publisher’s mailing list, and to find full details of all publications and writers. Arc offers a 10% discount on all books purchased from the website (except Collectors’ Corner titles). Postage and packing is free within the UK.

Copyright information: please note that the copyrights of all the poems displayed on the website and sent out on the mailing list are held by the respective authors, translators or estates, and no work should be reproduced without first gaining permission from the individual publishers.

they find him in a dinner suit of salt
and sand, his passport seaweed, an ensemble
of herring gulls behind him in the drizzle.

he says nothing, but lets the surging felt-
surf caper through the piano case
to grand surprise. The heavy epaulettes
of hands weigh on his shoulders: this
is his hour of fame, a time of tablets,

Autumn nights with nurses floating
like icebergs through the wards. In the clinic
garden the last leaves flutter
beneath the walls. From an old cabin,
where ivy rises, drifts the muted tinkle
of a piano. Some believe it is Chopin.

by Jan Wagner
translated by Iain Galbraith

On Friday 23 October, poets Sarah Corbett and Eleanor Rees will be visiting Oxford to read from their exciting new books in an event organized by the Poetry Centre. It will take place at the Albion Beatnik Bookshop in Jericho, and all are very welcome! More details can be found via Facebook.

‘The Man From the Sea’ is copyright © Jan Wagner, 2015. It is reprinted from Self-Portrait with a Swam of Bees (Arc Publications, 2015) by permission of Arc Publications

Notes from Arc Publications:

Jan Wagner studied English in Hamburg, Dublin and Berlin, where he has lived since 1995. A poet, essayist and translator of British and American poetry by Charles Simic, Simon Armitage, Matthew Sweeney, and Robin Robertson, he was also, until 2003, co-publisher of The Outside of the Element, a boxed loose-leaf periodical based on an idea by Marcel Duchamp. He has published six volumes of poetry and has received numerous awards, including the Mondsee Poetry Award (2004), the Ernst Meister Prize for Poetry (2005), the Wilhelm Lehmann Prize (2009) and the Friedrich Hölderlin Prize (2011).

In Self-Portrait with a Swarm of Bees, Wagner is a vigilant, yet playful, chronicler of the quotidian, his meticulous handling of image and sound forging a worldly, almost luminous palpability. Intensely curious, constantly attentive to novel or unanticipated possibilities afforded by traditional forms, Wagner’s poems celebrate what he has called ‘our steaming, glowing, odorous, noisy world’.

You can read a review of the collection by one of the Poetry Centre’s own interns, Inigo Purcell, on the Poetry Centre website.

Iain Galbraith is a prolific translator of German and Austrian poetry, while his own poems have appeared in numerous anthologies and journals. A winner of the prestigious John Dryden Translation Prize, and editor of five anthologies of poetry, his recent translated books include a selection of W.G. Sebald’s poetry, Across the Land and the Water (2011). He is also a widely performed translator of British and Irish drama into German.

Since it was founded in 1969, Arc Publications has adhered to its fundamental principles – to introduce the best of new talent to a UK readership, including voices from overseas that would otherwise remain unheard in this country, and to remain at the cutting edge of contemporary poetry. Arc also has a music imprint, Arc Music, for the publication of books about music and musicians. As well as its page on Facebook, you can find Arc on Twitter. Visit Arc’s website to join the publisher’s mailing list, and to find full details of all publications and writers. Arc offers a 10% discount on all books purchased from the website (except Collectors’ Corner titles). Postage and packing is free within the UK.Copyright information: please note that the copyrights of all the poems displayed on the website and sent out on the mailing list are held by the respective authors, translators or estates, and no work should be reproduced without first gaining permission from the individual publishers.