Reading and Discussion: Bricklebrit!

with Uljana Wolf and Daniel Graf 

Uljana Wolf dedicates falsche freunde (false friends), her second book of poetry, to the irritation of translation, the transgression of man and language. Here, poetic charge derives from highlighting word pairs from two languages ​​that look or sound alike but that have different meanings. The transition of bodies migrating between states plays a role, as do relations between people of different cultural backgrounds and languages. Wolf’s third volume of poetry, Meine schönste Lengevitch, looks at multilingualism and the clash of language regimes. Wolf discusses with Daniel Graf the linking of the ordinary and the political with poetry.

Uljana Wolf (born in Berlin, 1979) studied German literature, cultural studies, and English in Berlin and Krakow. She lives as a poet and translator in Berlin and Brooklyn. Wolf’s first publication, kochanie ich habe brot gekauft (2005), was followed by two collections of poems, falsche freunde and Box Office, both in 2009, and her critically acclaimed collection of prose poems, Meine schönste Lengevitch, published in 2013.As a translator, Wolf focuses on works by female lyricists from English and from Eastern European languages. She is the recipient of numerous scholarships and awards, including the 2006 Peter Huchel Prize, the 2006 Dresden Lyric Prize, the 2008 RAI Media Award / Meran Lyric Prize 2008, and, in 2013, the Wolfgang Weyrauch Prize.

Daniel Graf (born in 1980) studied modern German literature, linguistics, and musicology in Tübingen, Vienna, and Leipzig. He wrote his doctoral thesis on the poetry of Ingeborg Bachmann. Graf has worked for the literary magazine Edit and he completed an editorial fellowship at Berlin Verlag. He then worked as a freelance editor for Rowohlt and as trainee in the rights department of Grove Atlantic, in New York. Since May 2012, he has been a non-fiction literary agent at Graf & Graf, Berlin.