Literary Evening Lecture: David Constantine - What my poetry owes to translation

David Constantine will read from his poetry and will also explain how translating from foreign languages has helped him in his own writing. The evening will include a more general discussion of the need for translation in the making of any nation's poetic language.

Born 1944 in Salford, Lancashire, David was for thirty years a university teacher of German language and literature. He has published a dozen volumes of poetry (most recently – 2014 – Elder); two novels, Davies (1985) and The Life-Writer (2015); and five collections of short stories. He is an editor and translator of Hölderlin, Goethe, Kleist and Brecht. For his stories he won the BBC National and the Frank O’ Connor International Awards (2010, 2013).The film ‘45 Years’ was based on his story ‘In Another Country’. With Helen Constantine he edited Modern Poetry in Translation, 2003-12.

Later this year Bloodaxe will publish his new and greatly enlarged Selected Poetry of Hölderlin and Norton his translations, with Tom Kuhn, of more than 1000 poems of Bertolt Brecht.