Description
A pandemic passion project by poet, Karen J. Head, with Sandra Danneil (Editor), Randi Gunzenhäuser (Lead German Translator), and Anne-Françoise Le Lostec (French Translator), What We Missed: New and Selected Poems in English, German, and French was supposed to be a summer project in which students at TU-Dortmund would translate three to five poems as part of a seminar on poetry translation. Instead, it grew into a nearly two-year project, during which a French translator also joined. Head selected poems from five of her previous collections as well as new poems from over twenty years for translation by the students. The topics of the poems are wide-ranging, from the poet’s memories, people and places of her life. Collectively, everyone in the world missed many things because of the pandemic. However, the project group discovered some bright moments during which they found ways to reach across virtual and cultural landscapes to do work they might otherwise never have had time to complete.
Praise for What We Missed
Karen Head’s vision serves an international audience, celebrating and sorrowing for both what we share in common and – crucially, what we don’t. In any gathering of translators, we discover a shared conviction that translation is the key to global peace, which may sound naïve but is the result of study, experimentation, passionate discussion, theorizing, and debate. In a world where we often do not listen to one another with careful attention, the translators in this splendid collaborative project embody the power of creating connections that honor the poet’s language while adopting the nuances of their own languages to bridge borders and wrap three distinct cultures in the embrace of shared human experiences. Here’s a model of how, through translation, an individual writer’s beautiful work is transformed into a polyglot symphony.
– Aliki Barnstone, international award-winning poet and Translator
Join in! This is a joyful celebration of what we missed during the pandemic, and what, even at the best of times, poets and translators are often starved of: creative collaboration, communal learning of poetic vocabularies, and the craft inherent in the presentation of a lyric self. Karen Head and her transnational team explore the fine line between collective authorship and its resistance to names on the one hand, and the visibility of translators who meet where new languages emerge on the other.
– Dr Christophe Fricker, Translator, University of Bristol
This is a groundbreaking volume, a tribute to Karen Head’s delicious poetry, making her lyrical work available in English, French, and German. The notes on translation will be useful to future literary scholars worldwide. The poems are witty, sonorous and surprising. We find Allen Ginsberg naked in Karen’s kitchen and Bruce Willis also makes a cameo. These poems are entertaining and accessible, calling on all the senses. The fine, remarkable translations bring home the poems to a wide audience. The seductive roses of Auvillar cannot be resisted in any language! What We Missed misses nothing delightful in these world-class poems and translations.
– Marilyn Kallet, author of of 19 books, including Even When We Sleep
As a poet and traveler of the world, and of memory, Karen Head is one of those on whom nothing is lost. Judging by the poems in What We Missed, it would seem she hasn’t missed much, in fact – neither wonder, nor danger, nor desire, nor heartache, nor even true love, all of it keenly observed and acutely felt, embraced with a joie de vivre only slightly tinged with regret. There are so many delicious moments here, lived right down to their depths. And how delicious that these “songs of experience” are offered up not only in their English originals, but in French and German translations for the multilingual reader to savor.
– Cecilia Woloch, author of Tsigan: The Gypsy Poem (New Edition)
