Wickerwork: A Poetry-in-Translation Conversation
Wickerwork artwork jacket cover.
This conversation brings Christian Lehnert, winner of the Hölderlin Prize 2025, and Richard Sieburth together for a fruitful exchange between poet and translator and thereby promises to be an especially stimulating opportunity for participants to gain rare insights into the craft of lyric poetry and its move into another verbal and cultural idiom. The dialogue will be centered on the poetry of Christian Lehnert and its recent series of English translations by Richard Sieburth. The event will be the first time Lehnert has appeared in the United States.
Throughout, Lehnert’s interventions, tinged with Eckhartian mysticism, exhibit a provocative engagement with twentieth-century, post-Heideggerean thinkers, with Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben and Jean-Luc Nancy. While clearly relating to this important work, Lehnert’s poetry offers singular reflections on a broad array of themes in ways that are at once deeply personal and environmentally attuned, surprising and challenging.
Richard Sieburth, by far one of the most astute and prolific translators of German and French literature and poetry working today, has prepared a vibrant collection of Lehnert’s lyrics in a single volume entitled Wickerwork (spring 2025) with Archipelago Books, New York. As Rosanna Warren comments, “Richard Sieburth creates an intricate music for Christian Lehnert’s crystalline poems. An incandescent experience,” while Peter Cole views the Lehnert volume as a literary success that culminates a brilliant career: “Richard Sieburth stands among the truly masterful English translators of our time. […] Sieburth’s latest translational revelation comes in the form of Christian Lehnert’s Wickerwork, the supple, metaphysicianal weave of which seems to emerge from several lifetimes of looking and reflection.”
Bios:
Born in 1969 and raised in Dresden in the former German Democratic Republic, Christian Lehnert was trained as a Lutheran pastor and, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, appointed as professor of theology in Wittenberg and Leipzig. For the past thirty years, in addition to eight volumes of lyric poetry and epigrams, Lehnert has consistently published book-length essays and articles on theological themes, including the History of Angels and Liturgical Poetics, as well as commentaries on Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians and the Book of Revelations.
Richard Sieburth’s translations from the German include Oswald von Wolkenstein, Hölderlin, Büchner, Benjamin, Scholem, and Bobrowski. His translations from the French include Scève, Labé, Nostradamus, Nerval, Baudelaire, Michaux, Cendrars, and Leiris. He has also edited a number of Ezra Pound’s works for New Directions and Library of America.
