As this issue goes to press, the final drumrolls, dramatic endings of symphonies, and the more intimate notes of the late-night solo recitals of this year’s Proms, just over the road at the Royal Albert Hall, sound out and fade. A celebration of summer and a feast of well-known pieces and premieres, their end heralds autumn. The variety of the programmes and the non-exclusive nature of this great annual event is something to aspire to, and we hope you will find our autumn offerings as palatable and full of the familiar and the exciting unknown as you would wish, both in terms of the books selected and their publishers. We are particularly pleased to welcome to our pages four newcomers among the latter – Tulipan Verlag, SchirmerGraf Verlag, Urs Engeler Editor and Kein & Aber.
To linger with music just a moment more, it is striking how many of us have come to develop a deeper love of German through the language of German music – a fact that
Richard Stokes skilfully exploited during his decades of unconventional German teaching. Familiar to many through his programme notes at the Wigmore Hall, and now at the Royal Academy of Music, his article continues our series about those professionally involved with German and may act a stimulus to future explorations of the special relationship between music and the German language itself.
From music (and we feature in this issue a biography of Puccini as engaging as the man himself) to poetry. Thanks to the urgings of readers and the encouragement of publishers, we now take a fresh dip in this inviting pool. The intoxicating Friederike Mayröcker from Vienna is the subject of
Jeremy Over’s article, and the Swiss poet Kurt Aebli, who cast a spell over all of us present at his reading at this year’s Solothurn festival – an annual event I heartily recommend – well deserves to be rescued, as Donal McLaughlin puts it, from the category of ‘best-known unknowns’.
Autumn to many in the publishing world is synonymous with Frankfurt. This year, as the Book Fair celebrates its sixtieth anniversary, it’s a pleasure to mark the event with a wide-ranging interview with its director,
Juergen Boos, the man behind the largest book fair in the world.
In his statement accompanying the announcement of this year’s German Book Prize long-list
Rainer Moritz – whom we also welcome to our pages as he introduces us to the charms and aims of the Literaturhäuser of Germany (is it not lamentable that their equivalent does not exist here?) – commented on how broad and attractively confident this year’s submissions were.
The NBG editorial committee concurs! We hope you enjoy the voices and stories, the powerful works of non-fiction, the enchanted realms of our children’s books, the tales of love, war, sex, death and birth – it’s all here in an especially fertile autumn.
This variety, and one particular element of it, is something
Ilma Rakusa elegantly explores. She is the grande dame of criticism, translation, and prose, and it is an honour to welcome her to our pages.
And our Forgotten Gem? ‘The greatest book of the twentieth century,’ according to Maarten t’Hart in Die Zeit. Welcome to a baroque tale, penned in the 1950s, of a Majorca awash with smugglers and artists, cads and whores.
Soon the nights will grow longer and the spring and summer days of Hay and Edinburgh will become but a pleasant memory. It has been a most encouraging year for German writing in translation – and this should, and must, continue. Let English-language readers have access to the latest from Siegfried Lenz, for example, a tender exploration of love and loss, and the excitingly original approach to the same themes by Thomas von Steinaecker. Or again, why should the same privilege not be granted to the satisfying literary thriller by Steffen Kopetzky, the wry humour of Karen Duve, and the wicked glint of Ingrid Noll; to the utterly pleasurable read that is Angelika Waldis’s latest novel and the perfect-to-read-aloud children’s story by Vanessa Walder, not to mention Karl Schlögel’s brilliant analysis of the Soviet Union in the critical year of 1937 and the fascinating study of the sense of smell by Hanns Hatt and Regine Dee.
Publishers and booksellers, critics and readers, please continue to support this literature and to believe in it enough to bring as much as can be published well and with passion onto our shelves and into our homes. While fully recognising today’s difficult economic and publishing climate, and not just as it affects works in translation (information sheets on translation grants are available from the NBG office), we believe with conviction that our featured books are strong enough to stand out and make their mark, and truly deserve their chance here.
With thanks for all your letters, emails and sharing of ideas, and wishing you an autumn filled with many happy reading hours.
Yours sincerely,
Rebecca K. Morrison
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