David John Constantine (born 1944) is an English poet, [1] author and translator. [2]
Born in Salford, Constantine read Modern Languages at Wadham College, Oxford, and was a Fellow of The Queen's College, Oxford, until 2000, when he became a Supernumerary Fellow. [3] He lectured in German at Durham University from 1969 to 1981 and at Oxford University from 1981 to 2000. [4]
He was the co-editor of the literary journal Modern Poetry in Translation . Along with the Irish poet Bernard O'Donoghue, he is commissioning editor of the Oxford Poets imprint of Carcanet Press and has been a chief judge for the TS Eliot Prize. [5]
His collections of poetry include Madder, Watching for Dolphins, Caspar Hauser, The Pelt of Wasps, Something for the Ghosts, Collected Poems and Nine Fathom Deep. He is a translator of Hölderlin, Brecht, Goethe, Kleist, Michaux and Jaccottet.
In 2015, the film 45 Years , based on Constantine's short story "In Another Country", enjoyed critical acclaim. The film stars Tom Courtenay and Charlotte Rampling. Rampling was nominated for an Academy Award for her performance.
Constantine is also author of two novels, Davies and The Life Writer, a biography, Fields of Fire: A Life of Sir William Hamilton, and multiple collections of short stories, including Back at the Spike, the highly acclaimed Under the Dam (2005) and The Shieling (2009) and the award-winning Tea at the Midland and Other Stories.
German literature comprises those literary texts written in the German language. This includes literature written in Germany, Austria, the German parts of Switzerland and Belgium, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, South Tyrol in Italy and to a lesser extent works of the German diaspora. German literature of the modern period is mostly in Standard German, but there are some currents of literature influenced to a greater or lesser degree by dialects.
Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin was a German poet and philosopher. Described by Norbert von Hellingrath as "the most German of Germans", Hölderlin was a key figure of German Romanticism. Particularly due to his early association with and philosophical influence on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, he was also an important thinker in the development of German Idealism.
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1808.
Hans Magnus Enzensberger was a German author, poet, translator, and editor. He also wrote under the pseudonyms Andreas Thalmayr, Elisabeth Ambras, Linda Quilt and Giorgio Pellizzi. Enzensberger was regarded as one of the literary founding figures of the Federal Republic of Germany and wrote more than 70 books, with works translated into 40 languages. He was one of the leading authors in Group 47, and influenced the 1968 West German student movement. He was awarded the Georg Büchner Prize and the Pour le Mérite, among many others.
Michael Peter Leopold Hamburger was a noted German-British translator, poet, critic, memoirist and academic. He was known in particular for his translations of Friedrich Hölderlin, Paul Celan, Gottfried Benn and W. G. Sebald from German, and his work in literary criticism. The publisher Paul Hamlyn (1926–2001) was his younger brother.
Jeremy Adler is a British scholar and poet, and emeritus professor and senior research fellow at King's College London. As a poet he is known especially for his concrete poetry and artist's books. As an academic he is known for his work on German literature specialising in the Age of Goethe, Romanticism, Expressionism and Modernism with contributions on figures such as Goethe, Hölderlin, and Kafka.
Philippe Jaccottet was a Swiss Francophone poet and translator.
Richard Sieburth is Professor Emeritus of French Literature, Thought and Culture and Comparative Literature at New York University (NYU). A translator and editor, Sieburth retired in 2019 after 35 years of teaching at NYU and 10 years at Harvard.
Bloodaxe Books is a British publishing house specializing in poetry.
"Wanderer's Nightsong" is the title of two poems by the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Written in 1776 and in 1780, they are among Goethe's most famous works. Both were first edited together in his 1815 Works Vol. I with the headings "Wandrers Nachtlied" and "Ein gleiches". The second poem was set by Schumann in his Lieder und Gesänge, Vol. IV, Op. 96. Both poems were set by Franz Schubert and catalogued as D 224 and D 768.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was a German polymath, who is widely regarded as the greatest and most influential writer in the German language. His work has had a profound and wide-ranging influence on Western literary, political, and philosophical thought from the late 18th century to the present day. A poet, playwright, novelist, scientist, statesman, theatre director, and critic; his works include plays, poetry and aesthetic criticism, as well as treatises on botany, anatomy, and color.
Paladin Poetry was a series of paperback books published by Grafton Books under its Paladin imprint, intended to bring modernist and radical poetry before a wider audience. Its founding anthology The New British Poetry 1968-88 attempted to revive the fortunes of the modernist tradition, to correct the gender imbalance of previous anthologies and to bring a new generation of ‘Black British’ poets to prominence. The series was originally edited by writer John Muckle, then Grafton’s editorial copywriter (1985–88), and later by the London writer Iain Sinclair. Many of the Paladin Poetry books were paperback originals. The entire poetry series was pulped within months of the publication of its last titles. However, it did affect poetry readers and had a considerable influence on the output of other poetry publishers, such as Bloodaxe, Penguin, Carcanet and Salt.
Martin Greenberg was an American poet and translator.
West–östlicher Divan is a diwan, or collection of lyrical poems, by the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. It was inspired by Goethe's readings of the Persian national poet Hafez.
Ventseslav Konstantinov was a Bulgarian writer, aphorist and translator of German and English literature.
The Frankfurter Anthologie is a collection of German poetry and accompanying commentaries, instituted by Marcel Reich-Ranicki in 1974 in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, of which he was then literary editor, and overseen by him until his death in 2013.
Der Kanon or more precisely Marcel-Reich-Ranickis Kanon is a large anthology of exemplary works of German literature. Edited by the literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki (1920–2013), he called the anthology, announced on 18 June 2001 in the German news magazine Der Spiegel under the title "The Canon of worthwhile German Works", his magnum opus. The five parts appeared from 2002 to 2006 published by Insel Verlag: 1. Novels (2002), 2. Tales/Stories (2003), 3. Dramatic Works (2004), 4. Poetry (2005), and 5. Essays (2006). As expected, the anthology met with opposition and criticism, and even the idea of an anthology was questioned, but Reich-Ranicki called this questioning "incomprehensible, because the lack of a canon would mean relapse into barbarism. Reich-Ranicki sought to differentiate his anthology from previous compilations in his hope to imagine a "reader judge" such as teachers, students, librarians, who would need to draw from this canon because they were in the "first line of those who deal with literature professionally."
Karen Leeder is a British writer, translator and scholar of German culture. She is professor of Modern German Literature in the University of Oxford. In 2021 she was elected as Schwarz-Taylor Professor of the German Language and Literature, a position she took up at The Queen's College, Oxford in 2022.
David Luke (1921–2005) was a scholar of German literature at Christ Church, Oxford.