The poets Federico Italiano and Jan Wagner in dialogue

 

Federico Italiano and Jan Wagner are among the most interesting poets of their generation. Their lecture and dialogue focus on their reflections on contemporary poetry, which they published together in the volume Grand Tour. Reisen durch die junge Lyrik Europas, as well as on their mutually translated works.

Sieben Arten von Weiß (Hanser, 2022), a collection of selected poems by Federico Italiano, was translated by Raoul Schrott and Jan Wagner, while Jan Wagner’s anthologies Variazioni sul barile dell’acqua piovana (Einaudi, 2019) and Autoritratto con sciame d’api (Bompiani, 2022) were translated by Federico Italiano. The two poets will take us into the borderland between sense and sound, words and music – poetry – and discuss the creative possibilities of translation.

The event will be held in Italian and German, with consecutive translation.

Federico Italiano, born in 1976 in Galliate in the province of Novara, lives in Rome, where he teaches comparative literature at the University La Sapienza . After his debut with Nella costanza (Atelier, 2003), the poet, translator and essayist published five further volumes of poetry: L’invasione dei granchi giganti (Marietti, 2010), L’impronta (Aragno, i domani, 2014), Un esilio perfetto. Poesie scelte 2000-2015 (Feltrinelli, zoom, 2015), Habitat (Elliot, 2020) and La grande nevicata (Donzelli, 2023). His poems have been included in various anthologies in Italy and abroad, translated into several languages and awarded numerous prizes. For the German publisher Hanser, he published an anthology of contemporary Italian poetry, Die Erschließung des Lichts (with Michael Krüger, 2013) and an anthology of young European poetry, Grand Tour. Journeys through the young poetry of Europe (with Jan Wagner, 2019). Hanser also published a selection of his poetic work, Sieben Arten von Weiß (2022), translated by Raoul Schrott and Jan Wagner. As an author of essays on poetry and translation theory, he translated Variazioni sul barile dell’acqua piovana (Einaudi, 2019) and Autoritratto con sciame d’api (Einaudi, 2019) by Jan Wagner.

Jan Wagner, born in Hamburg in 1971, lives in Berlin. In addition to poetry (recently published Steine & Erden, Hanser Berlin 2023), he publishes translations (Charles Simic, Margaret Atwood, Ted Hughes, Dylan Thomas, Simon Armitage, Matthew Sweeney), essays and radio plays. Variazioni su un barile di pioggia (Einaudi, 2020) and Autoritratto con sciame d’api (Bompiani, 2022) were published in Italian translation by Federico Italiano. His poems, which have been translated into forty languages for anthologies, magazines and collections, have been honoured with the Leipzig Book Fair Prize (2015) and the Georg Büchner Prize (2017), among others. In 2011 he was a Rome Prize winner at the German Academy Rome Villa Massimo.

With the kind support of the German Academy Rome Villa Massimo