Jan Wagner is a German poet, essayist, and translator. His collections of poems include Guerickes Sperling, Achtzehn Pasteten, Australien, and Regentonnenvariationen, for which he was awarded the Prize of the Leipzig Bookfair. The Art of Topiary is the most recent translation of Wagner’s work into English. The editor of two influential anthologies of German language poetry, including, with the poet Björn Kuhligk, Poetry of the Now: 74 Voices, Wagner is also the German translator of several British and American poets, including James Tate, Matthew Sweeney, and Charles Simic. He is the recipient of the Mondsee Poetry Award, the Anna Seghers Award, the Ernst Meister Award for Poetry, the Mörike Preis, and the first Arno Reinfrank Award. In 2017, he was awarded the Georg Büchner Prize. A member of the German Academy of Language and Literature, he currently lives in Berlin.
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Books by Jan Wagner
Over the course of a partnership spanning nearly two decades, poets Jan Wagner and David Keplinger have crafted a distinctly collaborative exchange between original German and American letters. Now, in this masterful dual-language poetry collection, they muse at the constraints of translation, challenging its boundaries while weaving their distinct voices in lyrical call and response. Together, they marvel at what translation can be: a tempered conversation in metered rhyme.
One of the most important contemporary poets working in German makes his American debut in this compact, light-footed, and curious dual-language collection.
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