December 1914

by Jan Wagner

A poem from the collection 'Self-Portrait With a Swarm of Bees', translated and read by Iain Galbraith. (Arc Publications). This book won the Popescu Prize 2015, judged by Olivia McCannon and Clare Pollard.

From the judges: "Jan Wagner’s poems are ‘not only elaborate, cunning, and worldly, but genuinely entertaining’ (Iain Galbraith). His playful adventures in form surprise into view the hidden structures of life and language, while celebrating poetry’s ‘bond with our steaming, glowing, odorous, noisy world’ (JW/IG).

Galbraith converts every challenge (formal, lexical, metrical) into an opportunity, matching Wagner’s ingenuity and investment at every step, having internalized the ‘primal syntax’ so completely that everything he writes hits the mark. The result is a perfect sufficiency: a set of poems in English that somehow inhabit the same skin as the German, with their own autonomous heart and lungs."

Jan Wagner

Jan Wagner was born in Hamburg, Germany, in 1971. A poet and essayist, he has published six volumes of poetry, including Guerickes Sperling (2004), Achtzehn Pasteten (2007), Australien (2010)and his most recent collection Regentonnenvariationen (2014), for which he was awarded the Prize of the Leipzig Bookfair (2015). He is the co-editor of two influential anthologies of German language poetry, and has also translated the work of several British and American poets. He has received many awards for his poetry, including the Ernst Meister Prize (2005), the Wilhelm Lehmann Prize (2009), the Friedrich Hölderlin Prize (2011) and the Mörike Preis (2015). His collection Self-Portrait with a Swarm of Bees, translated by Iain Galbraith, won the Popescu European Poetry Translation Prize 2015.